[jdahlin]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME does a reasonably good job explaining the history:

GNOME was started on 15 August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena as a free software project to develop a desktop environment and applications for it. It was founded in part because the K Desktop Environment, which was growing in popularity, relied on the Qt widget toolkit which used a proprietary software license until version 2.0 (June 1999). In place of Qt, GTK (GNOME Toolkit, at that time called GIMP Toolkit) was chosen as the base of GNOME. GTK is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a free software license that allows software linking to it to use a much wider set of licenses, including proprietary software licenses. GNOME itself is licensed under the LGPL for its libraries and the GNU General Public License (GPL) for its applications.

[xrd]

The irony of Icaza now working for M$ is thick. He's an amazing guy and I don't begrudge him at all.

[xtracto]

Ooh I 'member! /. Is filled with stories and comments of people badmouthing Miguel because of his stance of integration between Linux and the Microsoft world. His views appeared always "controversial " to the OpenSource world and the sentiment in /. Was that she was a M$ apologist and that he only wanted to be noticed by M$.

I remember back in the day when he started Gnome with Federico, he got a place in a Time magazine 's list of influential people. I being a kid from the same country, wrote an email telling him I wanted to help building Gnome, and he replied to mee! To me he always appeared a pragmatic person.

[deaddodo]

I mean, it's always kinda played off like he turned coat. But if you know the history it makes total sense.

He started off with GNOME, got interested in .net and Mono (originally as a means to integrate them into GNOME/GTK) and shifted focused on those. He built a company around that (with others), which then got bought by Microsoft due to their obvious interest in .net (and probably internal talks about the future direction of .net Core). Since then until 2022, his work was mostly on .net and its open ecosystem.

So it's neither contradictory nor counter to his roots, but is humorous when you say "the guy who created GNOME works for Microsoft". Despite the fact that he probably did some major work on bridging the two worlds together and leading to modern MS actively incubating and contributing to Open Source projects.