Science Quote by Miguel de Icaza

A sentence like this reads friendly, almost casual, but it’s also a declaration of strategy. Miguel de Icaza isn’t just describing a licensing choice; he’s signaling an ambition to make software behave less like a product and more like infrastructure. “All of our code” is a claim of total commitment, the kind that reassures skeptics who’ve been burned by “open-ish” projects that keep the crown jewels proprietary. It’s a trust play.

The second half does the real work: “so it can be used for other projects.” That “so” reframes openness as utility, not ideology. Open source here isn’t presented as moral purity; it’s presented as an accelerant. The subtext is an invitation and a dare: take it, fork it, improve it, build on it. De Icaza is implicitly arguing that the highest compliment to a codebase is reuse, even if that reuse happens outside his control. That’s a worldview where influence beats ownership.

Context matters because de Icaza’s career sits at the intersection of developer culture and platform politics: the long fight to make interoperable tools, the battles over standards, the anxiety of building in the shadow of dominant vendors. Open sourcing becomes a hedge against irrelevance and a way to recruit a distributed labor force without sounding like you’re asking for free work. The line is calibrated to sound generous while quietly enlisting the crowd: your project can run on our rails, and once it does, we matter.