Science Quote by Miguel de Icaza

What reads like a mundane IT timeline is really a quiet manifesto about power, risk, and the politics of software. Miguel de Icaza frames migration not as a heroic leap into open source purity, but as an exercise in institutional psychology: 6,000 people are not “users,” they’re habits, workflows, and unspoken dependencies. The line “you don’t want to migrate…in a single jump” is the tell. He’s selling change to an organization that likely fears disruption more than licensing costs, and he does it by translating ideology into project management.

The intent is pragmatic persuasion. De Icaza isn’t arguing Linux and OpenOffice are morally superior; he’s arguing that sequencing makes them survivable. First, swap the office suite: the daily tool everyone touches. That move creates cross-platform neutrality, loosening the hidden grip of a single vendor without forcing employees to relearn everything at once. Only after that muscle memory forms does the OS shift become imaginable.

The subtext is about leverage. Adopting OpenOffice in October isn’t just a technical choice; it’s a bargaining chip and a cultural signal: “We can leave.” The dates also imply accountability, a way to turn a philosophical preference into an operational commitment.

Context matters: de Icaza, a prominent open-source builder and evangelist, is speaking from the era when Linux on the desktop was less a default option than a strategic bet. His rhetoric acknowledges the real obstacle wasn’t code quality. It was human tolerance for churn.