Success Quote by Miguel de Icaza

There is a quiet rebuke hiding inside de Icaza's pragmatism: Linux on the desktop can keep perfecting itself into a corner, or it can grow up and compete in the messy, real marketplace of users. He frames the problem as a tooling habit "we've been building" - a collective, almost well-meaning provincialism. Desktop Linux, especially in its earlier eras, often poured talent into elegant, Linux-only infrastructure and then acted surprised when the wider world didn't show up.

The rhetorical move is to point at two runaway hits, Mozilla and OpenOffice, and treat them less like exceptions than like evidence. Their "wildly, wildly successful" status isn't just praise; it's an argument about distribution and legitimacy. Cross-platform software travels. It recruits allies outside the tribe, gets tested in harsher conditions, and becomes harder to dismiss as a niche hobby. In other words: the most effective way to advance Linux on the desktop might be to stop insisting that every victory be Linux-exclusive.

De Icaza's subtext also needles a certain moral posture in open source: the idea that purity (Linux-first, Linux-only) is automatically virtuous. He's making a scientist's case for external validity. If your software only thrives in the controlled environment you built for it, you haven't proven much. Mozilla and OpenOffice succeeded because they met users where they already were - Windows, Mac, everywhere - and dragged open standards along with them.