Science Quote by Miguel de Icaza

The sting here is in how aggressively unglamorous it is. In a tech culture that rewards grandstanding - tribal declarations, framework wars, manifestos disguised as blog posts - Miguel de Icaza offers a sentence that reads like a shrug. That restraint is the point. “I’ve never worked with the Java community” isn’t a technical critique; it’s a boundary marker, a way of stepping out of a predictable argument before it starts.

De Icaza’s career sits at the crossroads of open-source politics: GNOME, Mono, and the long shadow of Sun-then-Oracle over Java and its ecosystem. In that context, “the Java community” functions less as a literal group of collaborators and more as a symbol: a famously large, opinionated, enterprise-adjacent world with its own norms, gatekeepers, and ideological battles. By saying he hasn’t worked with them, he’s implicitly refusing to be cast as either ally or antagonist in the Java-versus-everyone narrative.

The subtext is defensive but also strategic. It’s a preemptive credibility move: don’t attribute motives, conflicts, or grudges to him based on community affiliation. He’s not testifying about Java’s culture; he’s disclaiming the authority to do so. That matters in open source, where “community” is often used as a moral weapon - invoked to legitimize a project or delegitimize a person. His line drains that weapon of its charge by insisting on plain biography over tribal mythology.