Science Quote by Miguel de Icaza

Praise this clean is rarely just about code quality; its real target is legitimacy. Miguel de Icaza saying Microsoft “did a really outstanding job” on .NET lands with extra voltage because he wasn’t a comfortable insider polishing a corporate talking point. He built Mono, the open-source implementation that tried to make .NET viable beyond Windows at a time when “embrace” from Microsoft often came with a lawyer-shaped shadow. So the compliment reads as both technical assessment and political signal: the platform is good enough that even the person who spent years re-creating it in the open is willing to credit the original.

The phrasing is tellingly plain. No grand claims about “the future of computing,” just a restrained “when it comes to .NET,” like he’s bracketing ideology and judging the artifact. That restraint is the rhetorical move. It positions .NET as an engineering achievement that can be separated from Microsoft’s history of lock-in and platform brinkmanship. Subtext: we can stop pretending every Microsoft technology is a trap, but we also shouldn’t forget why the suspicion existed.

Context matters: early .NET was genuinely strong on developer experience - a coherent runtime (CLR), a modern language (C#), rich libraries, and tooling that made enterprise development feel less like punishment. For an open-source advocate, acknowledging that is also a bid for détente: if the tech is this solid, the fight shifts from “is it good?” to “who controls it, and can the ecosystem be trusted?” The compliment, in other words, is an olive branch with a checksum.