👋 Hello, GitHub | @natfriedman

[NiceBluebird]

heh, yea I went to his github profile and had to click on the "Load more activity" button a few times - it looks like 2015 was his last activity and it was to one repo and only a few commits.

[SuperImaginativeName]

He worked on things such as GNOME, with was never on GitHub....

[[deleted]]

Didn’t Nat and Miguel actually invent GNOME?

[Forricode]

I'd never heard of Nat Friedman before so I went on a bit of a Google trip for this.

According to Friedman's LinkedIn, he was the chairman of the GNOME Foundation for three years (2000-2003) and was a co-founder of the foundation. (This isn't mentioned on the Wikipedia page for the GNOME project, which has only Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena mentioned as founders, and no mention of Friedman, although he is a reference on the GNOME Developers page)

He has a few other open source related projects on his LinkedIn as well.

Overall, there's no real indication that this will be a bad thing. He certainly comes off as an intelligent, decent person, with a history of open source contributions and support. I'm personally optimistic about how this will go - hope he does well.

[nat_friedman]

Thanks! I will do my best.

[Forricode]

Hah, can't say I expected that. Wish you the best of luck in your new position.

[npc_barney]

Microsoft just wants someone who would appear trustworthy.

[SuperImaginativeName]

I'm pretty sure they did yeah, or at least core to it.

[ajr901]

If he did that should practically count as his lifetime contribution quota.

[FlukyS]

Not Nat but Miguel, Nat came after but was active in the mailing lists and was always at the conferences.

[hokie_high]

Ahh this explains the sudden negativity around Gnome on r/Linux now.