Biography|Nat Friedman — The Boston Company He Founded the Year He Graduated

People remember Ximian as a GNOME shop that Novell later swallowed.

The incorporation date is 19 October 1999.

Friedman and Miguel de Icaza first registered International GNOME Support, then Helix Code, then, on 10 January 2001, Ximian, because Helix Code could not be trademarked.

Friedman was chief executive from the founding until 2001.

That year the board brought in David Patrick after a fifteen-million-dollar venture round, and Friedman moved to vice president of product management.

The firm sold a mix of free and paid software on top of GNOME: a desktop, Evolution mail, and a connector into Microsoft Exchange.

Novell bought the company on 4 August 2003.

Wikipedia lists the founding city as Boston.

A later printed headquarters was 101 Rogers Street in East Cambridge, on the river side of the campus he had just left.

The building stock on Rogers Street has been redeveloped since.

What has not changed is the sequence.

A twenty-two-year-old MIT graduate, a Mexican GNOME founder, and a company built to make a free desktop usable at work.

Photo: Doc Searls, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait made 24 April 2006.