There's a sense of dissonance in the office of Miguel de Icaza. On one hand, here is the celebrated hacker -- as in programming whiz, not virtual trespasser -- wearing a T-shirt, looking boyish and rail-thin, and resembling an impoverished graduate student who has been living on coffee. But here also is the vice president of product technology for staid software giant Novell, entirely at ease as he takes command of a plush corporate conference room in Cambridge, MA, with a view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline. It's a dissonance, however, that de Icaza is quick to wave away. "There are a lot of motivations in the open-source community, like the freedom to choose software platforms and the chance to innovate," he says, referring to the global community of programmers who write software that others are free to download and modify. "Now one of my motivations is that I'm being paid to do this, and I have to deliver products."

Both determinedly idealistic and stubbornly pragmatic, de Icaza is in many ways the new face of the open-source software movement. A programming firebrand, de Icaza has rocketed in stature in just a few years from an unknown student at a Mexico City university to one of the leaders of the increasingly successful challenge to Microsoft's hegemonic grip on computing. And though he remains deeply connected with the community of idealistic programmers who make open source possible, his meteoric rise is fueled in large part by a keen marketing sense. De Icaza recognized early on that to be truly popular with everyday users, the Linux operating system -- the freely available operating system that serves as open source's alternative to Windows -- needed the same icon-based bells and whistles familiar from the Windows desktop and access to applications of the same variety and quality as those that run on Windows machines. Open source might offer cheaper and better software, but de Icaza instinctively recognized that it would only change the world if people actually used it.