Nathaniel Dourif Friedman is an American technology executive and investor. He was the

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

(CEO) of

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

, and former Chairman of the

GNOME Foundation GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Orinda, California, United States, coordinating the efforts in the GNOME project. Purpose The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platfor ...

. Friedman is currently a board member at the Arc Institute, and an advisor of

Midjourney Midjourney is an independent research lab that produces an artificial intelligence program under the same name that creates images from textual descriptions, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. It is speculated that the underlying ...

Life and career

Friedman attended and graduated from St. Anne's-Belfield School in 1996. In 1996 while a freshman at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, Friedman befriended

Miguel de Icaza Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972) is a Mexican programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. Biography Early years De Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied Mathematics at the National Autonomous University ...

on LinuxNet, the

IRC network Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...

that Friedman had created to discuss

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. As an intern at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Friedman worked on the IIS

web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiate ...

. At MIT he studied

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

and

Mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and graduated with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

in 1999. Friedman co-founded

Ximian Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Miguel ...

(originally called International Gnome Support, then Helix Code) with de Icaza to develop applications and infrastructure for

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

, the project de Icaza had started with the aim of producing a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphica ...

. The company was later bought by

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the lead ...

in 2003. At Novell, Friedman was the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for

Open Source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

until January 2010. There he launched the Hula Project which began with the release of components of

Novell NetMail M+NetMail was an ISP-grade E-mail package by Messaging Architects. It was designed to deliver scalable messaging and calendaring services, using Internet-standard protocols (e.g. IMAP, iCalendar, POP, SMTP), across a large enterprise, or to a larg ...

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

. During his tenure, Novell began an effort to migrate 6,000 employees away from

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

to SUSE Linux and from

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

. Friedman's final project before his departure was work on

SUSE Studio SUSE Studio was an online Linux software creation tool by SUSE. Users could develop their own Linux distro, software appliance, or virtual appliance, mainly choosing which applications and packages they want on their "custom" Linux and how it loo ...

. During his sabbatical, Friedman created and hosted a

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

called ''Hacker Medley'' with friend and former Ximian employee Alex Graveley. In May 2011, Friedman and de Icaza founded

Xamarin Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android) and Xamarin.iOS (formerly MonoTouch), which are cross-platform implementation ...

, with Friedman as CEO. The company was created to offer commercial support for

Mono Mono may refer to: Common meanings * Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease" * Monaural, monophonic sound reproduction, often shortened to mono * Mono-, a numerical prefix representing anything single Music Performers * Mono (Japanese b ...

, a project that de Icaza had initiated at Ximian to provide a free software implementation of Microsoft's .NET software

stack Stack may refer to: Places * Stack Island, an island game reserve in Bass Strait, south-eastern Australia, in Tasmania’s Hunter Island Group * Blue Stack Mountains, in Co. Donegal, Ireland People * Stack (surname) (including a list of people ...

. At Xamarin they focused on continuing to develop Mono and

MonoDevelop MonoDevelop (also known as Xamarin Studio) is an open-source integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its primary focus is development of projects that use Mono and .NET Framework. MonoDevelop integrates features similar t ...

and marketing the

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

Xamarin SDK to developers targeting

mobile computing Mobile computing is human–computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for the transmission of data, voice, and video. Mobile computing involves mobile communication, mobile hardware ...

devices and

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally placed i ...

s. In 2016, Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft. With the June 2018 announcement of Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of

, the companies simultaneously announced that Friedman would become GitHub's new CEO. GitHub's co-founder and then-current CEO

Chris Wanstrath Chris Wanstrath is an American technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git, which he created with Tom Preston-Werner in 2008. Before ...

had been leading a search for his replacement since August 2017. Friedman assumed the role of CEO on the 29th of October 2018. During his tenure as CEO, Friedman introduced a number of new products rapidly, including GitHub Copilot, GitHub Codespaces, a native GitHub mobile app for iOS and Android, GitHub Actions, the GitHub Advanced Security product, GitHub Sponsors to support open source developers financially, and a new GitHub CLI. Friedman also acquired six companies including NPM, Semmle, Dependabot, and PullPanda. He helped grow Github to an estimated value of $16.5 billion, more than double what Microsoft paid for GitHub in 2018. On 3 November 2021, Friedman announced that he was stepping down as CEO. Friedman co-founded California YIMBY in 2017 to address California’s housing shortage. He has been married to Stephanie Friedman (née Schatz) since 2009.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Friedman, Nat American male bloggers American bloggers American computer programmers 21st-century American businesspeople GNOME developers Living people GitHub people Year of birth missing (living people)