What little English Icaza knew (he taught himself through Internet chat rooms) was enough to communicate with a dedicated group of "free software" enthusiasts like himself, programmers who considered it a higher calling in life to create applications that anybody could use, change, or redistribute. Icaza had recently persuaded his counterparts to start pitching in their time, and hundreds of thousands of lines of new code, in service of an impossible �ber-task: creating a free, easy-to-use interface for Linux, the operating system that was quickly becoming the standard-bearer of free software. The goal was to make Linux, notoriously off-putting to non-techies, as point-and-click simple as Microsoft's Windows. Some considered the task absurd and futile -- Microsoft (MSFT) controls more than 90 percent of the world's desktops, after all. Who cares how easy you make an operating system for computer jocks? For Icaza, it didn't matter. He simply loved the challenge. "When you are programming code," he says, "you are creating a little universe and you get to define the rules. It's a cheap way of creating your own castles in the sky."