While Elliot Lee was working for Red Hat as a webmaster, he collaborated with Miguel de Icaza in an eventually unfinished attempt to create a common library for applications on the Linux platform. De Icaza, while studying at UNAM, recruited two fellow students, Arturo Espinosa and Federico Mena Quintero, to contribute to free and open-source software. Mena became a developer of GIMP in 1996, and wrote the Gradient Editor. The GIMP project's original authors, Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, had decided to transition away from the Motif widget toolkit by creating a new widget toolkit that became known as GTK that same year.
