Spring Comdex 99/Linux Global Summit
Day 2
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Rick is going to go far. He is in a very inviable position of leading the networking services team for ATT. You really have to be a schmuck to screw that one up. He boasted that his team has cleared over a billion dollars in sales last year and had 10 billion in unfulfilled backlog orders. My God. The whole Internet thing is a fast moving target and who knows what or who will be around next year or 10 years from now. But I would put my money on ATT still managing, to a large extent, many corporate networks around the world and making a good profit in doing so.
The talk ended with a spiffy video of a bunch of clients talking wonders about Rick's services department. Lots of time laps footage of expressways showing cars flying around really fast. After a while one gets sick of that kind of vido promo.
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I headed out of Arie Theater back over to McCormick West and went over to my now familiar and cozy room N133 for a panel discussion featuring representatives of the Linux International. Cozy room N133 got rather packed and the panel was moved to room N228. I'm getting rather tried of typing all this stuff so I'm going to let you read which I took. The panel discussion was a standard one with questions from the audience asking about the ins and outs of Linux. Bob Young made a nice introductory remark about how everyone in the Linux business today is stumbling around a dark room, bumping into furniture. Maurice Hilarious made an important observation that no one has gone broke doing Linux business. I had to get my question in which was that Linus is the single point of failure in the whole Linux industry. What was the Linux International going to do when Linus retires? There were several answers, "We will have a Linux standards base to fall back upon", "Yes there will be splintering of the kernel but we can deal with that", "Linus only wrote 10% of the code", "We will miss the leadership role Linus has given us". Bob Young concluded quoting Linus. "After I'm dead, I don't care what happens." It seems to me that this issue has come up, and discussed before. But, if say Linus and Alan Cox are flying together to some conference in Finland and get struck by a missile as they fly over Redmond, then chaos will be inevitable. My guess is that something will sort itself out and I believe the Linux International will play a role in this. The fact is, the code is out there, it does not belong to anyone and its GPL'ed forever.
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It was about 2pm at this point, and since I had eaten a full featured breakfast at the Hyatt where I stayed the night before, I thought that instead heading for lunch, I would find a quite area and start writing up this Comdex experience. On level 2.5 I think, there is an area where there were a bunch of tables where people were hang out. It was quite and out of the way and a good place for me to break out my notebook and start writing all this down. My plane left at 6pm so I figured I would spend an hour writing and then leave at 3pm to catch my 6pm flight. (Three hours turned out to be just about the right amount of time needed to go 10 miles from McCormick to the Midway airport. Freeken Chicago traffic...)
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- Photos of the Linux Pavilion
- Back to Linus's talk at FNAL
- Back to Spring Comdex 99 Write up, Day1.
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Authored by Stephen Adler
Copyright 1999, Stephen Adler