Ted Ts'o delivered the closing keynote of OLS. A very good speech. There are a few things worth mentioning about Ted's talk:

Ted has joined the ranks of those who are still confused about what .NET is. It is completely understandable, given the fact that Microsoft labels everything as .NET. What is dissapointing is to see people making bold statements on the `Dangers of Mono' because it will allow Linux servers to participate with Passport.

The bad news is: Linux servers can *already* participate with passport. Microsoft has been shipping the Linux development toolkit for Passport since the first day of their release.

He also encouraged application writters to stop breaking the library APIs, because that gets vendors upset. I replied to him that kernel developers should get their act together and stop breaking the device driver API on each kernel release.

Honestly, my mum really cares very little about getting a 0.0005% perormance improvement on her system. To the average user, it is more important to spend less time configuring and fixing the machine and dealing with device driver problems than getting a few nano-seconds less of latency.

Remember: computers are cheap. Time is not.

If Linux is going to loose to Microsoft is not because of some evil super plot and rollout of technologies like passport.

Microsoft might win just because they understand `binary compatibility'.

openbsd

I remember when the OpenBSD did a port to the m88k machines. They needed drivers for their system, and they just use an 10-year old driver that they extracted from CMU Mach. Plug and play. It was working.

party

The Ximian Party as usual was great. Thanks Michelle! Thanks Nat! And everyone else who went to the party and made great conversation.

I talked to Don Becker about GNU/Linux, and he had an interesting story to tell. Back in the day when he was at MIT and was an active contributor to gcc, he tried to get RMS to support Linux. RMS' answer back in the day went along the lines of `Linux is a waste of time, work on the Hurd instead, it is the future'.

An interesting twist to the Linux vs GNU/Linux debate.