Linus keynote speech at the 3rd IDG LinuxWorld conference in NYC

Within a stone's throw of Wallstreet, Linus decided to begin his keynote commenting on fragmentation and commercialism.

He assured the audience that fragmentation, the bogeymen of UNIX, is a virtue in Linux's Open Source world. Linus noted that Linux for a supercomputer is very different from Linux for a fridge. Both use common modules but serve different needs. People working to meet their own needs work off of a common base. The bad aspects of UNIX fragmentation, in-fighting and using resources to fight competitors rather than serve customers, are not inevitable consequences of fragmentation.

Next, Linus reiterated that Open Source and commercialism are not opposing views. The "real point of Open Source is user control and choice on product." Commercial companies share those values as they strive to serve their customers. Moving the user experience beyond shamanism is important. "If the computer crashes, you walk around it three times widdershins. It shouldn't be like that." Open Source is not in conflict with commercialism, especially when developers are rewarded with paychecks to support their contributions.

The kernel update is a briefer part of each LinuxWorld keynote. Linus is aiming for the 2.4 release in a few months, a year and a half after 2.2. He noted that 2.4 started on an aggressive schedule to get to a productized version of the 2.3 series faster than the wait for 2.2.

There were no surprises in his high level feature list for 2.4: multiple CPUs, new architecture (including IBM 390 support) and others. He does expect something like devfs will happen in the 2.4 time frame.

Linux expects a journalling file system will be available with the 2.4 kernel. Several good competitors are already on the table. The Reiser file system, by Hans Reiser, the ext3 file systems and offerings from players like SGI and IBM will compete to provide us with the best.

From the audience, Bruce Perens asked Linus about playing DVD disks on his old laptop. Linus spend only a few seconds noting that there are some large companies that seem to "want to screw their customers over."

The keynote concluded with the presentation of the $25,000 IDG/Linus Torvalds community award to the XFree86 project. LWN.net adds our congratulations to the XFree86 team for this well deserved recognition.

--dt