Closing keynote

July 28, 2000
J. Corbet

Ted Ts'o gave the closing keynote for the conference. The title was "Ten Years of Linux;" it did cover some history, briefly, but Ted was mostly interested in talking about the current issues facing our favorite system.

First on his list was legal issues. The Dmitry Sklyarov case illustrates the kind of issues we are facing, but others, such as software patents and trade secrets, also need attention. Ted repeated Hugh Daniel's words from the first day: Linux hackers need to get involved in their political systems and fight for freedom. Engineers tend to be apolitical, but current times require a wider world view.

Business models: people are still trying to figure out which ones still work. It's an important question, since an increasing amount of open source software development is supported by open source businesses. Ted, of course, works for VA Linux Systems, so this issue is quite close to home for him.

Rapid development: free software advocates claim that their way of development produces better software faster, but that is not always the case. Some things are very slow; for example, the block I/O and SCSI subsystems in the kernel have been needing major rewrites for years. It can be very hard to find people to do certain kinds of grunt work, including getting a projects up to critical mass to begin with, and, of course, documentation.

Another issue to be dealt with is, of course, Microsoft. Ted made the point that not much new stuff that has come out of the company in the last five years has actually seen widespread deployment. Windows 95 and 98 are still in wide use, for example. But, over the next year, the .NET and Hailstorm platforms will be rolled out, and some of it is pretty scary.

Ted was also a little nervous about the Mono project, stating that a Linux implementation of the .NET infrastructure might just make it that much easier for Microsoft to push Linux users into having to use Hailstorm. Miguel de Icaza was in the audience, and rather vocally disagreed with that point of view.

Ease of use is another issue, once again looking back to what Hugh Daniel said on the first day. Ted's stories around ease of use centered around his recent adoption of the Debian distribution; it has not been an entirely smooth transition for him, to say the least. Linux must get easier for people to use, or its future growth will be greatly limited.

Finally, Ted asked for a more conciliatory approach to proprietary software and those who sell it. He thinks that certain kinds of software will always be proprietary; for example, tax preparation software requires the efforts of an army of accountants and lawyers to follow the tax code. Thanks to the efforts of those people, TurboTax comes with a guarantee that the company will pay any fines resulting from an error in the software. Users of tax software will be willing to pay for that guarantee; the standard free software "no warranty" approach is not very comforting when one is dealing with the IRS (the U.S. tax agency).

Ted still keeps a windows box around so he can run TurboTax. He would really rather run it on Linux, but that requires that Linux become friendlier to proprietary software vendors. The Linux Standard Base will help in this regard, but it is also necessary that Linux developers stop being hostile toward close software. There was some discussion of programmers who change data structures or APIs in the middle of "stable" releases in a deliberate attempt to impede commercial software. If Linux is truly to achieve World Domination, that kind of behavior will have to stop.

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