Scott Kveton

I got to attend the OSDL’s Enterprise Linux Summit which was in Burlingame just south of the San Francisco airport. It was a good conference but by far the most fun was the keynote with Linus, Andrew Morton, Brian Behlendorf and Mitch Kapor.

It was funny at the start of the talk when Stuart Cohen introduced Linus he even said “and voted one of 2004’s most influential people, Linus Torvalds.” We all saw Linus sort of blush, push back from his chair a bit and put his hands up like “what am I suppose to say about that?!” Quite hilarious.

The keynote panel was about an hour and a half and the whole time you could see the press scribbling away on their notepads, etc. trying to quantify this “open source” thing. With Linus on this panel, they had quite a hayday with things he said. Honestly I don’t envy him a bit; he’s just up there talking about a job he obviously loves and everybody wants to turn him into something he’s not: a visionary. During the talk Linus even said he’s the “anti-visionary” … “I don’t trust people with visions” he said. I love it.

You sort of saw the same thing with the latest Wired cover story about Firefox. Here Blake and Ben have slaved away at a great product and now the press wants them to be the poster children for killing Microsoft. Dear lord, give it a rest.

Fortunately, I think the future is bright. Hordes of open source hackers quietly quietly doing their thing will overwhelm folks. It’s the fact that things like Blogs are taking hold, wikinews is on the rise, etc. It’s so hard to quantify yet so obvious this rise of FOSS.

I did have the chance to talk with Linus in the elevator on the way down to the conference but I didn’t say a thing. Lord knows he doesn’t need another person hassling him.