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Kurt Gray on Andover, VA Linux, and LinuxWorld
What a short, strange trip it's been by Kurt Gray
I started working at Andover in December 1994. When I was hired here, there were two other full-timers: Bruce Twickler, our boss from Andover, Mass., and a former college roomate of mine, Ed Lecuyer, who got me hired there. We were publishing PhotoMorph software at the time.
Back then, at our office in Westford, Mass, we used boxes of our software inventory as office dividers. Everyday was casual day. We hired more people. A VP of Sales. A CTO and other people. Then we moved to a bigger office in Acton, Mass. We published more software and Web sites.
I became Andover's sys admin and CGI programmer. I was using Linux on my desktop at work and moved some of our Web sites onto Linux servers. Linux made my job easier and more fun so I used Linux and got addicted to reading Slashdot/Freshmeat/Themes.org. As we hired new programmers and sys admins I set them up on Linux boxes.
Then we bought Slashdot. Then we bought Freshmeat. Then working on Slashdot and Freshmeat became part of my job. I can't complain. Then we bought ThinkGeek, AnimationFactory, QuestionExchange...
So today I find myself actually ironing a pair of pants in a hotel room at the Sheraton New York then rushing downstairs for a cab to our booth at LinuxWorld. I get to the convention center and people are watching TV screens near the entrance where Bloomberg news is buzzing about the big deal betwen VA Linux and Andover.Net.
I had some drinks at the hotel with Chris Dibona and the VA gang but I've never met Larry Augustin. I don't even recognize all of the people I work with now. Most of my coworkers have no idea who I am either. What a short, strange trip it's been.
My Sloppy Transcript of Larry Augustin's Keynote
President of IDG introduces Larry Augustin. Applause.
Larry points out that this auditorium [at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan] holds 3000 people. Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs have packed this hall when they've spoken here, but yesterday Linus' keynote was standing room only and a full balcony.
Point taken. Audience applause.
Larry talks about how he used to work at Bell Labs. They had Sun machines with preinstallaed software but Larry and his coworkers would download and install free software, not because it was free but because it was better.
A toddler in the audience starts whining. Larry says it is his daughter. Audience chuckles. Baby cries. Baby carriage is wheeled out of the hall. Audience swoons.
Larry talks about how he contributed Bison++. Talks about why Open Source is more efficient and more economically sound.
Rod so-and-so from Intel Marketing comes out and talk about Trillian Open Source code release. One of the engineers from Intel comes out. It's demo time. Real IA64 hardware running IA64 Linux. They have Apache, sendmail, etc. ported over. They demo Apache serving Web pages. Engineer says the porting process was very fast and easy -- "It was a delight," he says. He demos a real time 3D rendering of a skull with rotation and lighting changes. Larry asks, "Is this your skull?" Laughter. Demos MPEG player playing "Prince of Egypt." Full screen. Demos Doom IA32 version, to prove that IA32 binaries run natively on IA64. Intel marketing guys talk about how Open Source helped Intel get Itanium out the door faster thanks to VA and Trillian team. Intel guys exit stage right.
Larry talks about the needs of Open Source projects. Hosting. Community building. Sh*t! my laptop has 36% battery power left! I really should have left this plugged in last night. I'm a dumbass. Before I lose power I want my family to know that my battery died peacefully and painlessly and it was all for the best. I need a plug. I need juice. 35% battery left. Larry is saying it's wrong to separate users from developers. Larry introduces SourceForge. Larry says he'll talk about that more later (after my battery dies I guess). Maybe if I sit closer to the wall there will be a plug. 33%! Sh*t! I picture Abe Simpson at a Springfield town meeting shouting, "Get to the money!" Another SourceForge slide on the big screen. He's going talk about how VA got to SourceForge. He mentioned how he used sites like Freshmeat! 32% battery left. Larry talks about how source code is usually not permanently archived.
Larry introduces John Hall [not maddog, the other one] from VA, who will demo SourceForge. Shot of SourceForge home page (live!) on the big screen. 31% battery. I need a plug. John makes the point that they're hosting open source projects for many platforms. Larry mentions he wanted a finanical organizer and found a program called GnomeGNUTaxes (sp?) -- audience laughs, applauds. That's all I can stand. I have to find a plug.
Damn. I just went all the way up to the balcony looking for a plug and the plug's a non-standard! Sh*t! I'm closing GNOME and shelling out to save a little juice.
29% Battery. John talks about the Quake project. John announces patch manager and and a new code builder/compiler on SourceForge. John exits stage.
Larry introduces developers from KDE and CMU Sphinx. (Sorry - didn't catch their names.) Larry asks them about their projects. 26% battery. KDE developer says they're moving development over to SourceForge.
OK, here's the plan. I'll keep typing until my battery dies, then try to remember the rest. Larry asks why Sphinx went open source. Developer explains that there was a risk there could have been patent issues with Sphinx so they open sourced it to get it in the public record. Audience applause. Developers exit.
Larry mentions Freshmeat, Theme.org, and Slashdot. Larry announces VA acquired Andover.Net. Applause. 23% battery left. Larry introduces Trae McCombs from Themes, Rob Malda from Slashdot, Tony Ganthrop from VA, Adam Green from Andover. Rob immediately asks Larry for a flat screen monitor -- Rob says he can take that one (the huge one on stage). Audience laughs. Larry says these are the people who run these fine Web sites. Applause. Guests leave the stage. Tony hugs Larry when leaving stage. Audience laughs. Larry wraps up. Questions from audience. 20% battery left.
First question: Someone annouces they open sourced some natural language translation software. Larry thanks him for the announcement.
Second Question: Developer of PHP thanks Larry for hosting PHP. Mentions that the build tool on SourceForge is nice but we need build tools for other non-Intel platforms. Larry agrees.
Third Question: Any plans to integrate Freshmeat and SourceForge? Larry says Freshmeat is an index and SourceForge is an archive so he wants to find a way to "pull those together." (I can't help but be nervous about that.)
4th Question: EMC employee asks about VA's business model concerning hosting open source. Larry says Andover sells advertising and VA will also offer corporate support services with hardware. Battery: 18%.
5th Question: Open Source has always been politically confrontational and corporate sponsors will probably discourage confrontations, so would VA be willing to host code such as DeCSS? Audience applause. GOOD QUESTION! Chris Dibona fields this question. Chris says with the Andover acquisition that VA will be more involved with the DeCSS issue. Larry interrupts Chris and says "We'll try to help out with that." (hmmm...)
Larry says lets wrap it up there. We're done. Battery 14%. I'm going back to the booth.
Salon did an interview with Rob yesterday at LinuxWorld. They talk about VA Linux. Check it out here:
t ml?CP=SAL&DN=110
http://w ww.salon.com/tech/log/2000/02/03/slashdot/index.h
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IanO
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Objects in Mirror are Losing!
So does this mean VA will be stepping up to bat for DeCSS? The amount of cash and lawyers they could bring to the table could seriously turn the tide in our favor on this issue. I'm sure that as good as the current lawyers are they are no match for the hundreds of people generating paperwork for them that the MPAA has. After all, a common tactic used by large lawfirms is to swamp the opponent with paperwork that MUST be returned.
Plus, with a massive legitimate company telling the judge that DeCSS is necessary perhaps he'll take it a bit more seriously?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
But who cares about Andover?
I mean really, all they did was buy a couple of popular Open Source sites. Can you say 'getting in late in the game'? I mean, before they bought slashdot the only thing most of us had heard of them was when that idiot columnist guy wrote a completely unrehearsed piece about Unix and open source in general, and then wrote another piece about how people at slashdot sucked (because we flamed him, etc). A couple weeks later, The bought slashdot.
Now, Andover has been bought out by VA, well great. Now the "leading opensource news site" is owned by $5 billion corporation that has a vested intrest in promoting its services above others. Fantastic.
A couple days ago CmndrTaco said that it was "funny" that Time was reporting on AOL's jacked up AOL 5.0. Will it be 'funny' now when slashdot reports on VA's screwups? Or will VA just never make screwups, is that it?
Ever hear of journalistic independence? I guess not.
Yeh, yeh, mark me down...
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
my notebook doesn't need batteries
> Larry says these are the people who run
> these fine Web sites.
I hope Kurt Gray made a mistake and that Larry isnt that clueless about his own holdings. Trae did indeed found themes.org, but he doesn't work on it anymore, he runs linux.com. As the project manager of bb.themes.org, I have been privy to enough events to know that VA is more interested in politics and hype than the open source community. Hey, they are out to make money just like everyone else, but I doubt we will see any articles on /. to the tune of "VA is the Microsoft of the Linux world" like we got with Red Hat. When VA went public, lots of people got "the letter" but curiously, none of the people who volunteer at themes.org did, even though themes.org was the most popular site in VA's stable of web sites until yesterday. Ever notice how every VA web site is redesigned whenever there is a trade show? This mandate alone has seriously kept themes.org from completing a decent design that loads well in any browser. Will we see a /. redesign every time there is another trade show, too? VA has always scared me, but now that they have such wide reaching potential to hurt the community, I am more scared than ever.
--
Gregory J. Barlow
fight bloat. use blackbox.
Gregory J. Barlow
fight bloat. use blackbox.
Slashdot is getting lame for other reasons -- mainly, because for some reason moderators are getting more and more anal retentive. More and more often, legitimate posts are moderated down in flames, just because they express a non "mainstream" (WRT to this medium) opinion, or because they're slightly offtopic. But being slightly offtopic can be useful, at times, to draw attention towards something related for example.
Is'nt it interesting to notice, for example, that if some demagogic "libertarian" invokes the Holocaust for the BILLIONth time in defence of the right to buy Uzis at the supermarket, he gets to +3 in minutes, whereas if you just slightly disagree that this is good idea, boom! Bye bye, Karma.
And I guess this is a self fulfilling prophecy ... reload and watch my score ...
I'm a little bit confused about the questioning of Slashdot as a "trusted" news forum. This come especially after Andover has purchased them, and now again as VA purchases Andover...
In my mind, Slashdot is still one of the most trusted news forums for me-- because someone can post a message openly criticising their journalistic integrity. There really isn't that much journalism going on by the Slashdot guys, relatively speaking. The ratio of content on this site between what the guys in the Geek Compound here in Michigan post, versus the content posted by YOU worldwide is incredibly large. And the fact that YOU can moderate and score that content is amazingly bold too. If you can, list for me the number of news sites which get as much or more traffic as Slashdot that have a similar tradition of openness.
And as you reply to my message to tell me I'm full of dung, just think about it. You're posting to tell me I'm full of dung. You can do that. And if one of the Slashdot guys posts a story that's completely wrong, you can tell the world that he's full of dung too! In fact, you can go even further and do a bit of corrective journalism and post links and resources which tell a fuller or more correct story.
And what other news medium showed a public figure recant a statement in realtime?
I'd really like to know just what it is that Andover has changed about Slashdot, because maybe I'm actually full of dung, but I haven't seen it.
After talking to another friend about the potential for decline in the journalistitc integrity slashdot may succome to as a result of the merger, I believe that the only way to be certain that no one is playing favorites is to start linking to *all* of the submitted stories.
If Penguin Computing (who competes with VA Linux) announces something interesting on their website which is in turn submitted to Slashdot, how can we be sure that it won't get dropped simply because Slashdot's owners are competing with Penguin Computing?
There have been many cries in the past about allowing the general browsers of the site be permitted to view unposted stories, which has so far been denied, but I think that now that Slashdot's integrity may be called into question, it makes more sense than ever to allow access to the other submissions.
A possible alternative would be to allow the moderation of articles *before* they are posted with moderation being granted in a similar fashion to comment moderation. If ten people with such status vote that a certain article should be posted, it instantly gets posted.
I personally don't doubt Slashdot's integrity in the past or the present, but without knowing what *isn't* getting posted, there's simply no way for us be certain that things will remain that way.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
I think Rob will continue to do the right thing. He's on *our* side here, remember that. For the amount of shit he puts up with from the "release slash" trolls, the "you didn't accept my submission" trolls, the "first post morons", and everything else, it's a wonder he's even still at it.
I don't know Rob from anyone, but from what I do know about him, he doesn't seem to be the kind of person who'd compromise his reputation to bow down to the almighty corporation. Has VA ever fucked up? I actually can't think of a time where they did. If they do in the future, I trust Rob would post it. But from the VA track record and what they've given to the community and what they continue to do for us (SourceForge is so cool) I don't think we've got much to worry about.
Give Rob a chance, flame him later if he screws up, but I don't think he will.
..is a power that mass media has always had. It used to be that you could trust /. to be "totally" unbiased and out there, now that is no longer the case. Whether or not there is a conscious decision to skew content, VA is still paying all the checks and the posters of stories now have an obvious vested interest in promoting, or at least raising awareness of, their company. When tech rumors can cause billion dollar swings in stock valuations, you must be able to trust the source and now we now it's tainted (the potential for ulterior motives has increased a hundredfold)
Unfortunate but such is life when big money knocks on the door and demands action, one way or the other.
+&x
"Outside the community" like VA? Ha.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
There's an article in Salon today that pretty much sums it up for me. This sort of bullshit is just icing on the cake to what this article has to say -- I just thought it would take longer for Slashdot to show signs of being completely owned. I mean, this is depressing. A mere day after Rob promises that Slashdot will stay independant, we start seeing fscking press releases from VA/Andover. This is the very basis of what worried me when Slashdot got bought.
I know that it's Rob's ball and he can do what he wants with it, but I feel like /. is moving farther and farther away from being something special.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Sorry folks, but the LinuxWorld chair got it wrong when he said, "Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs have packed this hall when they've spoken here, but yesterday Linus' keynote was standing room only and a full balcony."
I've been there for Gates and Jobs. They filled the hall too.
Linux is big and getting bigger, don't puff if up to be even bigger than it already is. That's a common corporate BS game, that Microsoft plays especially well. The Linux world doesn't want to play there.
Steven, Editor at Large, Sm@rt Reseller
http://www.zdnet.com/sr
Everybody is going nuts over "journalistic integrity". I look at it this way:
Rob and the guys have been doing this as a hobby for fun for quite a long time. Now lots of peripheral things have happened, but Slashdot is still a bunch of techies writing news for techies. Do you really think any of the admins would really stand for it if Andover or VA attempted to pollute their integrity with gratuitous articles? So Andover "bought" Slashdot and VA "bought" Andover. It just means the checks have different return addresses on them, that's all. I think it is quite obvious that techies and the open-source community are the MOST touchy when comes to exploitation or commercialization. Why would VA or Andover want to shoot themselves in the foot by pissing off their whole target audience? The only way you win in this new market is by the good graces of the community. Nobody wants to piss anybody off.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I was at the Javits Center in NYC for about three hours. I talked to Rob Malda for quite a while about the Slash engine. I saw Hemos, Roblimo, and a number of other people around the booth. They were getting ready for their party, where they gave out some awards. They looked like they hadn't slept well in a few days.
The conclusion that I came to, and it seems obvious from my perspective, is that articles posted about the Andover-VA merger are being posted because the Slashdot authors think that they will help the community understand what's happening, and what people are thinking at the moment. Whether that is actually true or not is entirely dependent upon your perspective.
I've worked trade shows in the past. The world outside the convention center could have ended yesterday, and people working the show floor probably didn't notice. You have a tendency to think you are aware of what's happening in the world, but you almost certainly miss a lot.
I think the Slashdot authors will produce more understandable, insightful stuff about the merger once they get a chance to go back and sleep in their own beds for a few days. But, considering the environment they are in at the moment, they are doing a pretty good job.
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Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
Uh, even though the /. crew cannot seem to get this through there heads;
/.
Andover did NOT MERGE with VA. VA BOUGHT Andover.
Maybe they think they are actually the end-all of geek news. Damn, I know at least 10 SysAdmins that don't read
Please, deflate your heads and hit the floor running...
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