Brian Behlendorf Interview

Robert McMillan writes: "Linux Magazine has an interview with Brian Behlendorf where he talks about what he's up to at Collab.net, and reminisces about the good old days at Wired. Did you know that he registered the macdonalds.com domain?"

Comments

I Never Thought...

[queasymoto]

I never thought I'd see an article saying "back in the day" about the early days of Wired, talking about how noone new about the internet. When Time-Warner knows enough about the internet to start a magazine about it, and for everyone to almost universally judge it as "not quite getting it," I think that counts as people knowing about the internet. Makes me long for the days when September sucked due to all the new freshmen coming online at once, until they caught on in late October and got a clue.

Domain name disputes...

[drudd]

Finally a positive story about corporations taking control of trademark disputed domains...

Eventually Josh gave it back to McDonald's in exchange for McDonald's funding a T-1 in perpetuity to a high school in the Bronx.

At least somebody somewhere got something useful out of it. Now if we could just convince other corporations that being charitable can often be more productive and better for their public image (not to mention cheaper!) than calling in the lawyers.

Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to cede their domain so easily...

Doug

Re:It's even more frustrating from the inside

[Speare]

disclaimer: not a flame

I can appreciate the importance of the questions you raised.

Suits probably cannot, and you need to speak to them using their language. Calmly, coolly, civilly, and with facts and figures of research.

I am guessing you were more civil in that design meeting than you were in the posting ("I told them again and again", "People hate", "I don't want", "java crap", "marketing nitwit", "stared blankly"). If someone was invited to a design meeting spoke so brusquely, then they probably wouldn't be invited to another.

Introducing new concepts to people who don't have your experience and background takes patience, clarity and civility. Often, people reject others' ideas, simply because they're not very familiar with the concept. Be a politician to get a politician to listen to you. Be a suit to get a suit to listen to you. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if skillfully applied. :)

web sites for big business

[Submarine]

It does not surprise me in the least that companies such as McDonald's, a few years ago, would not even know what registering a domain name means. The truth is that today most big companies make a Web site (because everybody does it) but more often than not it is absolutely pitiful.

Web sites for big business often have the following characteristics:

• display in extenso the company's organigram but hide information on products;
• are filled with buzzwords ("our middleware system will improve your corporate efficiency by improving synergies between work units" as opposed to "our integrated email/chat server will allow your workers to communicate faster and more efficiently");
• do not contain contact information, and if they do, more often than not a phone number only (hint: the Internet has supported email before supporting http/HTML);
• contain lots of unnecessary junk like Flash, animated GIFs, sounds and Javascript.

It is funny that those big companies pay so much for PR services that cannot even understand:

• that people do not have a whole day to look for information in their badly setup site;
• that not everybody has a personal T1 line and that even if they do they might not be willing to install a new browser/plug-ins whatever just to consult a catalogue.

It is interesting to note that after a few years of experience with the Minitel in France, the successful Minitel sites had the following characteristics:

• straight to the point;
• efficient ordering and order tracking systems;
• minimize transmission times.

I guess that corporations do not learn from experience sometimes.

It's even more frustrating from the inside

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

I used to work in the IS dept at a bank in WA. They decided to setup a website so they could do what they called "online banking" (actually online form fillouts and by-mail and by-phone banking).

Because I was a "team leader" I was invited to ONE design session and I also participated in some of the in-house beta-testing (plus overhearing conversations among the real bigwigs).

I told them again and again that:

1) People hate "intro pages" that do nothing
2) Not everyone wants to spend time downloading graphics and java-crap--so make it optional at worst
3) The point of hyperlinks is to MOVE you around a site--not to popup new windows. I don't want the main page to be a "base station" from which other pages launch.
4) Not everyone has IE 5.x (and this was about 1.5 years ago--not everyone has IE 5.x NOW)--some people use Netscape (actually, they did finally listen to this one when USERS started calling in saying that they couldn't use the site)

But the marketing nitwit in charge of the web project (IS was only involved to purchase hardware and such) just stared blankly at all these objections. And the web people had no idea what I was talking about when I said "will I be able to view it in Lynx"?
--

Full article re: mcdonalds.com

[Mike Schiraldi]

You can find the Wired article about the registration of mcdonalds.com here. A quote:

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald's media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago. Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.
--

Re:I think he misses the point with IIS

[otis wildflower]

The only other common option is Solaris/Netscape, so where does Apache fit in?

BB came to meet with our company's developers and server jocks and discuss collab.net as an outsourcing model, and had some interesting things to say about his former employer, C2net.. He basically said that when Stronghold came out there was really no useful, viable SSL for Apache (he's right: SSL support at the time was difficult and tenuous IMHO). Then mod_ssl came along and out of the gate it was (his words) like 60% of Stronghold's speed/reliability/usability, and it increased rapidly, then surpassed Stronghold. The only reason to buy Stronghold/RedHat/Raven is for the US privilege of a licensed copy of R$A. C2 started deluding itself regarding the value of its proprietary software/features, and BB (rightly) bailed.

BTW, I had a chance to ask a couple of Qs to Dr. Eugene Spafford of Tripwire (he cowrote COPS, Tripwire, Practical Unix and Internet Security) yesterday, at a demo/pitch for Tripwire and some related security software (think MetaDirectory for ISS/FW-1/Nessus, etc). He was pretty down on OSS as a security solution, stating that the most secure software comes from small teams of competent designers and coders. While this may be true, I then asked him that given that almost any system can be penetrated, which system provides the best response (open or closed)? He said that it was dependent on the vendor, then proceeded to tell us that we should only select software vendors that implement high-quality security designs. I then also mentioned that, as a die-hard cynic, UCITA would probably become the best asset Open Source ever had, should it pass, since OSS provides the source and concrete licensing terms that are user and developer friendly, and corporate IT would then need to take EULAs extremely seriously. He said (to the effect) that I was being a bit glib, which is correct. ;)

The upshot: putting aside the whole issue of objectivity (his bread is partially buttered by closed-source security solutions) I think our disagreement basically fell down along academic/engineering lines. He basically said that, in an ideal world, closed-source software would provide the most secure solutions. I'm not qualified to really argue that point, but I _am_ qualified to say that in the _real_ world, there are enough issues with availability, accountability and talent in the closed-source world that open-source moves ahead in terms of rapid response fixes and peer/quality review. When I asked him about the patch issue, he said, essentially, that responsible software companies can have patches out faster than OSS projects. My one word rebuttal: Microsoft. He really didn't have any further comment ;)

I respect his opinions and expertise, but I feel that where the rubber meets the road, some of his preconceptions are off-base.

Your Working Boy,