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Grand Tour: the Story of a Penguin and a Red Fedora
GaelDesign writes "The legendary Red Hat Road Tour 2002 is nearly at an end, and a good time was had by all. One of the most successful stops on the tour was the presentation at the O'Reilly and Associates headquarters in Sebastopol, California. Because the Red Hat RV's arrival was delayed due to traffic conditions, Tim O'Reilly gave a rousing speech beforehand that was well received by the audience. Read a detailed report of the event at The Idea Basket."
Anybody got pages 2 & 3?
.NET. Tim had a lot of good points to make. In this brave new world, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the Internet is the computer. We're heading toward a time where in a functional sense there will be only one global computer, instead of a hundred million separate computers. Microsoft sees this coming, so what they're doing is basically building the operating system for this new "global computer". If we think of Web services as simply programming components distributed across many individual computers, then there has to be a set of easy-to-use tools and frameworks to build new applications for this platform. That's what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with .NET.
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Grand Tour: the Story of a Penguin and a Red Fedora
The Idea Basket > Articles
posted by Jared White on November 16, 2002 05:16 PM
Red Hat Road Tour 2002
Mission: to discover the state of Linux in America
Stop #16
The Place: O'Reilly and Associates, Sebastopol, CA
The Time: 7:00 PM (in fact, 7:50 PM, more on that later)
The Vehicle: a large red RV that was an amazing sight to behold
The Audience: members of the North Bay Linux Users Group, along with a few stray outsiders (like me)
Arrival
My friend and I arrived at the O'Reilly headquarters at around 6:35 PM (PST). For those of you who have yet to see O'Reilly's new digs just outside of downtown Sebastopol, they really are a striking set of buildings. Built in a country-cottage style with peaked roofs and gables, though large-scale and at least three stories high, they exude an old-fashioned, down-to-earth warmth and cheeriness that belie the ultra-modern high-tech activities commencing within their light grey-blue walls.
A fair number of people had already gathered in the conference-room-turned-presentation-center when we entered, but we were lucky to find seats relatively close to the front of the room. Nonetheless, it quickly turned out that pizza was on in another part of the building, and before you could count to twenty-three using only prime numbers, the room was deserted. However, since we had already eaten, it was time for us to take a look at the O'Reilly bookstore.
That was fun. Quite fun. Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell and books of a similar sort for sale were displayed on shelves covering an entire area next to the lobby in the front of the building. Thanks to the 20% off discount available to presumably anyone who bothered to show up, I left the store with O'Reilly's PHP Pocket Reference to give me great geeky reading pleasure in the cold wintery days ahead; and when my friend returned home later that night, XML in a Nutshell was tucked firmly underneath his arm.
An Unexpected Surprise
We got back to the conference room around 7:00 PM and were promptly informed that the Red Hat RV was quite late! Apparently, the lovely traffic problems of the San Francisco Bay Area had grabbed the folks from Red Hat and swallowed them whole, so we would have to wait a while. That was the bad news. The good news was that the time would be filled by a rousing little speech from none other than Tim O'Reilly himself! Since I had never seen one of Tim's presentations in person, this was quite a treat for me. As I would quickly discover, Tim's folksy, gentlemanly manner is well reflected in the buildings his business occupies. The subject of his speech, one presented by him a few times in the recent past (but one I'd never seen) was, at first, rather alarming: "Why Linux Doesn't Matter." You can be sure the audience laughed rather nervously at this strange topic for a geek gathering targeted mostly at die-hard Linux users. But what he had to say was, in fact, rather brilliant.
Tim's Speech in a Nutshell
Basically, the computer world is on the verge of a major paradigm shift. In the past, both users and developers have thought of computers in terms of what applications they can run and what system services are available to use. What is now beginning to change isn't that basic concept, but the definition of what an application or service actually is. Previous "killer apps" that helped accelerate the adoption of new computer systems were such apps as the first spreadsheet, or word processor, or even the Web browser. But now the killer apps are of a completely different nature. Tim said that he'd heard recently about someone who bought their first computer so that they could use amazon.com. Here was an "application" that didn't actually run on the computer locally at all. The computer was basically just an access point for getting onto the Internet, where all the really fun stuff was.
By now, Tim had brought up the (to some) unpleasant subject of Microsoft
Which brings us back around to Linux. In trying to think of what Linux and the Open Source heritage could bring to the table in the world of Web applications and services, Tim came up with an important idea. Linux from the very beginning embraced the basic UNIX philosophy of keeping everything modular and based on open communication. With a modular system, components can be replaced with different components by different developers, and because they all adhere to the same protocols, it works. Instead of using a philosophy of control to create a closed system, UNIX is all about communication and open standards. UNIX was the best platform to develop the Internet with because of that philosophy. Now Linux provides the best platform with which to develop new Web technologies and applications that can kick-start the transition to an Internet-based operating system environment.
In closing, Tim suggested that the more the Linux and Open Source communities focus on building this Internet OS using the UNIX philosophy of modularity and communication, compared with the Microsoft philosophy of control and complexity that places undue importance on tools in order to work with technology, the better. Instead of fearing Web services, we should be embracing them, albeit on our terms, not Microsoft's.
Elementary, my dear Watson
Just before the Red Hat RV finally arrived, Tim followed his speech with a short Q&A session. I won't go into all the details, but there is one thing I'd like to mention. With all this talk of Web services, I, of course, had to bring up Watson (and the copy-cat Sherlock 3 by Apple) as an excellent example of how data and functionality available on the Web could be repackaged in a more familiar desktop application form. Tim replied that he not only liked Watson a great deal, but wished there was a similar program for Linux! In addition, he mentioned Rendezvous as a good example of a simple technology "hack" will enable previously closed applications to open up their functionality to other computers and devices running on a network. For instance, a future version of iTunes will be able to share its playlists and music files with other copies of iTunes running on a local network. Bottom line from Tim O'Reilly: if you have a device or data that you think might turn out to be useful for someone else, make it accessible!
Woody/Stable: for production systems, like servers, not ur desktop
Sarge/testing: testing the next release for stable, nice for office like desktops
SID/Unstable: all the new can cool stuff that aint yet tested, this is for ur desktop.
Considering the number of packages and archs Debian has/supports it does a way better job then RH,MDK etc.
Infact that was the reason I switch from MDK to Debian. After installing a Mozilla RPM, it was obvious how old the libs were, how nasty RPM can be, and how it is a very bad idea to install any thing on those distro that did not come on its CD
You may point out stuff like Openoffice and GNOME 2, but just like they may not be on the before mentioned CDs, they are not in the main archive (Well they are now) but there always was apt archive with those debs for you to point your sources.lst at.
I have both testing and unstable in my sources.lst, and testing set to default in me apt.conf. So my system is kept upto date with sarge, but I can still install stuff from SID (apt-get -t unstable install )
Yes I know parent was a joke, but I dislike Debian being labeled as 'old' (esp w/ compared to RH and MDK), and I love apt and dpkg
You must have been at a different event than I was. Most of the feedback I got was extremely positive. The only time RHN came up was with the package resolution issue.
I suspect this is a post from one of the two guys who asked three times why we don't use apt-get. And took great pains to tell us repeatedly that was why they wouldn't use Red Hat. So of course RHN and the new package manager came up. They even asked twice in a row b/c they really didn't want to hear the answer, just take an easy dig at us. It happens, we'll live.
Yes it was marketing, but there was an awful lot more that was discussed. Including technical features, product road map, Q&A, heck Dave even spent over an hour trying to fix text on someone's laptop display.Hopefully someone else from the event can post their opinion as well. I doubt you can speak for a hundred people.