Jon 'maddog' Hall On the Future of Free Software (Video)

You know who maddog is, right? He's one of our favorite speakers on what we might call the Linux/FOSS circuit. So you know, despite the Noel Coward song that says, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun," Jon prefers shade much of the time when he's in a tropical climate, based on personal observations at Linux conferences in Florida and Hawaii. But sun or shade, maddog is an eloquent and interesting speaker. We'd like to take you all to hear him in person, but we can't, so this video is the next best thing. (Alternate Video Link)

Comments

Re:Ironic

[OzPeter]

Cheaper Hardware / Expensive software argument is odd. When I got to these linuxfests, Mac-book Pros are by far the most common. Kind of hypocritical there. Apple does not represent anything free and open.

Nothing changes, I went to one in the late '90s and it was VAIOs all over the place.

Re:Ironic

[tepples]

The Apple II ROM wasn't free to reproduce. And the fixed address entry points in its ABI made a cleanroom compatible workalike nearly impossible to make, as all subroutines had to be no longer than the version in ROM. Compare this to KERNAL of C64, BIOS of the IBM PC, and even Apple's later ProDOS, which used proper syscall numbers.