Linus and Bill at Comdex

i0n wrote in to send us a Chicago Tribune article about Linus and Bill at Comdex. Has anyone rummaged up transcripts of either speech? I've seen several articles on each, but no transcripts. Update: 04/20 02:07 by CT : Knish sent us a PC Week Story on the keynotes. Update: 04/20 03:17 by CT : Ign0rance sent us Bill's Speech. Update: 04/20 03:34 by CT : BitMan sent us an MSNBC article.

Comments

A bit of a departure for Linus

[Enry]

Till now, he has not really been spreading much FUD about Microsoft, leaving that to the rest of us. His tongue-in-cheek comments are usually to the effect of "world domination. fast." not referring to M$ at all.
"MS probably controls the floor"? That makes him sound more like RMS or some paranoid nut than who we've seen in the past 7 years.
He's suddenly become much more vocal in the press about his dislike of MS and Bill in general. Any idea why this is happening?

I was there

[boinger]

I have to disagree with some of the postings here - I didn't come away with the impression that I had witnessed an hour-long M$ bashing speech. Yes, he had some excellent quips here and there that were anti-M$, but for the most part is was very Linux-centric.

Though, notably, I guess one could construe a lot of the speech to be anti-M$, simply because Linux is intrinsically anti-M$ (in that, Linux is all the Windoze is not).

Overall, my main impression is that Linus is an excellent speaker. I would not have needed to whisper much to my mom, were she to have attended, but I wasn't bored on the geek end of things, either. He did a great job of speaking to both the Linux-curious, as well as those of use infiltrating corporate america with our renegade Linux boxes that secretly hold the company together. It was a fine speech.

As for the rest of COMDEX - I was relatively un-entertained by the majority of the booths. I think that the auto-login (via a card-swipe) terminals provided by Novell were very nice. And there were enough that there weren't lines longer than one person behind another person. (and even that was rare). The Linux Pavillion was good-looking and conspicuously placed (near-ish the entrance, right past the APC area). Everyone was polite and helpful, there. They had a little projection-screen area where they were demo-ing various Linux distros and products. I got distro CDs from RedHat, SuSE, and Caldera for free, and I even got a Beta of SuSE's Alpha-AXP distro (I had to ask, and they produced it from a secret cache) for my Alphastation.

Sadly, Compaq didn't show for their Linux Pavillion booth, at least not by midday Monday.

"The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now."