“Atlanta has always had the reputation for being the elite geek
conference. Even though there were enough PR and marketing
people there this year to make some of us wish for a genetically
engineered animal that eats press kits and tastes good, ALS was a
fun, informative show.“
“I asked Jon “Maddog” Hall, executive director of Linux
International, about what happens now that Linux is the de facto
standard for UNIX on Intel. But he points out that Linux still has
a long way to go as a standard platform, and adds, “One thing that
the Linux community had better pay attention to is maintaining
binary compatibility across releases.”
“Binary compatibility? Yes. “The lack of binary compatibility
helped kill UNIX systems,” Maddog says. “People didn’t understand
what was really wanted by customers and ISVs.” So distributions can
consider themselves warned.”