O'Reilly ET Con: The Future of Web Services

The Future of Web Services L.F. Cabrera, Ph.D. I have to say that I didn't think much of this keynote. Sending a Microsoft guy to talk to this audience is kind of like dropping a lamb in the lion cage at the zoo. To his credit Dr. Cabrera handled the audience fairly well. The thing that really got to me though, is an exchange that took place about half way through his talk. Someone asked if MS was going to do something like GPL with some of their support code for web services. He said, "What is GPL?" I'm pretty sure he was serious, and the whole room was dead quiet. Even the typing, which is a constant sound at this conference, stopped. After a bit of silence, he asked again, what it was. It seems that if MS is going to send people to conference like this one they should probably take a minute to help them learn some of the basic terminology used by the audience. Maybe there should be a class at MS or something. The "Real Wold 101".