I went to my first Duluth-area tech presentation today, and it was a dorky one:”Space: The Final Frontier“. This isn’t probably that funny or even sense-making until you realize the presenter was Christopher Hertel, network storage guru and entrepreneur.

See, you’re chuckling now.

Chris presented on the current strategies in storage, both on the network side and from the filesystem side. His work on Samba gave him quite a bit of clout in the Open Source herd (nearly everyone attending). But beyond his obvious qualifications, he was an excellent speaker and a very nice person. He has a strong and youthful charm that makes

Another interesting thing is that he’s going to be doing some work with the new Port25 Project.
Apparently he was part of the push for Microsoft to release their documentation on previously private protocols (primarily CIFS, in his case). When they “decided” to open up some of their secret compartments (with the help of the EU), they took some of the Samba players to do work in making that information readable and accessible.

Personally, I think a lot of this might have to do more with the shuffling that’s taking place at Redmond than about the EU. Granted, the millions upon millions in fines is bound to take it’s toll. But I really am optimistic that Microsoft is going with the more cooperative approach to market control rather than their previous, Neanderthalian strategy. Let’s just hope that Port25 is a buzz-phrase driving a mindset and not just an obvious marketing campaign.