A ten-year retrospective from LWN's other co-founder

I started reading lwn from the day I discovered it in July 1998. It was a Norwegian news site
that linked to lwn in an article about Oracle on Linux. (The lwn article can be found here:
http://old.lwn.net/1998/0723/ ). 

I also remember when I had to start appending "/bigpage.php3" to continue getting lwn in my
preferred format. But that was a small annoyance compared to the joy of getting daily updates,
even though I had to append "/daily/" to the url. 

I have always viewed lwn as much more than a news site. The open source / free software world
has lots of strong personalities with very different and sometimes quite extreme viewpoints.
In this world I have always thought of lwn as a moderate and uniting force with editors being
able to see the case from several angles. And in many years from now, when the history books
are written, I think this is what lwn will be remembered for. 

Back in 1998 when I started reading lwn, I thought that Windows 98 was my last MS operating
system ever. But I am writing this on my 64-bit Vista which I use for photo and video editing.
(Of course I also have Fedora and Ubuntu on the same computer.) I also thought that driver
problems would disappear fairly soon. But I still can use several hours getting X up and
running on modern ATI or nVidia cards. And I'm still not able to connect my laptop to a
wireless lan. 

lwn is not a very personal publication, and in the beginning I had no idea who was behind.
After a while I started to see things like "Elizabeth O. Coolbaugh, Managing Editor", but I
still had no idea what a managing editor was or what articles you wrote. The first time I
really felt that I started to know one of the editors was after this article:
http://lwn.net/Articles/116260/

And even though I don't feel I know you in person, I want to thank you for your contribution
to the best Linux site ever! 


My all time favorite quote from lwn: 
"Richard Stallman is kind of like the eccentric uncle that everybody loves, or at least
respects, but whose behavior means that nobody wants to take him anywhere."