The OOXML document format war is over, and the good guys lost. The world will be a worse place because of it, for a long time to come. After being a lobbyist for many months, it was a great relief to get back to being a Samba coder. At least that's something I feel I have some competence in. The jury is still out on my lobbying career.

I recently got to attend a couple of conferences, both of them the really technical kind where I end up learning things. The first one was the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, in Austin, Texas. I got to spend time learning where Linux is going from some of the people creating it, and to meet a lot of old friends. Jim Zemlin, the head of the Foundation, has a vision of where Linux should go in the next ten years, and it is breathtaking in scope.

In brief, it's a kinder, gentler version of Linus Torvald's quote that Linux is headed for "world domination, fast". But make no mistake, it's just as compelling. Jim and the Foundation are working towards a world with Linux running on the smallest embedded devices to the largest supercomputer clusters, and all possible devices in between.

His vision is of Linux as a common platform for all the intelligent devices we already have, and are yet to invent. With a standard environment and common API's across all these systems, this mass of devices will become an irresistible target for new software from application developers.

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