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Jim Gettys to keynote at ApacheCon US 2007

We now take for granted amazing educational resources such as Wikipedia, search engines such as Google, mapping systems, and all the myriad services of today's Internet. But we should not: recently at a OLPC trial, a parent asked "What is the Internet?"

The Internet, the web, and the community that has built these services are key foundations to enabling learning by more than a billion children. As we look forward toward to the web reaching billions more, many challenges become clear: the last mile problem, back-haul from remote areas, world wide content distribution networks, and offline access, to name a few.  The web is indeed still in its infancy.

The developing world's Internet is much more like the Internet of 15 years ago: high latency, unreliable, and slow, than that of the ubiquitous broadband Internet most of us now enjoy.  Caching, careful content creation, and internationalization is vital. Much of what you do can either enable or inhibit successful use of the  World Wide Web to better people's lives everywhere.

Jim Gettys is the Vice President of Software for One Laptop Per Child. He was previously working on the X Window System, both on desktops and embedded systems such as the HP iPAQ. He helped to start the handhelds.org project and has also contributed to freedesktop.org efforts. Gettys has served on the X.org Foundation board of directors and served until 2004 on the Gnome Foundation board of directors. Gettys worked at W3C from 1995-1999; he is the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification (now an IETF Draft Standard). He is one of the principal authors of the X Window System, edited the HTTP/1.1 specification for the IETF, and is one of the authors of AF, a network transparent audio server system.