Olive Blog

Spring update on the Olive project

Olive has been getting some very good publicity lately. Vint Cerf, who is a Turing Award winner and Internet pioneer, found out about Olive through the grapevine, and contacted Satya to learn more. Satya gave him an overview and demo some weeks ago. Vint was very impressed with Olive because it solves a key problem that has long concerned him. This is, of course, the problem of preserving executability of software over the long term. This has been the crucial missing piece in his vision of a "digital vellum" to preserve Internet content.

Since learning about Olive and seeing it working, Vint has become something of a champion of Olive. He has invited Satya to do a joint keynote presentation on April 27 at Stanford to the annual IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium) meeting. On February 13, he gave a keynote talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, CA. The official AAAS video of the talk doesn't seem to be out yet, but many news organizations reported the talk. This article by a BBC reporter includes Vint's mention of Olive. A search for "Vint Cerf black hole" will show you many other news articles, some mentioning Olive.

Satya was interviewed on February 17 on radio by BBC World News. It is just a short interview about Olive, working from Vint's talk to AAAS, but very good visibility for Olive.

The BBC also has a link to the Olive website on its web page. Over the past several days, the number of hits on the Olive web page has increased dramatically, thanks to Vint's publicity.