Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda and Jeff “Hemos” Bates share their thoughts on growing up, getting famous, and the responsibility that comes with having the biggest megaphone in the world.
There was a sober atmosphere on the day Linux Magazine’s Robert McMillan visited the dynamic duo behind Slashdot at their headquarters in Holland, Michigan. Slashdot’s co-founders Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda and Jeff “Hemos” Bates were busy packing up their now-famous geek compound (a serendipitous collection of butt-ugly half duplexes fronted, on that day, by a brown metal dumpster filled with O’Reilly books) for a move to more civic-code-compliant digs in the center of town. Bates himself was moving from the town that he and Malda had grown up in to live the life of an urbanite in Boston, Mass.
THE BAND WAS BREAKING UP.
Or was it? If Slashdot has proved anything, it’s that physical location doesn’t really count for that much in the modern world. After all, how else could a couple of punks in their early twenties, working out of a small town in Michigan, become two of the most important voices in Linux? Since Rob Malda’s Chips and Dips Web site morphed into Slashdot three years ago, it has emerged as something of a civic center of the open source movement. Journalists and computer executives now hit the site to get a snapshot of the community’s take on issues of the day….
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