LinuxWorld 2005 - report

[Net Llama!]

Greetings,
I attended the first exhibit day of LinuxWorld (in San Francisco) today.

For the terminally impatient, here are the pictures:
http://netllama.linux-sxs.org/pix/lwce/

This was my 4th LinuxWorld, and sadly, the show is starting to go 
downhill.  For the first time, the exhibit floor was moved from the much 
larger Moscone North to Moscone West.  I'm not entirely sure why this 
was done, although there was a difference convention going on in moscone 
west at the same time, so perhaps the other one reserved first.  At any 
rate, the main  show floor Moscone West was not large enough, and about 
18 booths were actually placed in the lobby on the 2nd floor (including 
all of the .org pavilion).

There wasn't terribly much that was notable this year, other than the 
sudden appearance of booth babes at two different booths and a distinct 
lack of excitement overall.  The booth babes were tacky.  Really, really 
tacky.  I mean, "blond twins wearing nearly nothing and running up to 
people to get pictures taken" tacky.  I mean "wonder woman with batman" 
tacky.  And i mean blondes with scandanavian accents handing out bottled 
water on the sidewalk.  Perhaps i'm just old fashioned, but I always 
thought of Linuxworld being above that sort of thing, and now its not 
any longer.

One booth that was actually pretty clever was from Blackdog ( 
http://www.projectblackdog.com ).  Their entire booth was nothing but a 
padded ring with a mechanical bull inside.  BlackDog apparently makes 
the "world's smallest Linux server" (it fits inside your hand, and plugs 
into a USB port).  Their gimmack was that they gave you the APIs for the 
mechanical bull, and let you program it on the blackdog server, and 
upload it to the bull, and then you got to ride it.  It was, by far, the 
loudest booth, and also the most creative gimmick i saw all day 
(ignoring the booth babes).

The big giveaway was SuSE giving out their trademark green colored 
baseball caps to advertise the release of OpenSuSE (which is supposed to 
compete with Fedora).  Towards the end of the day, it seems like 4 out 
of every 5 people in attendance had one.  Novell was also giving away 
some really high quality t-shirts if you wanted to wait in a line for 30 
minutes to fill out a survey.  Dell was giving out what looked like 
jumbo hockey pucks (about 6inches in diameter and 2inches thick) which 
turned out to be t-shirts (very very very very badly wrinkled) in 
shrink-wrap.  Redhat was giving away breakfast to everyone for the first 
hour, bizarre willy-wonka style chocolate bars (that said 'prize inside' 
on the label), and red 'Redhat' hats all day long.

The same players had the uber-booths again.  HP, Intel, AMD, Sun, 
Novell, Redhat, & IBM.  Sun's was somewhat more creative, with a large 
corner roped off with a group of 8 of their new Ultra-20s (which are 
really crappy boxes, i've had one in my cube at work for over a month 
now) all loaded with Unreal Tourney & Linux for real tournaments with 
prizes.

Microsoft had no presence, although they were rumored to actually be 
fielding a team for the Golden Penguin Bowl.

For anyone who wondered about Pat McGovern's departure (actually forced 
out, but that's a separate email thread if anyone is interested) from 
sf.net a few months back, he appeared today in Splunk's ( 
http://splunk.com ) booth.  I'm not quite sure what his role is there, 
but the company seemed to have an interesting product/concept. Basically 
they're selling what you get when you cross logwatch, grep & google, 
which is a web based 'intelligent' search engine for system/server logs. 
I saw a demo, and it looked kinda nifty, although I do wonder how many 
hardcore sysadmins would actually be firing up a web browser (not to 
mention the backend needed to power this thing) just to search logs. 
They were giving away a rather clever black t-shirt with simple white 
letters on front that said "We take the sh out of IT".

The .org pavilion upstairs felt really thin & disconnected from whatever 
spark the main show floor had.  The boothes just all seemed kinda thrown 
together, and were not seeing very much foot traffic, possibly because 
the entire exitence of the 2nd floor was very poorly advertised.  The 
usual players were in attendence, Fedora, Debian, Gnome, KDE, NetBSD 
(who had some kind of computer bolted onto the side of a toaster, 
running NetBSD), Linuxprinting.org, Mozilla, EFF, FSF and a few others 
that escape my memory.

I also caught John 'maddog' Hall giving a talk in the IBM pavilion/booth 
on the economics of open source around the wall.  It wasn't earth 
shattering stuff, but he's usually an interesting speaker (oddly he was 
running FreeBSD on his IBM thinkpad).

As I was walking back to BART afterwards, I happened to catch Chris 
DiBona & Linus himself sitting in the garden behind the Yerba Buena 
Center chatting.  I had seen Linus once before a few years ago at the 
Linux 10th anniversary picnic, but never before at LinuxWorld.



-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand		 		http://netllama.linux-sxs.org

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