LinuxWorld
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 pavillion).
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 pavillion 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 pavillion/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.