LinuxWorld 2003!
Just got back from a full day at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. This was my 3rd LW, and in my opinion, this was the best of the bunch. I arrived a half hour before the floor opened at 10AM, and already the place was packed.
IBM & HP had the 2 'superbooths' to the right & left of the main hall entrance. Together, they occupied nearly 25% of the total floor space.
There was *ALOT* of swag this year, which was a pleasant change of pace from the past few years where it had been gradually decreasing in quantity.
Novell had a fairly large booth where they were hawking their up & coming linux offering big time. They made a great effort to reiterate that they have no intention of tinkering with Ximian, but instead pushed the fact that they plan to use Ximian's offerings to enhance their own.
The Golden Penguin Bowl was mildly amusing, although just about everyone on the panel really wasn't all that famous, and Chris DiBona is becoming more & more self-promotional in a teeth grinding way.
Notably absent this year was Google. Granted they're not really selling anything that is Linux specific, but they were there last year, and were quite popular.
I saw Maddog giving a talk in the IBM booth about how Linux helps global companies & governments save money. This was the first time that i'd seen him in person, and he's quite a captivating speaker.
The .org pavillion was ok, although smaller than last year. Gentoo was doing their thing, showing off uber-boxen running blazingly fast.
HP was once again rude. I wanted to play with their dual Opteron box, and the sales drone scolded me for touching the hardware without permission. I guess i missed the point of a trade show, if you can't actually play with the products being offered.
IBM had a bit of a toned down booth compared to last year's linux powered vending machines & car. It was still well setup, with all of their HW product lines on display (including a fully functional z series).
M\$ was there, attempting to hawk their 'Unix Services for Windows', as well as some new stupid quasi-IDE that was noted to run on Windows, Solaris & mac. What a bunch of idiots. And they were once again, well positioned in front of the restrooms.
Oracle had a large booth that was a complete ghost town. Every time i walked by or through, there was almost no one in it. Oddly, they were giving free lunch to anyone who sat through a 10 minute demo, yet they still couldn't fill all the seats.
Redhat's booth was scaled down a bit from last year, and didn't seem to be getting much foot traffic other than when they were giving out free hats (that were identical to last year's).
Veritas was also a newcomer with a large new booth, although they didn't seem to understand what it was they were doing. Every single box there was running WinXP.
O'Reilly had a significantly larger booth than the previous years. They were running a special, buy 2 books, get a 25th Anniversary t-shirt for free. The books were going like hotcakes.
Xandros (Lindows competitor, with an updated Corel Linux) was giving away a full boxed set of their desktop distro to the first 1000 attendants. All day the line was very long. I got mine, which notably comes with a registered copy of WineX & Crossover.
Pictures are available here