LinuxWorld 2006
I went to LinuxWorld in San Francisco today. Unfortunately, Doug wasn't able to go with me due to last minute schedule conflicts at work.
They moved back to the Moscone Center - North this year (it was in West, for the first time, last year). The only significant change for the move was that they had more floor space, and the .Org pavillion was moved back onto the main show floor instead of being segregated into the hallway outside the main showhall.
Either I've become jaded, or LW has gotten boring. Really boring. There really wasn't anything notable this year. It was mostly the same big companies (although Redhat didn't appear for the first time ever), with the same booths, doing the same spiel. I guess most folks are going to say that this is all proof that Linux has hit the mainstream. I suppose, but all the same, it used to be nice when new, exciting, startups would appear with a new product, or at least an innovative gimmick to wow the crowds.
The only notable newcomers to the show this year was Apple and Motorola. Apple was hawking their X Serve product, albeit poorly. I guess they just didn't know how to market to a non-Apple-cult audience, because their boot was nothing more than two X-Serves, and a G5 lined up, with a sign beside them listing the pricing. Motorola has one of the largest booths there, and was basically hawking their cell phone line with an ambiguous Linux tie-in that I wasn't able to figure out after wandering around for a few minutes.
The sad (or good, depending on your perspective) highlight of the show was truly the .Org pavilion where there was still that spark of excitement, rather than the din or marketing. I struck up a conversation with the guys at the Fedora booth (and got a free hat out of it, that they apparently had in very limited (5!?) supply), and also had a nice chat with, of all groups, the Open Solaris folks.
It was refreshing to actually hear about some of what is going on inside the OpenSolaris project. They agree that the current installer sucks, and they're seriously considering using anaconda. They also agreed that if Solaris is going to make any real inroads on the desktop, they need to learn from what the Linux world has been doing for the past few years. Namely, make *alot* more packages available (not just CDE & and Sun's bastardization of Gnome (JDS)), make partitioning more sane (autopartitioning such that 95% of the disk is handed over to /export is stupid for anyone not in a server/corporate environment), and generally make more desktop focused tools available.
I also had a quick chat with the EFF folks, and thanked them for their efforts (especially their case against AT&T. They were handing out stickers which said FAIR USE HAS A POSSE.
In the "desperate wanna-be up & coming distro that is trying to increase market share to survive" category was Linspire/Freespire (2 years ago it was Xandros, who this year had a small booth, but beyond that, nothing interesting going on). Linspire was giving away their new Freespire distro with a 300 page user's manual, and if you went to their conference room, they were giving away t-shirts and a boxed edition of their 'commercial' Linspire distro. For reasons that boggled my mind, they had no booth on the show floor and instead had a conference room clear on the other side of the convention center. I guess someone was either cheap, or failed to plan properly for the event.
The schwag trend this year was t-shirts. Everyone and their mother was giving away t-shirts as their primary marketing vehicle. My award for the best schwag (which also happened to be a t-shirt) was Splunk. They were giving away two different black t-shirts with white lettering on the front. One was the same one from last year which said "Remove the sh from IT". The new one said "Finding your faults, just like mom". Brilliant & catchy. So now I have both. Just about every other t-shirt giveaway was boring, uninspiring, logo-palooza.
I give pretty big credit to Novell for a really well put together booth. They were running the standard, and mostly boring, marketing presentation series in the front of the booth. However, towards the back they had several rows of IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T42 notebooks with SLED10 installed, and were doing technical demonstrations throughout the day where all of the audience could participate. I caught the XGL demo which was a great introduction to XGL for the unwashed masses. They also had more of the same T42's in the email garden, just to spread the love some more. With the absence of Redhat, Novell (and therefore SuSE) was truly the bigman in the house.
The "why did you even bother?" award is a tie between OSTG/Slashdot/sf.net and Amazon for their "Slashdot/sf.net lounge" and booth respectively. The signs for the loung, promoted it as a chance to meet with the folks who run sf.net & Slashdot.org, however every time I wandered by, it was nothing but a bunch of beanbags & a few potted plants, with nothing but show attendees. No representatives of slashdot or sf.net were anywhere in site. Amazon on the other hand had a booth, which seemed like a half hearted job recruiting attempt. However the two representitives were sitting behind the desk, looking bored out of their minds, with no visible literature onhand, and nothing obvious to advertise.
As for pictures, I couldn't find anything worthwhile to capture. So, I ended up taking a few of David as he adorned himself in the vendorware that I brought home.
So that was basically it. I'm not sure that I'm going to bother going next year (which is already scheduled for Aug 6-9, 2007). I suppose if Doug, or someone else wants to go, I'll come along too, but I'm pretty much done with the going solo stuff. Its just not worth it anymore.