Slashdot Mirror

I was at the Expo on Thursday and Friday. Some of my impressions of the conference:

It's getting more business-y and less geeky every year. There are a lot of reasons for that, and it isn't all bad, but it's still vaguely sad to see.

HP and IBM accounted for about half the floor space - seriously. The Expo promoters must have played the two companies off against each other as far as conference participation went, and besides the large areas devoted to these companies, there were other large sections that were intended to represent an average company solving all its problems with Linux - these areas were jointly sponsored by HP, IBM and the other big companies at Linuxworld. It was - quite - as if the entire conference was owned by IBM and HP, but it was pretty close.

There was virtually no BSD presence. I think I saw some NetBSD people - that was it.

The .org pavilion is still going strong - while the rest of the conference is getting more business-oriented (fewer engineers and more salesdrones), the non-profit free and open source software area is still sizable and well-attended.

There were fewer "check out our neat new hardware gadget running Linux" booths and more "buy an expensive rack server running Linux from us" booths.

Linux.conf.au sucked a fair number of the geekiest attendees away from LWCE. Okay, the Australian conference is a lot smaller, but it's still dumb to schedule them simultaneously.