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UK Linux Expo: Growth, Suits And Vodka
"Linux Expo 2000, running June 1 and 2 in London, is widely seen in the British IT industry as an indicator that Linux has come of age. It is now in its second year, with 35% more exhibitors than last year and expecting a 70% increase in visitor numbers. Despite such figures, it is not a huge show, with around 80 exhibitors. However, this Expo seems to be primarily an opportunity for Business to prove how net-centric it has become and to show how well it has embraced Linux whilst the Geek Evangelists struggle to remind the besuited visitor of the Open Source philosophy.
It was the usual uneasy fit. The Linux Professional Institute couldn't help referring to the sponsorship they had received from Mandrake who had the neighbouring stall. The LPI was part of a .org ghetto on the lower floor along with Debian -- selling a six CD set including source code for seven pounds -- and such other luminaries as the Linux User Groups. All around them, the commercial face of Linux in Europe was touting its wares.
The deals on show covered the spectrum from server co-location to the servers themselves and from Linux Utilities for a fiver to commercial packages which have been rapidly ported to the lively new Linux markets. A good selection of Linux distributors were available on-site. Red Hat had the largest stand while SuSe seemed to be getting the most visitors. My quote of the day had to be the SuSE guy at the prize draw: "This is genuine -- a guy with a German accent giving away software." SuSE's popularity may also have had something to do with the advertised appearance of User Friendly and the opportunity to get a Dust Puppy to take home, but some of the UFie comments were a little scary. Their headline quote was taken from a slashdot post and much of what they had to say seemed to suggest that userfriendly.org is in the process of "leveraging" their undeniably successful core product.
This seemed to be a theme of a number of other exhibitors, though Red Hat actively stated that there is only one Linux -- and I'm sure they were talking about the kernel rather than attempting to dismiss their competitors' market share. This is despite the appearance of at least two distributions I hadn't heard of before and the presence of a stall which had the primary purpose of selling downloads of other people's distros cheaper.
The Mandrake stand seemed quite popular while SGI definitely scored points with the best Quake setup at the show. SGI also had the most original attraction of the event -- an Ice Penguin. The ice carving stood on a plinth and had a hole drilled through from one shoulder and coming out the bottom of the belly. At appropriate moments, an SGI staffer would pour a stream of vodka in the shoulder which cooled and splashed into the lucky recipient's plastic cup. The choice of Smirnoff alleviated the potential problems of insufficient cooling which may have occurred if cheaper source product had been in use.
Towards the end of the day, Mailbox Internet -- who started off as the UK's primary Apple-friendly ISP -- started handing out beer to anyone who managed to maintain a serious conversation with their sales staff. This approach was far more rewarding than that taken by Pervasive. I asked their sales guy to compare his database product with mySQL and PostrgreSQL and his basic response was that you get what you pay for. Perhaps he would have tried a different tack if I hadn't been wearing a suit and a tie. This was the essential problem with the event -- over 80% of the exhibitors were commercial outfits but less than 20% of the visitors were Suits. The Geeks were there in force in the hope of finding Illiad and talking amongst themselves and I suspect that Lonix , the London Linux User Group, with its professed aim "to drink beer and have fun" was more successful at recruiting than many of the commercial exhibitors. Meanwhile, many of the exhibitors made me feel naked without a business card to hand over and one company was advertising MCSE training.
For all that, it was an interesting event and a reminder that there are ways of obtaining information without visiting google. In fact, this was a pretty good example of the Bazaar that ESR and cluetrain tell us about. It was an environment where small operations and large have an almost equal voice and where passion beats gimmicks -- which is where Linux began, is it not?
My score for the afternoon: 1 beer, 1 vodka, 1 T-shirt, 3 CDs and about a thousand brochures."
Daniel James also sent this report from the show floor, with some quick product descriptions and other Expo news:
"This mailing is coming to you from the LinuxUser stand at the Linux Expo in London. The exhibition is more than twice as big as last autumn's show, with stands on two floors and the European Linux Conference hosted by SUSE on the floor above. Here's the pick of the news from the show.
____________________________________________
Stronghold SSL web server
Stronghold 3 has been released by C2Net Software. It's a 128-bit SSL
server based on Apache. It costs $995, but you can download an
evaluation version from http://www.c2.net
_____________________________________________
New Alpha motherboard
The UP1100 has been revealed at the Expo - partnered with a 21264 Alpha
processor, it's aimed at Beowulf clusters, web servers and development
and rendering boxes. API have also announced a partnership with QSW
which will develop Linux supercomputers. Check out
http://www.alpha-processor.com and http://www.quadrics.com
______________________________________________
Mailbox Internet partners with SUSE
Mailbox claim to be the first 100% Linux ISP, and they've formed a
partnership with SUSE to co-promote Linux on the desktop.
http://www.mailbox.net.uk
_______________________________________________
New Silicon Graphics Linux boxes
SGI have been showing off their 230L Visual Workstation, preinstalled
with RedHat 6.1 and OpenGL 1.2 graphics drivers. They've also announced
that IBM's Web Sphere will be available on the new 1450 Linux server, to
run alongside DB2. http://www.sgi.co.uk
________________________________________________
Best freebie at the show?
TurboLinux tatoos - we've
all got one. They
did promise that they wear off eventually ... More next week. Don't
forget to send in your Linux-related snippets to me at
daniel@linuxuser.co.uk"
For another voice covering UK Linux Expo, try mart's roundup of the event, linked from LinuxUK.
I'm not so sure that follows. A few months ago I saw W.H.Smith selling software for £30 which will "test for and fix the millenium bug in your computer". This was bollocks of course, it just checked your BIOS, and almost no home users had a bios so shagged that it wouldn't have booted ok on 1/1/2000. However, people must've been buying it and I've not heard of any backlash.
You only get a backlash if people *realise* they've been ripped off. I wonder how many people buying Red Hat for £50 know they can get it for £5? But anyway, if they do find out, that shouldn't put them of Linux as a whole, just make them more reluctant to shell out in the shops.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Mailbox could be of interest to me as well. My current co-lo outfit is too far away and their network availability is too low, so I'd like to expand elsewhere.
What's parking and ease of access like at the Fulham NOC? [US readers will be aghast to hear that not every outfit in London has a 10-acre carpark.:-)] And how secure is it physically?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I don't believe the most successful open source company will be proportionally as rich as MS, simply because most of their income comes from a monopoly which could not be obtained by an open source company. That doesn't mean that closed source is better. No democratic head of state will ever have the power that Stalin had.
OTOH the overall IT market may be more productive, efficient and competitive if open source continues to make an impact.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I'm the red-shirted guy from Mailbox Internet who was buying the beer on the Friday, and spent most of the Expo talking to people who didn't believe I was who I said I was because I was wearing a tie and not the usual ThinkGeek fare ;)
On the subject of suits and geeks, I'm actually glad I had the shirt on - most of the geeks got hold of me because I was talking tech, and a lot of the suits gave me more time because I had a shirt and tie on - sad but true.
Anyway, my personal score for the show:
- Dust Puppy from Dark-Side Dave.
- £120-worth of books.
- A 4ft-high penguin (yes, we were the ones who took it to the pub).
- Squishy penguins from SGI and Alphanet.
- The Walnut Creek set of Slackware CDs.
- Tux cufflinks for those "I've just been told to be smart" moments.
- A new news peer for Mailbox, and several traffic peers with people in Telehouse.
- Two consecutive hangovers, and a large bar bill.
- Sore feet.
Great fun folks. There's photos of Thursday and Friday (and some more here).Hugs to y'all,
Joel
MD of Mailbox Internet
Smegma.
Ah yes. Often i have partaken of this sport on a boring Saturday afternoon. Best is usully a pretty clueless shop such as PC World. Ask clueless questions for a couple of minutes, then whack them with a nice, technical question (Such as, does the FSB run at 66Mhz or 100Mhz on this box?) Be sure to use a lot of abreviations and acronyms for best effect.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
It varies from place to place. Titan computers in Exeter suprised me when I walked past once. In their shop window they had BeOS, Linux and Windows running on their top of the range machines, so I popped in to have a chat and the showed off QNX as well.
Better than another shop wher I asked for a 3dfx card and they got some lame 3d animation software out... I left hurriedly.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
When we set up a booth and fly in people to work the show, a well designed booth will try to make sure that the people coming in to the booth get attention and the people that are there to spend money get the most attention.
There always needs to be a way to filter the people so that the exhibitors can tell who's a CIO, CEO, and VP and who are high schcool kids cruising for handouts. Both groups need access to the exhibitors, but for differant reasons.
One east coast show did it right. They had "student only mornings". They opened the show early for 2 hours each day and asked exhibitors to make some people available to handle these students. This was a win win for everybody because the students got better access to the exhibitors and could ask them detailed questions. This made the students visit truly educational and not just a freebie grab fest (alltho we still gave away cool stuff). It was also a win for the exhibitors because during the show, you spent less time educating and more time concentrating on cultivating sales leads.
Perhaps more Linux shows can use this format in the future to balance exhibitor cost and atendee access.
___
I expected to hear that parking was limited, maybe to a dozen cars in their courtyard say (this being in London), including some reserved spaces for incoming co-lo visitors with gear to unload.
But to hear you say that there is NO parking space available would make their operation a total joke. You can't expect people to carry servers from a car parked at a side-street parking meter, with boots needing to be locked as you move back and forth, subject to kids swiping leads from your loaded trolley, or even mugging and car break-ins once the criminal community realizes that this is a computer-gear loading point.
As for Telehouse, that's at the other end of the co-lo price and facilities spectrum. While parking used to be bad there, their new courtyard provides ample space when their main loading bay is full. That's beside the point though: the high price of up-market co-lo sites derives from their better housing and management facilities, not quality parking.
If what you describe is true, it's totally ridiculous for Mailbox's intended business. They badly need to move their co-lo rooms to a better site, and it could be even cheaper and more expandable for them to do so outside of London --- even just 15 miles further out would make a big difference, without imposing a travel strain on staff.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
By not encouraging a geek presence on their stands, companies are missing a golden opportunity to create a buzz which then attracts further visitors, and so on. You're more likely to get corporate visitors too that way, just to see what all the fuss is about.
The price of raising the effective profile of your stand in this way is not high: you just have to print more leaflets and provide more fun exhibits and offer some lower-cost purchases, T-shirts and mugs if nothing else, and those can be offset against advertising budgets. A minimal-size booth will then probably not be adequate, but there were many larger stands at the show that were almost empty of visitors, a wasted opportunity.
Next time, exhibitors should invite students and other geeks as well as corporates, as an exercise in marketing if nothing else!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
After fiddling a bit, we'd grab a marketroïd and ask him about the program, if it did this or that, and about what price it was.
The bullshit reactions we often got were priceless!!!
--
Here's my mirror
Thanks for the reply. As always, it's horses for courses, and these days a useful 19" server can be about the same size as a hungry person's pizza, so the lack of parking facilities needn't be fatal to business. Just damaging. :-)
:-)
One certainly can't quibble with the 35 pounds/month price of the basic package, although prospective customers should note that 1 gigabyte per month is just 386 bytes/sec for a 30-day month, so they shouldn't expect to run any substantial web or mail services on that.
386 bytes/s is less than 5% of the bandwidth of a single ISDN channel, so obviously this would not provide viable service for any substantial constant-rate applications. In other words, the application needs to be one that is inherently low-bandwidth or one that can make good use of the burst headroom for this package to make sense.
"Corporate shopfront on the Internet" is probably not such an application, even for a tiny business. Worldwide 24-hour access, the roaming of search engines, and rapidly increasing expectations of end customers, all conspire to make such a miniscule average bandwidth unsuitable. And now that ADSL is finally starting to happen, the server bandwidth pricing of yesterday just isn't going to be of any use at all.
There are however still a few low-bandwitch applications around, so I might well check out Mailbox in the future. Especially when the Putney site's carpark becomes available.
Cheers!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I actually spent 2 days on a stand there fielding questions on Linux, was roped into a Linux Q&A presentation and showing our systems to people.We see a wild variety of people with the most common questions:
- Can I use this instead of Windows?
- Why should I use this instead of Windows?
- Can I run my Windows programs on it?
- Can I use it on the same machine as Windows?
- Is this cd Free?
- Could Windows be any worse (yes, the flamebaiters try in real life too!)?
So everyone wanted to know about Linux in relation to Windows. I think the fact that we were not at a Linux Show (I got bumped by a coin-toss at the last minute for going to the London Linux show to make way for a salesman) made it a far more worthwhile experience as people were insterested in holding the Linux world to the same standards as the traditional commercial world. The downside was we saw just how entrenched Microsoft had become, the only question I received that gave me hope was "Can I re-compile my programs written for SCO for Linux?" As long as these people are out there it can only be a matter of time before we can have a software show and stop nailing shows to operating systems.And I would just like to say that the only answer I hated giving was when I had to tell one person who wanted to ditch Windows that they had to keep Windows because he couldn't replace his Cubase.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Students were banned from attending this one. My friends and I had to make up a fake company name to get tickets.
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
There always will be suits at the Linux Expo (and Software Development Conferences). That is how you can tell the sales people from the real people.
Fight Spammers!
It's great to see Linux doing well in the UK! Sometimes it seems that MS have a stranglehold here in the UK and Ireland that's unbreakable when I hear about how well Linux is doing in the USA (get it in all the shops, magazines everywhere, or so it seems) but things are taking off in Ireland too, take a look at http://cork.linux.ie/events/windowsworld/ for my report about how we wooed the crowd in Dublin last month!
Was because to get one of the `VIP' passes to the event, you had to sign up on a web site that said that `sorry, we cannot accommodate students'. Oh, that's okay, I mean it's not like any students wrote the darned kernel in the first place or anything! I think the non-advance entry price was stated as £15; pretty pricy and not worth it to most students, assuming they were letting 'em in on the door.
:-)
Given this perverse entry requirement, I was trying to fathom the purpose of this event from a friend on the Debian stand, and from his description it sounded like a corporate willy-waving competition as to who could sponsor the most number of pissed-up geeks
I was a bit miffed in that I got a pass sent to me as an `independent consultant', but about to start some ferocious exams, I couldn't go. Maybe that was part of their no-students drive too...?
Hey ho; maybe next year.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
I would definitely never consider myself a suit, although I was wearing one...
:-)
;-)
It was my first Linux show, and I was very impressed. The Alpha Linux hardware made my jaw drop as it zoomed a mandelbrot image smoothly and quickly. The guy I spoke to on the stand said that it was realtime but I can't confirm it. If it really was realtime then those machines are FAST! The SGI hardware goes without saying - very impressive. One of their stand techies reamed off the specs and but when I asked him what software took advantage of the [phenominal] 3D graphics hardware, he replied "Quake!".
One thing that was a bit odd was the "Great Linux Debate" (which was too packed for me to attend). It claimed to feature industry leaders, but the highest profile person, Alan Cox, was at the show (on Red Hat's stand), but wasn't at the debate. I know because I spoke to him when the debate was running. It's not everyday you get to meet a real Unix Wizard!!!![1]
It was interesting seeing which companies sent people to the show - including some "traditional" sectors like the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Ministry of Defence.
All told, it was a very good day - I've got loads of new distributions to try, and left with two bags full of stuff including a rather nice "stress" penguin. The "Can I have one for my girlfriend?" worked well for the cute stuff....
[1] I asked Alan about Linux at the highend (hot swap PCI etc). He said he'd seen it demoed, that Red Hat and SGI were involved in providing some high end stuff. He then talked about clustering, and how they evaluated Unix clustering, but decided that the VMS form of clustering was "right" and that's the way they're taking Linux. (apologies to AC if I misheard him).
Indeed. My personal favourite at the moment is Polmos Wyborova. If you're in London, Gerry's off license in Old Compton Street sells a fairly decent selection of vodkas.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
British Linux show
Penguin-fest across the sea
Now invade Europe!
Yep, but what else do you expect from the 8-9 bucks an hour crowd?
They've never had to do anything of actual purpose. If they did, they might take a better view of it after running Apache a bit.
Really, I can see why they don't like it: job security. They probably don't like people buying online either. Oh well, I guess it's back to McDonalds...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Well, i'm sure i've seen boxed copies of Redhat in Software Warehouse stores. But i can't ever imagine walking into a Dixons or (God forbid) a PC World and finding a sales person who new what Linux was. Hell, must of them barely know what a computer is...
Syllable : It's an Operating System