LWCE Reports Continue

Linux World continues, and reports from the floor continue to roll in; below are some more tidbits on what was on the floor or announced at today's show. Notably absent this year (besides a whole raft of companies, like formerly large exhibitors like Penguin Computing, Oracle, VA Software and subsidiaries like OSDN) were the sort of toys that crystallized dot-com risk-taking. On the other hand, companies like IBM, HP and Compaq seem as gung-ho as ever, with all sorts of info on how large customers will save (favorite trade-show words) Real Money with free software, and the dot-org booths where a lot of the show's spirit lives are happily sharing their projects' visions and toys.

wo1verin3 writes: "Trivia for geeks... and nerds. Or rather geeks vs nerds. Read about the contest of the people with oddly and randomly shaped heads here." This site also links to MoC chrisd's page of questions and answers.

abel wisman submitted news that GNU Bayonne and PreViking have merged into a single project, which will keep the name GNU Bayonne. Not familiar with either? Bayonne is a telephony application server, and PreViking is a telephony-switching daemon, both of which are open source. David Sugar of the Bayonne project also demonstrated an automated web-based callback system used to provide callbacks to form-based online queries. The newly combined Bayonne / PreViking teams will also be working on www.phonestreamer.com, built on top of GStreamer. The Bayonne booth at LinuxWorld offered booth visitors today free calls to anywhere in the world using these technologies.

red_gnom writes: "Linux is in the running to power the world's biggest computer, we learned this week at LinuxWorld Expo. A bid is being prepared to provide the computing power behind the US government sponsored Project Purple, which will pool a vast server farm to the three leading U.S. research labs, which is scheduled to come on stream by the end of 2004."

terrywin writes: "Apparently, the company that licensed Corel's Linux has indicated that the beta is now available. http://www.xandros.com/news.html, their home page has a link to the beta form. The last report I saw on this was back in September."

Finally, cnmill points to this story on CNET about today's announcement of version 1.1 of the Linux Standard Base. Congratulations!

Comments

Making money

[Anonymous Coward]

As the VC money dries up and projects that aim for the stars get blown up on the launching pad, the true beneficiaries of all the free programming labor become obvious. It isn't those companies that hold to some ideal of Freedom of Software or other tripe like that. The ones who are making it are the closed source shops who have a product to sell. IBM, Oracle, et al.

Linux to them is simply another market to tap. It isn't about the love of coding, but the love of money. So much the better for them that people are willing to give away their work for free.

When the dust finally clears a year or two from now, you'll likely see a single company responsible for Linux development and multiple software houses offering server software for the platform. "Linux on the desktop" is dead if these big-iron companies are the ones left supporting the platform. So much the better, I'd say.

Re:Making money

[SomeOtherGuy]

Ya. Look at what IBM has done for the desktop products they have aquired in recent years...(let them die horrible deaths..) anyone remember the Lotus 123 spreadsheet, Amipro word processor, et all...If it wasnt for a steady stream of cash they would find someway to kill Notes also...Read the article in todays USATODAY...They are in the Linux thing for servers only...They will spend a gazillion dollars on getting 5000 VM's to run on a mainframe -- but I bet you wont see them spend a dime on anything for the desktop...

Re:Making money

[cduffy]

Sure, there will be hobbyists who still tinker with the OS and the OS will still be "free", but the true money to be made in gratis software is the support of it. This single company will be the only one that will emerge from the current crop of distro vendors with the money, reputation, and knowledge necessary to be the main Linux distributor in the Western Hemisphere.

Not likely. There may be one Linux distribution which gains general usage, but they'll still only be a distributor; they'll still take their software from "the wild" before packaging and QAing and selling it, and there will still be smaller companies which do better in other markets.

I work for a Linux company doing embedded systems work (MontaVista Software), and we have to accept patches from the wild. As it is we can provide and support a huge amount of high-quality software on a very wide array of platforms with a staff of under 200 people. To accept only in-house patches would either require a massive growth in staffing (and a corresponding growth in expense) and, further, would stop us from benefitting from the concurrent development done outside the company.

Indeed, there've been times when we've considered keeping work we did in-house between ourselves and our customers, and came to the decision that there was a very strong business case for merging our work into the community tree to ease the costs involved with software maintenance. Doing internal development is just too expensive, and the advantages to justify it just aren't there. This is true no matter who you are -- it would be no more cost-effective for Red Hat (or Microsoft) to work on an internal fork of some Linux distribution than it would be for us.

As for what I said about having smaller companies succeeding in niche markets, let me use MontaVista as an example. We have a fair number of experienced kernel coders working for us, and several very large companies have found our "money, reputation and knowledge" to be enough to justify purchasing our products and services. By the numbers (less than 200 people) we're small fries compared to what you'd think you need to run an OS company, yet we've been doing remarkably well. Largely, this goes back to OSS development methodology. Because we can take advantage of the concurrent work done elsewhere, we can focus on work closely aligned with our specialty -- embedded systems -- and not have expend undue time on software maintenance. Because we do embedded systems so well (due to our focus!), we win customers in that market over differently focused competitors. This demonstrates how smaller companies can survive and even thrive in an OSS environment despite the potential presence of a 900lb gorilla.

...but the true money to be made in gratis software...

Our customers don't care about gratis -- our product isn't gratis to them (though it is cheaper than many proprietary alternatives, particularly if they're producing a large quantity of units; Linux, of course, carries no royalties). Rather, they care about libre. Because of the GPL, they can take their existing product (including the software they got from us) and go to another embedded systems company at any time or switch to working in-house if they don't like the service they receive from us. Our customers have absolute freedom from vendor lock-in -- nothing to sniffle at. Thus, they're assured that they'll receive quality service and honest pricing -- or they really can just go somewhere else.

The Register Article

[Prisoner Of Gravity]

Linux is in the running to power the world's biggest computer, we learned this week at LinuxWorld Expo.

This is clearly really exciting news. If Linux ends up being used on the world's largest (or fastest, or sexiest, etc...) computer, it's reputation for being both A)A valid solution for high-load calculations and B)A superior solution, worthy of being used on expensive hardware.

If Linux is used on this largest computer, imagine what this will mean for managers choosing it for mere 'large' computers. The future looks good for 'Big' Linux.

VA Software still is supporting Debian

[JoeBuck]

VA is still supplying network connectivity to Debian, not a cheap proposition given their bandwidth needs. Try a traceroute to www.debian.org:

...
13 s6-0.border1-7206.valinux.com (209.81.23.54) 102.552 ms 86.615 ms 86.868 ms
14 fe0-0.dist5-3662.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.86) 95.753 ms 134.836 ms 95.819 ms
15 e2-2.community8-bi8000.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.102) 124.682 ms 88.352 ms 114.626 ms
16 klecker.debian.org (198.186.203.20) 91.755 ms 96.514 ms 93.637 ms

Wrong, wrong, wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

There were a ton of proprietary software vendors, wholely clueless that Linux users may prefer Linux because of the Freedom.

Happy to burst your bubble on this one. "Linux users" are not the target of the companies at LW. Those companies know that you can't sell anything to people who are either too ideologically "pure" or just too damn cheap to spend money for anything except hardware.

Those companies are marketing to the people running big business systems, who see Linux as a very attractive alternative for small to mid-range servers. Whine all you want about commercialism and the lack of OSS purity and all that nonsense, but the bottom line is Linux is very significant success in the real world, even if not on your terms. Live with it.

Re:1st time conference attendee

[Moses Lawn]

Well, this is what will inevitably happen as Linux becomes commercially successful. There are really only two directions that things can go. Either Open Source will remain a comparatively local phenomenon based on the original ideals of the community, or it will become commercially successful and shows like this one will tend towards Comdex. It really can't be both.

Sure, commercial vendors are selling commercial, proprietary products based on Open Source. That's their job. There's nothing wrong with selling software - it's been keeping me employed for over 10 years. Many, if not most, Linux users may prefer the fact that it's Free, that's true. But that is not the audience for the folks showing on the .com side here. Yes, Linux *is* just another platform, and don't you ever forget it. The sooner Linux and BSD become ubiquitous, the sooner we'll see business software available for more than Windows as the standard. If I was an IT director and I needed to do PHP development or move my users off of Outlook, I would be thrilled to buy $10,000 worth of software to do that.

Ximian may seem slick, funded, and bullshit, but two of those attributes are awfully important for establishing credibility. As to their stewardship of Gnome, let me remind you of the example of Berkeley Software, who sold the After Dark screensaver for a number of years. It was wildly popular (you almost never saw a Mac or PC back in the day that wasn't running it). They made a lot of money, deservedly, on it, and used those profits to fund (*warning: wayback machine failing*) software for disabled and deaf/blind users. The thing is, if a company is run by people that are not completely greedy, they can, and often will, do Good Things with the money they make.

It sounds like there are some killer products available for Free and for money. That's great. That's perhaps as it should be, depending on how you see Open Source's future. But don't worry too much about the cloying, claustrophobic feeling you get from a trade show like this. Trust me - they're all like that. Go to Comdex or (shudder) E3 sometime, you'll see.

As to the sales people, some of my best friends are sales people. Most of them are incredibly smart, sharp and damn good at what they do. They may seem insincere, dumb and clueless bacause they really don't understand what the hell they're talking about most of the time. Imagine yourself plopped into the marketing department for a few weeks, having to do whatever it is they do up there, and I think you'll see what I mean.

That said, there are far, far too many sales and marketing units out there that seem insincere, ass-kissing, and downright dumb because they *are* insincere, ass-kissing, and downright dumb. Unfortunately, these are often the very characteristics the enable them to survive and propagate in the corporate gene pool.