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LWCE Wrapup
Okay, let's close out the Linuxworld Expo news as best we can. CNet has an article on the march on City Hall (there's also an AP article) to promote open source in government (some people even want to get Linux certified). CNN loves Linux. Bruce Perens, as we mentioned last night, is bailing out of Hewlett-Packard. And Newsforge has several stories from the Linuxworld floor: 1, 2, 3, 4. And finally, CmdrTaco and Chris Dibona (Gamara here on Slashdot) were on TechTV yesterday (and repeats today). Viewer discretion advised.
http://events.kde.org/info/lwce-sf-2002/pictures/
Linuxworld seemed like two conferences in one. There was the "Linux, the home-user and small office product" and then there was the "Linux, spend lots of money on this superduper mainframe".
.ORG pavillion. The folks there were mostly friendly and talkative, and seemed equally happy to talk with suits, end-users, or administrator types like me.
I'm small fry. I use linux at home, bug hunt for some OSS projects, administer linux & UNIX at a 60-person company. My linux world revolves around home users, small offices, and nonprofits.
I couldn't even get anybody at the IBM, HP, AMD or RedHat booths to speak to me. They just wanted to scan my card and send me info. But when I asked simple questions ("So, tell me about the s390" "Do you have any server products for smaller offices or for nonprofits"?), the salespeople got huffy and would go pursue some bigger fish.
It was like they could tell, just from my haircut, that I don't have $400,000,000 to blow on an s390 mainframe.
Sun was the exception here. Out of all of the Big Business booths the folks in the Sun booth were really excited to show off their products to everyone. The Gnome 2.0 folks were thrilled to talk about small office users. The Cobalt Qube guys really wanted to show off the Qube interface.
I spent a good amount of time in the
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
My company has done some market research for Sun, and we attended Sun's VIP Day presentations at LinuxWorld.
Here is some information I gleaned from the presentations, Sun's website, and the LX50 documentation:
Kernel version: 2.4.9-31
Apache version: 1.3.22
Tomcat 3.2.1
J2SE SDK 1.4
SunOne ASP (Chilisoft ASP) 3.6.2
Red Hat 7.2 ships with the 2.4.7 kernel and with Apache 1.3.20, so Sun has done some buffing of the distribution. It may be 7.2 with errata applied. 2.4.9-31 is Red Hat's recommended kernel for 7.2; it closes the zlib vulnerability.
The Sun/Chilisoft ASP support normally sells for $495.
For more information, see our market brief.
Not giving up a comfy job, he's only giving up some so-so benefits (HP benefits are nearly as nice as they once were) by going contract. He'll still be working for HP and still getting paid by HP, but the IRS won't classify him as an employee so no benefits, but also less risk for HP. I'm sure he makes enough money that benefits really aren't a big issue (it doesn't take much, most employers far exaggerate the value of their benefits, something you don't find out until you try going it alone).