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Grand Tour: the Story of a Penguin and a Red Fedora
GaelDesign writes "The legendary Red Hat Road Tour 2002 is nearly at an end, and a good time was had by all. One of the most successful stops on the tour was the presentation at the O'Reilly and Associates headquarters in Sebastopol, California. Because the Red Hat RV's arrival was delayed due to traffic conditions, Tim O'Reilly gave a rousing speech beforehand that was well received by the audience. Read a detailed report of the event at The Idea Basket."
The Red Hat road tour stoped at our University (SIUE) near St. Louis. For the most part almost everyone was very disipointed with the stop. It turned out to be more of a marketing ploy with them trying to sell the Red Hat Network, then a stop to realy explain the advantages of Linux and open source all together. I would have thought that they would have got it that a university is not the place for marketing, we want to hear from the Engineers, and talk about open source in general. The stop would have been more of a sucess if it's target audience would have been OIT(Office of Information Technology) then the students and faculty.
Part of the problem with any 'inside' Linux journalism (a big part of the reason I finally dropped my sub to Linux Journal magazine) is the 'yay for our team' mentality presented, exemplified in this article.
It reads like a marketing brochure written at Red Hat, not like an independent report. This seems to be a consistent problem with much Linux 'journalism' out there.
Writers have to learn to step out of their personal enthusiasm for the product being written about, or they come off like a proud dad describing Junior's last Little League game. Readers figure this stuff out, and it's not enough to preach to the choir.
Actually, the event was done as a local LUG event.
I'd agree that most of our events have more content, but a lot of people were interested in this event: we had almost 3 times our usual turnout. Luckily we were able to use the opportunity to plug a few of our upcoming events.
RedHat's declared goal was to "find out the state of Linux in America" or something like that; IOW they were interested in what questions got asked, etc. The real interesting bits were after the main event when we all went to the local brewpub and drank beer, ate pizza (RedHat paid for both, and for the pre-arrival pizza, too) and generally chatted about whatever. I ended up talking with one of them for a while about some of why I prefer Debian on servers over RedHat.