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Linuxworld Expo Wrapup
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.
At other tradeshows you get boothbabes, at Linuxworld, you get pics of a Dance Dance Revolution gamepad and a couple shots of guys getting a massage... piss poor!
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
The Backrub Booth! This was the BEST part of the whole show! For $15 I got an amazing backrub by a woman named Ebony
Ebony!! Fucker thats my wife!!
#3 pencils and quadrille pads.
Anyone been lynched by penguins at LinuxWorld?
And then it will turn out that they were accidentally released under the BSD licence, they'll get sued for acting wrongly!
-Mark
... and you guys would never post anything without checking the facts or past posts first.
You could have read the whole paragraph instead of getting into a high dudgeon over what you perceived as a slight toward people who make too much or too little money. I don't choose my friends by their income levels.
I'm just tired of the idjit "You must be getting paid off by Microsoft!!!" accusations we get every time we so much as mention that company's name. It has been especially fierce lately because of their presence at LinuxWorld and the fact that we (gasp!) have dared to write about it.
My point (which you apparently didn't notice as it flew over your head) was not to play holy over income or lack thereof, but to slam in the idea that no, we are not only not paid by Microsoft to write about them, but that we don't have enough financial need to be susceptible to bribery if they offered, which they haven't.
Not that I expect you to believe any of this, since this is exactly what you'd expect a paid Microsoft flog to say, isn't it?
Whoops! Gotta go! I had more to say, but Chairman Bill is paging me. Maybe he wants to pay me $20,000 to write an article about how Microsoft's SQL server is so much more secure than PostGres.
(The preceding paragraph is a JOKE. I say this in case any Slashdot readers forgot to wear their aluminum foil deflector beanies today and have had their senses of humor deactivated by CIA mind control rays.)
- Robin
And when they did was it a case of "Look there is a free tux coffee mug on the floor", followed by the sound of wood on the back of a skull.