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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.
It is more of a trend with Expos to get commericalized rather than development. On the other hand, the conventions have remained relatively similar as places to develop ideas ...
So what about the ask slashdot answers, Roblimo?
We don't need mansions or yachts to feel good about ourselves. Maybe one reason we don't need money as much as some people is that we save a bunch by using Free and/or Open Source software...
On the other hand, I don't need a vow of poverty to feel good about myself. Man, overcompensating a little about your apparently humble existence? Nothing wrong with that, of course, but throwing your "less rich than thou" attitude in people's faces is just as bad as throwing financial success in people's face.
Just for the record, the amount of money you earn -- either a huge amount or a small amount -- is absolutely no direct measurement of one's character. Apparently Miller believes it is.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If a vendor is reduced to using boothbabes, it's because they have no confidence in their own product.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Morons gave MS an award. This now validates MS as company that plays nice with OpenSource and Linux. This of course is false as we all know MS is doing its best to destroy linux and every linux company. Someone there pointed out how MS is distributing GPL software with their kit. This fact means jack no matter how ironic it is. What does mean jack is that MS will with its billion dollar marketing budget will turn this award to their advantage in their quest to ruin linux.
I see the trend here lately is to bash people who bash MS. Well maybe sometimes that's called for. Let's not forget the facts though, Microsoft is literally trying to wipe linux from the face of the earth.(I'd like to see someone argue with that fact) This award will only help them in that endevor, thus I think my calling them morons is in this case justified.
BTW incase anyone notices, I posted something similar at the newsforge site but it might not show up , so I reposted here.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
As an organiser of the now-past linux.conf.au. I can say, Yes it was stupid to have them scheduled at the same time. We had our conference scheduled quite a bit of time in advance of LinuxWorld, but LinuxWorld was scheduled at the same time anyway.
It cost us getting Maddog Hall, and it cost LinuxWorld a lot of very cool people, but you can find out about them on your own.