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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.
No presence from BSD??? Well no shit, guess what, BSD isn't another linux distro, they are in fact their own operating systems, that they only thing they have in common with linux is some of the same software runs on both systems. BSD does not "sellout" and doesn't have a buncha weirdo zealots running around claiming it is going to replace windows.
As far as expo's go, they're a good thing, but they only help to get the word out, not much more. Most everything covered at the expo was already known facts that were resaid to the public.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I'm looking forward to the animated cursors myself, Jimmac has made some really nice ones
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?
What the hell? I didn't say anything about Microsoft. Look, you started with (reasonably) trying to state that you aren't paid by Microsoft. OK, fine, point accepted. But then you went off on this tangent about somehow that making a low enough amount of money somehow shields you from taking money from Microsoft (seems like the opposite would be true to me, but moving on...). My point is that the amount of money you make has nothing to do with your ethics, and bringing that into the discussion to prove something proves nothing. Ethics is the question, not income.
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.
Everyone who matters with an ounce of sense knows that it's absurd that you would be getting paid by Microsoft. They are saying that basically to troll. In any case, ethics can only be proved by past actions, so personally I wouldn't waste time trying to "prove" it.
Anyway, I accept that perhaps I misinterpreted what you wrote, but I think my point is valid.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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)
OK.
Linux, in its current form, is MS's best way to solve its two biggest problems.
Firstly, if a significant share of the "wintel" market goes to Linux, MS will no longer be a monopoly--and can go back to doing whatever cuthroat things it wants to for another twenty years, without the government having cause to intervene and tell it to stop being evil.
Secondly, the presence of a free Linux gives it an escape vector to channel software pirates to. If MS _really_ wanted to wipe Linux from the world, they could simply cut the prices on their OS distributions for home users to $25 a pop, which would effectively kill of piracy of windows.
The really nice bit is that Linux / OpenOffice / KOffice provide MS with all of the beneifts of serious competition without any of the real competition. (When was the last time that you saw a Linux flyer in the mail?) There are all sorts of innovative ideas that Linux software comes up with, and MS can steal and benefit from them as much as they benefit from MS.
In short: MS benefits from Linux as much as Intel benefits from AMD, and wiping it out is far, far more trouble than it's worth. MS just wants to marginalize Linux so it can maximize its profit margin, and let Linux & Apple fill in the rest.
Plus, MS knows that Linux is better in some situations, and supports it. Heck, my webpage runs on Frontpage under Linux!