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LinuxWorld Exhibitors' Responses to Slashdot Questions
by Oculus Habent
For Hardware Vendors:
What basic strategies are you employing to better penetrate the server/appliance market with Linux systems?
I chose to ask Lou Martelli, the PR guy for InfiniCon Systems this one first. He said, "High-performance, low-cost clusters on commodity servers, specifically that work with InfiniBand." Okay, fine. He then launched into a spiel about InfiniCon products that had words like "value" and "interoperability" in it but didn't answer my question. I asked again, and got another sales pitch. Okay. Fine. This company's strategy to better penetrate the appliance/server market with Linux is to use a lot of marketing buzzwords.
Tim Lee, president of Pogo Linux, did better. He pointed to the products on display in his company's booth, and they looked so good I wanted to take them all home with me on the spot. The company's "Why Choose Pogo Linux?" Web page, which Tim pointed me to, showed more of their strategy: Strong Linux commitment.
Tim also said, "We're right across the street from Microsoft. We sell a lot of stuff to Microsoft people. There's a lot of Linux running at Microsoft. A lot of Microsoft developers prefer to work with Linux."
Heh. If Tim and his crew are making money selling Linux systems to Microsoft, well and good. You start getting the geeks in a company interested in Linux, and as those geeks get promoted up the management ladder, more often than not Linux starts to infiltrate the company's server rooms. This often takes place without top management's knowledge. We'll want to keep in touch with Tim, and see how big the "server/appliance market" for Linux systems gets inside Microsoft.
Dear Redhat Software (Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward
What is your response to the vulterant claims that your Gnome/KDE setup is breaking QT apps and causing havoc for developers who make use of QT?
Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan said any KDE breakage was unintentional; that the big problem is that Red Hat's developers are almost all Gnome people, and Bero (Bernhard Rosenkraenzer), their only real KDE person, left the company last year.
(Bero has since started his own distribution, Ark Linux.)
Anyway, Hogan says, the breakage is only in Red Hat 8.0's default hybrid Gnome/KDE Bluecurve desktop, but "if you just run KDE, not Bluecurve, there are no problems."
And for the followup questioner who wanted to know what "vulterant" meant, it doesn't show up as a word at dictionary.com and a Google search with "vulterant" as a keyword returned zero results.
To Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
by gmuslera
Considering that this is called "LinuxWorld", what product will you release next for Linux?
See the answer to the next question. Might as well handle these two together...
To Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
by Oculus Habent
Do you plan on producing Open Source components to any of your products? This primarily refers to server components, such as HTTP, DNS, IMAP, etc. which could function externally to the base programs (Exchange, ISA, etc.) and offer simpler and more granular control over active services.
I approached a person in the Microsoft booth whose badge identified him as "John Kotas" and asked him what products Microsoft planned to introduce for Linux. "I don't know," he said. I turned to one of Kotas's coworkers, whose badge was not visible, and asked the same question and also the one about producing open source components for Microsoft server products. Again, "I don't know."
I tried again, both questions, with a Microsoft person whose badge identified him as Jeff Albertson. He said, "As far as I know Microsoft has no plans for Linux products, but I'm not a media spokesperson, hold on, I'll get you one."
I turned around, and there was smiling, affable Mark Martin, an account executive with Microsoft's PR firm, Waggener Edstrom, who said, "I can work on getting an official spokesperson for you," when I asked him about Microsoft's Linux product plans.
In response to the other question, he said, "Microsoft has made its bet on Windows, and at the present time continues to stay the course. We hear from customers that they are getting great value from the Windows platform.
"We realize it's a heterogeneous world, and that's one of the reasons we're at LinuxWorld, talking about Unix services, which are also applicable for Linux."
Then we talked about football. Mark thought the Raiders were going to win the Super Bowl. I figured the Bucs would take it. He offered to help me set up any interviews I needed with Microsoft people. I will take him up on this offer. (In the past, Waggener Edstrom and Microsoft have been very poor about returning calls and emails from Slashdot and NewsForge people. We will see how well this promise is kept. We haven't interviewed a Microsoft exec for a long time.)
What is the best giveaway item? (Score:5, Interesting)
by burgburgburg
In your experience as a convention exhibitor, what is the most effective giveaway item you've ever used to draw people to your booth long enough to make a pitch? What will people wait in line for, sit through demos for, fill out long questionaires for, let you swipe their card for, jostle others to get?
Conversely, what was the lamest giveaway item you were ever saddled with? Where you had to throw it at passersby, and even then they recoiled in dismay?
None of the exhibitors I talked to wanted to go on record with this one. A Red Hat person said (on condition of anonymity), "Demo CDs are always the best." This was echoed by other software vendors: A Linux crowd likes demo software more than anything else.
In the press room, long-time tech journalist -- and now owner of food site eGullet.com -- Jason Perlow said his favorite was a miniature Rubik's Cube on a key chain from Intel. He also liked an HP giveaway: "It's a stuffed, squeezable penguin that you only get if you sit through a presentation first. It's very nice to hold. It could double as a marital aid, too."
Ummm... okay, Jason.
Other journalists chimed in. A Favorite was the foam penguin marionettes several had spotted around the show, but no one remembered who was giving them out. The journo crowd also liked the Red Hat (red) baseball caps, which were being given out at set times, and you had to line up to get. The SuSE lizards were also prized.
On the down side, t-shirts were considered passe, at least by the tech journalists at LinuxWorld, most of whom go to enough trade shows that after a few years they have a lifetime supply of corporate t-shirts and don't need any more.
One well-known reporter said, "I've seen so many giveaways over the years that the only way to get my attention now would be to give me a server. No, make that a cluster."
To icculus.org (Score:5, Interesting)
by alkini
To icculus.org (booth #9): What is it like to be a small organization at a big convention with people like HP, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc? Do people give you any credit for what you are doing?
The obvious answer: Icculus was the darling of LinuxWorld. Their booth drew more traffic per square foot than any other display.
A deeper answer, by email over the weekend from Icculus dude Ryan Gordon:
As to being a little organization:To the KDE team (Score:5, Funny)There were really two types of people coming by the booth. One would say, "Wow, you can do this on Linux?!" and the other would say, "How much are you selling this for?"
This tells me, contrary to popular belief, that people don't always expect handouts when looking at open source software. However, they don't see something that impresses them as often as they should, and it's gotten to the point where a product with any amount of polish is assumed to be commercial...and anything free is buggy, ugly, slow, something. I remember feeling a sense of awe the first time I loaded Enlightenment many years ago. Maybe people were feeling that same awe while watching a round of PyDDR: the sense that the technology that's been staring you in the face all this time can be much, much cooler than you ever dreamed. You can't get that feeling of awe from a presentation on how Company X's servers are 20% more scalable than their competitors.
Video games are sexy. People need to be aware that GNU/Linux is more than just something to drive your webservers.
Oh, and representatives from all the "Big Companies" stopped by at various points in the show to play the video games. Including Microsoft. I'm not threatened at all. :)
As for credit:
A lot of people (myself included) feel that video games are a major factor in getting GNU/Linux to the masses. I can't count the number of people that have said, "Thanks for porting [GAME X]! It was the only reason I kept a Windows partition around!" I heard this a million times at the show from people that don't even consciously consider themselves gamers. I also had a lot of students ask me how to get into the video game industry. We're the answer there, too. Just look at our ports of Quake 2, Freespace 2, Alien vs. Predator, etc. Commercial games that have been open-sourced are a great way to see how the pros did it, and give you a means to tinker with the code (experience, experience, experience). The amateur games we host (Black Shades, Bitstream, OES, etc) are also an attempt to nurture future game developers that are Unix-friendly. The person writing Battle Pong today might be writing Unreal 3 tomorrow.
A lot of people see icculus.org as a kind of Loki reborn. I don't know about that, but overall, people seem to be happy with what we're doing, both as a project hosting site and as game developers.
by secondsun
Which will come first, Duke Nukem Forever or KDE 3.1?
I didn't manage to hook up with KDE. Sorry. I went to where their booth was supposed to be, but didn't spot them. Another journo said they weren't around.
Perhaps a KDE developer reading this can fill us in.
To Macrovision Corp. (Score:5, Interesting)
by josh crawley
To Macrovision Corp. (booth R10)
As I understand, your main stakes are in the encoding of ntsc and pal video signals as to make them uncopyable in receiving hardware (correct me if I'm incorrect).
As that stated, why are you involved with Linux? Are you contributing to the video section (V4L) of the Linux kernel or making user-land utilities? In general, what are your open business plans with Linux?
Nancy Robbins of Macrovision said, "We're not with the video group." She offered to put me in touch with the people at the company who are. (Perhaps we'll talk with them another time.)
The Macrovision people at LinuxWorld were from their Enterprise Software Division (formally Globetrotter Software). They were there to push Electronic License Management and Software Asset Management products.
Ms. Robbins described this as "electronic licensing for software" and said their new Java-enabled version worked with Linux. She explained the value of their "license management system" and talked of how one of its great "value-adds" was its ability to handle "multiple pricing models."
Apparently Macrovision believes there is now enough commercial software being written for Linux -- by companies that want to use encrpyted "unlock" keys to prevent unauthorized used of their precious intellectual property (sigh) -- to make it worth their while to be at LinuxWorld.
As a follow-up question, I asked how long they thought it would be until their licensing scheme was cracked. Neither Ms. Robbins nor her coworker, Pam Watkinson, had an answer for that one.
To Linux Software Vendors (Score:5, Interesting)
by MyGirlFriendsBroken
Is Mac OS X a big enough competitor (for want of a better word) to the Linux server/desktop market to warrant porting products over to either OS X or to Darwin?
This is with focus on the server side.
I asked Pete Goodall of Ximian this one. He said, "Not that it's not viable, it's just a lot of work. We have no plans [to port to OS X] at this time."
One of the software engineers at Cylant (whose CylantSecure 2.0 was named Best Security Solution at LinuxWorld) said, when asked about a Mac OS X or Darwin port, "That's not for us, I don't think. No." He ruminated for a second, then added, "That's because there aren't enough Mac servers to make it worthwhile."
'We wont develop because there isnt enough of a target userbase' - If good applications are developed that outweigh the rivals then surely a userbase creates itself? Or am I just naive in thinking that eventually Apple servers could stand their own against MS and *NIX servers
So, why did MS get that best of show award? Sure, they have Services For Unix, but if it doesn't run on Linux, why should they get any sort of press at LinuxWorld? Am I missing something?
What would you say was the overall mood at this year's conference? How was it different from years past (I don't know because I've never attended one)?
Thanks,
- AV
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Which will come first, Duke Nukem Forever or KDE 3.1?
i don't know about duke nukem, but 3.1 is here today. http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html. check the mirrors.
I'm gonna become a tech journalist. That way I can walk around wearing my Red Hat cap, Microsoft T-shirt, Linux press badge, carrying a bag full of demo CDs. I can also have in my duffel a Rubik's Cube keychain and, to top it all off, a squeezy penguin.
Worth the price of admission?
Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan said any KDE breakage was unintentional
the big problem is that Red Hat's developers are almost all Gnome people
the breakage is only in Red Hat 8.0's default hybrid Gnome/KDE Bluecurve desktop
So RedHat's default setup broke one of the two big Linux desktops and there's nothing to complain about because they only did it out of incompetence and not on purpose? Well, that's like totally vulterant.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Does their implementation of the open kerberos standard now work with Linux machines?
Who the hell do they think they're fooling?!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps the word the questioner was looking for was:
vulterine
Main Entry: vulturine
1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of vultures
2 : RAPACIOUS, PREDATORY
"Nancy Robbins of Macromedia said..."
Where was she from, Macromedia or Macrovision? The question was directed at Macrovision.
Is it me, or was anyone else really confused by the response by the Microsoft guy? They're there to "talk about Unix services"? Well, it makes more sense in terms of their Services for Unix. Incidentally, reading the page for SFU, it's good to see real Unixy stuff in Windows. (No, I don't think it will "take away" market from existing Unix products. (Windows + Korn shell) != FreeBSD. I admit to being a little leary about the prospect, but I don't see it happening.)
Anyone have any experience with this Services For Unix thing? I don't have access to Windows machines to run the trials on.
I'm still confused as to why they're at LWCE, when the webpage bills it as "the #1 place for companies that sell, market or promote Linux based products, services, applications and solutions," and they claim to have no plans whatsoever to sell, market, or promote Linux-based anything. I guess that leaves reasons for coming sowhere around building mindshare in the Linux world :3 Although the fact that they seem to be
using GPLed utilities in their SFU is very
interesting. (And perhaps their foot in the door.)
Disclaimer: this is not a Microsoft flame. I am not an anti-Microsoft junkie. Do please refrain from flaming if you want to reply.
How do you think that companies like nVidia design and test their chips? Answer: by running expensive electronic design automation tools and simulators, mainly on big server farms running Linux or Solaris. Almost all of these tools, which cost thousands to tens of thousands per seat, use a flexlm-based license manager. With this kind of setup, as many machines as you like can have the tool installed, but the tool checks out a license from the networked license server in order to operate.
Your question about how long it would take people to crack such schemes isn't interesting: it is not extremely difficult for a good assembly language programmer to crack it, by, for instance, patching the binary executable with a hex editor. However, in practice this does not matter, as the price of being caught might well be expulsion from the chip design business: you can't design chips without tools, you need upgrades to the tools on a regulat basis thanks to Moore's Law, so you can't piss off your suppliers. In that sense, your license manager is just a technique to monitor your compliance with your contract (e.g. that you have 250 Verilog simulator licenses).
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Tim also said, "We're right across the street from Microsoft. We sell a lot of stuff to Microsoft people. There's a lot of Linux running at Microsoft. A lot of Microsoft developers prefer to work with Linux."
Not to take away from anything that was said but they are not across from the main Microsoft campus, but rather between the smaller satellite and the main campus. This gives them less MS visibility though, than being across the street.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Egads! Vocabulary creationism rivaling Dubya! How misinappropriate!
"The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
No, I didn't create the word; so I'm just taking an uninformed guess. "Vulterant" (vulturent) might be a created term meaning "in the style of a vulture or buzzard"? Since a "vulture" can be defined as "a person of a rapacious, predatory, or profiteering nature." and this is of what Redhat was accused with their mucking about with KDE; the derivation reads logically to me.
Then again, perhaps "buzzardly" was already taken or wasn't politically correct enough.
Qvacks.
What is your response to the vulterant claims that your Gnome/KDE setup is breaking QT apps and causing havoc for developers who make use of QT?
(...)
Anyway, Hogan says, the breakage is only in Red Hat 8.0's default hybrid Gnome/KDE Bluecurve desktop, but "if you just run KDE, not Bluecurve, there are no problems."
Eep! If the default settings are broken, and 80% of users use the default settings, then there is no 'only' about it.
"Sure, the tires will burst of you drive faster then 50mph, but that only happens when you use the default tires that come with the truck."
'only' is a word when you talk about a minority of people, as in, "it only breaks for KDE users who use Sawfish as their window manager".
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The person writing Battle Pong today might be writing Unreal 3 tomorrow.
When do I start???!!?
Because the lack of "MS Office for Solaris/AIX/SCO" has been the thing that's been holding them back. If they'd only developed "Office for *nix," they might have become a player someday.
Microsoft is smart not to be releasing Office for Linux. In many ways, it's the only application (Suite of applications) that makes them relevant in the business world. It's what keeps "asses in the seats" as far as keeping their Operating Systems in such wide deployment.
SmallCompany Inc. doesn't care what games have been developed for Linux. They need their people do be able to utilize Word, Excel, and Outlook. They can't afford translation errors in the spreadsheets... They can't afford for the wrong bullet type to appear in their Memos... They need to run Office, and if they need to run Office, then they need to be running Windows!
(Mac people... Don't get all bent out of shape... We know that Office has been ported to MacOS and OSX.)
Why should Microsoft release a product that would only serve to marginalize their hold on the Desktop OS? It indirectly adds another $200 to the cost of the Office Suite. That's free money to them, and they take it straight to the bank.
As for this:
That's a laugher. Anybody remember Corel? Loki? If history is any indicator, I think the case can be made that anyone choosing to produce Linux software (for the desktop) will perish.
[I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I cannot indulge your delusions of grandeur.]
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Disclaimer: I am the CTO Cylant.
:) Since early 2000 various different companies and goverenmental organizations have evaluated and experimented with CylantSecure, so far we've consistently gotten positive feedback.
We've been running CylantSecure on our external systems for the past couple of years. We've been eating our own dog food, so to speak. All I can say is, "mmm, tasty!"
To make evaluating CylantSecure easier, it has a built in 30 day fully-featured evaluation period.
scottwimer
-- Intrusion prevention for Linux servers. www.cylant.com
Really, I think the posting on /. should wait untill it is announced.
The release-schedule says that it is going to be uploaded a bit before the announcement.
Me, I'm downloading! ;-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Now it does return at least one result. Damm, google is FAST.
I once had a chance encounter with a woman who turned out to be an employee of flexlm. I asked her if it had ever been cracked and she said "oh yes, several times." She said that the company always takes legal action and has successfully silenced all cracks. Her statement is undoubtedly true since flexlm is and has always been a crappy product, largely unchanged for years, to think that they stumbled upon the perfect copy protection scheme is ridiculous.
Tim also said, "We're right across the street from Microsoft. We sell a lot of stuff to Microsoft people. There's a lot of Linux running at Microsoft. A lot of Microsoft developers prefer to work with Linux."
When given a choice, engineers will choose the best tool rather than follow corporate dogma. This quote speaks volumes.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Why does this merit a "sigh"? They're not talking about another DRM implementation here - apparently Roblimo doesn't understand this.
Asset and License Management Software has been around for years. In case you're confused, Macrovision is NOT talking about the product activation you see in Windows XP or TurboTax. Rather, they're talking about something like KeyServer, which allows large organizations to buy one copy of Photoshop or something, and "Key" it, so that it can only be unlocked by talking to a KeyServer. This allows you specify the number of concurrent users on the network, and any other number of restrictions (which workstations can use it, etc). This is extremely cost-effective for companies - they buy, say, 5 licenses of photoshop, key it, and then make sure only 5 users can use it at once. Thus, when the BSA comes knocking on the door and says "Hey, you have 100 computers - we demand 100 licenses", they can say "sorry, we enforce concurrent use of no more than 5 copies of the app. Have a nice day." It also prevents employees from stealing a copy of Photoshop and taking it home with them (it won't work). However, this solution is only available on Windows and Mac (and, for the longest time, it was Mac only). I don't see why this is such a problem that it now runs on Linux.
What this means is that WidgetCo, which uses, say, Matlab, and has 200 workstations, can save a ton of money by only purchasing 50 licenses. The MathWorks (matlab makers) won't have a problem with this as long as they can be assured that no more than 50 copies will be running concurrently. (And no, the honor system doesn't work anymore). FLEXlm software (what Macrovision is offering) can help assure this. This setup is what many colleges or large institutions use to assure that commerical software on UNIX is abiding by the terms of their licensing agreements or package deals.
So now WidgetCo can save even more money, because instead of having to buy costly Solaris licenses to run a platform that supports licensing software, they can now use Linux, and yet another big institution will be running GNU/Linux.
I know it would be nice if everyone using Linux also used other GNU software to get their jobs done, but really, there's always going to be commerical software. We should be cheering the fact that there is one less obstacle for large organizations to adopt Linux and still maintain their licensing agreements with the big commercial software firms. In fact, FLEXlm has been around for a long time (at least since '91), but it was only for certain flavors of UNIX (read: Solaris). All that happened is that Macrovision bought out the company, and released a version that runs on Linux. Good for them.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
The question: "What basic strategies are you employing to better penetrate the server/appliance market with Linux systems?"
The Response: "He said, "High-performance, low-cost clusters on commodity servers, specifically that work with InfiniBand." Okay, fine. He then launched into a spiel about InfiniCon products that had words like "value" and "interoperability" in it but didn't answer my question. I asked again, and got another sales pitch. Okay. Fine. This company's strategy to better penetrate the appliance/server market with Linux is to use a lot of marketing buzzwords."
What was so wrong with the guy's answer? If you're not willing to accept his answers, maybe you should try asking different questions or maybe even send someone else. Your question is basically, "what strategies are you going to use to sell Linux?". His answer was, "we're going to focus on value (i.e. price) and interoperability (i.e., flexibility and technical agnosticism). What the hell was wrong with his answers?
Exactly what answer were you looking for?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Many years ago I worked on a competitor product to FlexLM for a three letter company that no longer exists. It was a vastly superior product from every aspect, except due to a management meltdown common for this company (remember, it no longer exists), the product never shipped.
It is sad but true that in most ways FlexLM is the WORST of class for these software licensing products. Yet, it continues to live on while its competition is long forgotten (anyone remember NetLS?). I believe this is because it is VERY easy to deal with from a software producer prospective. This of course is yet more proof that the end user sometimes really does have little say in what they must live with.
As for the prospects of something ever displacing FlexLM... don't bet on it. There is a very high cost of entry to this market as to be even slightly competitive the competitor product must be pervasive, available on all platforms. That costs lots of $$$s.
Which is all a long way of saying that the (minor) tragedy of our project's failure is it probably was one of the few efforts sufficiently funded to compete with FlexLM, and it failed for purely internal reasons.
And thus we all must continue to live with FlexLM many years later....
Just goes to show that some moderators don't even check on something before they click :-(
db
Cig:
ôô
---As a follow-up question, I asked how long they thought it would be until their licensing scheme was cracked. Neither Ms. Robbins nor her coworker, Pam Watkinson, had an answer for that one.
Why in the hell did you ask that question? As much as everybody dislikes Macrovision, I was TRYING to stay away from asking something like this. No company's going to know whether they have critical problems in a certain product - expesially when the third party's going to trust the run-time license (like sayyy.. Adobe).
Trust me, I hate Macrovision cause they lobbied congress to put a Macrovision chip in all DVD's, got tape players forcefully to install an AGC circuit (which enables Macrovision), all the while reducing quality on tapes afflicted with this crap. Not only that, but then they patented the decryption circuits and code so that it's illegal to even rip the shit-vision out.
Still, I TRIED to stay away from flamebait like the question you asked. Hopefully, you didnt attribute that to me...
Terrorists don't bother me. hell if they want to come kill me, let them go ahead and do so. I'll just respawn, pick up some ammo, and FRAG EM!!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
It's interesting that RHAS got best of show for clusters. It's verbatim the same code we showed at linuxworld in 2001. They just put it in a box and slapped the redhat name on it two years later and all of a sudden it's award worthy. I guess we didn't give IDG enough money.
I wrote this just in case it was of interest:a t-linuxworl d
http://icculus.org/~chunky/writing/ms-
Gary (-;