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Review Of LinuxWorld 2004
jamienk writes "I went to the LinuxWorld convention at the Javits Center in NYC again this year. This is where the post-post-industrial corporate complex flexes for us consumers and infrastructure staff to see. And the smell of Corps was thick in the air. So was the nerdy, curious, driven, hacker odor. Guess which vibe won?"
I know all these journalism sites have to write stories about the supposedly big announcements and "new" technologies that come out at linux world, but to be honest there's exactly one reason I go year after year: Hanging out with the people there. It forges relationships that can be carried on well past the end of the convention. I'm glad all that desktop stuff was demoed, and I know it's important for the future of linux, but the best thing by far was making connections with like-minded geeks.
Anti-slash: In sacred jihad against slashdot
from article:
They look like Nerds, but somehow lack the fear, the self-consciousness, and the "loser" qualities so often attributed to their kind.
I'm not sure if that's a compliment, or not!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
A guy in the FSF booth was saying ->What does Linux World have in common with a computer chip? -- each year it gets smaller!
seems to include "middleware" "scalability" and other old, nebulous buzzwords.
When did scalability become a buzzword?
The author of this comes off as an elitist jackass.
Am I the only one who read that as corpses at first? :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
I can't afford to fly to a Linux Convention, i think they should do a live feed over the net so i can see all the nerds, and venders trying to sell to them.
I walked out with a RH Enterprise 3.0 WS distro (thanks, RedHat), a SuSE SLES 8 developer edition, a SuSE 8 full distro (thanks SuSE), plus Fedora CDs for cow-orkers, 7 t shirts and a blanket. The Oracle / Linux installfest on wednesday night was fun: free food, free beer and free (proprietary and free) software (this I already pay for as an oracle customer, but it was still a nice gesture).
Too bad that 10g db wasn't ready for prime time.
I think I'll make the trip up to Boston next year.
the Pogo Linux servers looked pretty sweet.
I missed the BSD babes of previous years.
Pd
It isn't called Apbache just as it isn't called WinAMP .
I'm sure they would have loved the chance to pick a up lot of potential customers for their code licencing initiative. After all, surely everyone there was using their code.
Why dont people just admit it to themselve, stop calling them conventions, and call them "Malls that only last a few days."
I went to LinuxWorld on Thursday and it was my first time... some thoughts.
.org pavillion rocked. By far the most knowledgeable and friendly people in the place. Spoke to some of the good people at geekcorps, FSF and gentoo. One thing I will never understand... why were the people at LILUG playing that stupid dancing game? They looked like a bunch of fools.
Good to see the large companies trying to get a piece of the linux pie.sigh Buzzwords were flying all over the place. Fed up, I started asking exhibitors at large companies for "scalable enterprise solutions". Most had answers! lol...
The
We sat in on a keynote Thursday afternoon, "The Impact of Open Standards on the Technology Industry". Absolutely useless. I was quiet amused at the people feverishly taking notes on very general topics.
Good experience, learned alot and will probably attend next year.
100% Insightful
"Novel: SUSE is presented as completely separate from Novel, they're not even co-branded (yet?)."
the SuSE standard edition CD set was a co-branded distro, including both Novell and SuSE software.
If you install off of the UnitedLinux CD, its UnitedLinux. If you install off of the SuSE 1 CD, its Suse.
UnitedLinux is dead, thanks to Darl.
Maybe it will be revived after SCO (CalderaSCO) is dead.
Having left the show with such a distro, I can fully state (evidence in hand) that his point is wrong.
Pd
The new GTKQTlib thing (where you can make GNOME applications use KDE dialog boxes, and save/print/open controls) can now be set to automatically make GNOME apps use KDE dialogs with no extra GNOME code. This should make it easy for distros to make GNOME apps integrate with KDE.
This is worrying. Qt is a full-on GPL viral product. How does automatically linking it with the more liberal GNOME licensing work. TrollTech and KDE are up shit creek with licensing... GNOME allows you to use whatever license you like for apps, unlike Qt/KDE which requires a very expensive Qt license for that priveledg. Consequently TrollTech is getting slaughtered in the desktop market. This bit of underhandedness seems to be an attempt to muddy the license waters, and confuse the issue.
The KDE people really impressed me. At one point one of them wanted to show me how you can write simple javascripts to create full KDE apps or dock applets. He didn't have it installed though, so he decided to download it from the net; there was a compatibility problem with the binary, so he pulled the code from CVS; he didn't want to wait for a long compile, so he decided to use the other processors on the LAN, but to do that he needed icecream; he pulled that from CVS... All this was done at a fast and furious pace, he had 10 or 12 shells running at the same time, was bouncing between them; other developers stuck their heads in: "which shell is patching...?" Development in action. It was cool.
Just when I was ready to try linux again, I read this paragraph and remembered why I got rid of it last time.
...and becoming another corporate niche.
This sounds about right. There's money in it, so money-making corporations will treat it like any other revenue producer.
Remember, the real longevity / profit in this market is assured by companies differentiating their offerings, which leads to locking in customers to products / services that competitors don't offer (can you say proprietary?).
The profiles of the "enthusiasts" are kind of amusing. Those folk will eventually find themselves pushed off to the side with a, "Hey, thanks for making us a market. We'll tell you how often to pony up the next installment for Linux-related products / services." Just like Apple enthusiasts.
He appears to be bashing Microsoft because UNIX Services for Windows is faster than Cygwin. Pretty lame.
That corps are necessary for widespread adoption of linux. Sure the people they send too these shows are worthless, but important stuff does cope from corps as well as individuals. So don't gete too down on the corps since we wouldn't have come this far without them.
This guy's conclusion seems to be that LinuxWorld was overrun by corporations (read: evil) but that secretly the geeks were powering everything and they, in the long run, would "win out." Um -- huh?
I mean, that might be a nice way to think about things, but how really is the open source world any different than any other scientific endeavor? You've got gigantic automobile manufacturers, aerospace companies, drug companies ... Boeing, Ford, Glaxo, Archer Daniels-Midland, whatever. Yes, these are "evil" corporations doing "evil" things, but a large proportion of what constitutes the products they sell came out of academic research. Weird guys with beards, in laboratories, doing things for the sake of "intellectual curiosity." People squirting things into petri dishes, people pointing lasers at things to see what happens. And then the corporations buy it all up and make money off of it.
Does this surprise anyone?
- Researchers research.
- Tinkerers tinker.
- Businesses make money.
Aren't these pretty much the dictionary definitions, and hasn't that always been the case?Sorry, but it just kills me when Linux geeks seem to think they're creating some kind of cultural/scientific revolution that somehow dwarfs past endeavors like, oh, the Saturn 5 rocket. And that, because of their personal ethics, they're going to somehow escape The Way the World Is, unlike Einstein, or Stephen Hawking, or John Nash, or whomever.
Nice world you must live in, buddy, but I'm not buying it.
Breakfast served all day!
and it was but a mere shell of what it used to be.. at least I got to support the FSF by buying a nice-looking "Free Software/Free Society" t-shirt. Other than that, got the google pen and a good look at small displays that would be perfect for replacing my in-dash GPS display screen.. looking for one with multiple inputs. Oh, and I finally got a replacement Linux license plate. The one on my car now has "Compaq" in huge red letters on it, which isn't too cool as an IBM consultant. :) The new one has "OpenGroup" up there now.
Oh, and my vote for the most mis-guided individuals who have no idea how to make the conversion to Linux-for-business: the VOIP people who ran their setup on a chipped X-Box. Are you kidding me, people??? You want a business to buy your product, and you power your display with a video game console? The coolness factor drops way the hell off when you're trying to sell VOIP solutions. Build a damn PC. Jeez.
Anyone remember the IBM party in 2001? They rented out the whole upstairs, had an open bar, great music, a real BattleBots cage, and, well, an ice sculptor. But he cut out a damn fine Tux, too. THAT'S what I think of when I think about the days before the bust.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Is that true? I've always wondered about real-life trolling. Obviously it's not too hard to place a folded-up Goatse printout in someone's hand, but there must be other ways to have fun...
Nice one, FTM.
I'm really looking foward to this year's HOPE conference. It seems everythings on the uprise in the computer sector to me. 2600 alaways throws a good party hope it happens again
At Linuxworld it seemed to me that there were alot more booths
showing ACCOUNTING packages
(and linux moves into the "mainstream" - whatever the hell that means) than in the past.
(I wonder how many accountants read slashdot??)
Is there an inverse relationship between TECH-COOL and Accounting?
Why did he become an accountant?
Because he didn't have the personality to be an actuary!
I was there on Thursday, dropped by the M$ booth hoping to see some ex-Softway employees. M$ was giving out a reasonably cool little fm radio thing. I avoid their software like the plague, but have to admit that a long time ago i got a decent lunch bag from them at a trade show (the only M$ product i've ever had that was worth anything). So I grabbed the radio. Unfortunately like most things Microsoft, when i got home i found out that it was junk, missing the little door that holds the batteries in. I guess they don't do QA on anything.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
That, and hooking up with all the hot Linux groupies? Um, no.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
It's amazing that in the USA, the land of equal opportunity and "freedom" that a bunch of people having fun can get such a comment for doing nothing else but having some innocent fun.
I think that the definition of freedom includes the freedom to make fun of people making a fool of themselves, as well as the freedom to make a fool of one's self. Not to mention doing both at once with some comments.
I find it amazing that whatever culture you come from doesn't allow you to speak your mind [when you will look foolish for it] about others looking foolish.
Was there Wed. with Friends. Beyond the mandatory trip to The Gingerman for free-as-in *expensed to the company* beers, and the requisite downtown pub crawl, We had a good time at Javitts. The Novell "Red Carpet" demos were intriguing. The Red Hat girls made us feel right at home. Even the Sun and SGI folks had some decent products. i mean c'mon little penguins, you already knew almost everything about almost everything you were going to see there anyway. All this BS about parties and swag.... I remember a time when you guys actually wanted a "corporate presence" at this gig... S'matter? Don't like the IBM commercials????
I gave up after reading
"I was at the LinuxWorld convention two years ago at the Javits Center in NYC. This one was bigger: more big companies, a bigger space, more people."
So which had more attendees? 2004 or 2002?
it was my first linuxworld. im a reasonably new user of linux (started a few months ago.)
:)
now, i only went on the last day (boy was it freezing here.)
i didnt know what to expect, i guess - but i sure expected a lot less corporate "types". most of the big names were out with their shiny new servers, and enterprise software (both not interesting to me.)
the MS booth was as big as Redhat - and I noticed that everytime they clicked on anything a window with something on SCO would come up. they were promoting MS services for unix by saying it sits closer to the kernel, hence faster - unlike cygwin which being an app would have to go a few layers down. well, d-oh!! i wont even bother saying anything bout closed source here and how anyone could do what they did if we had the kernel cos well, they didnt seem like they were having a good time either.
gentoo had a nice lot (maybe the goth chick had some to do with that...), and so did suse, sun and amd.
i came back with lots of brochures and no freebies - maybe thats why i was disappointed.
I totaly agree. For slashdoters the .org was the place to be.
I noticed that the big corporations like to do the media presentation with some hired gun enthusiasticaly pronounsing the greatness of their products or services. I wondered who are these people who seat though all those boring presentations?
Gentoo had a bunch of gentoo users the "chearleaders" intermixed with the developers. It made the project representation look a bit amaturish although the developers where on hand to answer any techincal questions.
OpenACS and Mambo was presenting their content managment software. The local NYC linux user community was there, nyphp, lispnyc, and nylung and others were all there.
The AMD people were surprisingly clueless. I asked a few of them which socket a particular opteron system on display was using (Looked like it was 939), but most of them started mumbling "socket? what do you mean?", or worse. Some of the systems they had up were pretty cool though, like the dual opteron rackmounts with watercooling. .ORG section we had the usual debian, BSD and Linuxboot people, fun to talk with as always. Didn't get a conversation going with the Gentoo or KDE guys, but the projects were still pretty interesting. EFF wasn't here this year, unfortunately, meant to buy some stickers.
The sun booth was another disappointment in terms of the staff. I wanted to see how reponsive the Sun Rays were, so I walked up to one of their public terminals and started looking around, starting a couple applications, etc. The nearby sales drone stood and glared at me, as if I was going to steal the bloody thing, the entire time (after asking "May I help you?" in that "What the fuck are you doing here, kid, get lost!" tone). I just walked away.
Other corporate booths were similar; either the staff didn't know that much beyond their script, or they didn't want to talk to me, by the benefit of me being a high school student (i.e. a PFY). It's appropriate, I suppose, since I'm not going to be making any million-dollar purchases anytime soon, but still not cool. The IBM booth was a notable exception; one guy showed me GeoProbe, a very neat visualization system. The program had two sets of seismological data loaded from an oil field in England (several square kilometers), and it could be manipulated in real time in various ways. It was running under RHEL 3.0 on a prototype opteron with only 4GB of ram; pretty impressive, considering the complexity of the model. In the mainframe section, two engineers showed me the new zSeries servers, and explained how the hardware worked. Really cool guys (both the mainframe and GeoProbe people), knew their stuff and were really friendly. Otherwise, Oracle's grid seemed promising, but I wasn't able to get too many technical details.
In the
O'Reilly had a pretty good deal on books, 25% off and a free shirt (the shirts only lasted through the first half of the day). Honeynet gave a pretty interesting presentation in the back of the O'Reilly booth.
There was also a robot rolling around the show floor, Sprocket (not sure of the spelling, it might have been different). It demonstrated pretty impressive speech recognition capabilities, talked to the presenters, made crude jokes and movie references. It seemed pretty capable of sustaining normal conversation and was able to recognize people based on their clothing (although it misinterpreted blue lettering on my t-shirt as a blue jacket). Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to it for more than a couple of minutes.
I found it was great to talk to some Geograpic Information Systems firms there (since I am an Environmental Engineer). I was disapointed with some of the companies efforts to push me along on Friday Afternoon because they thought I was just a student looking foor a free stuffed TUX. I will be in the market for a cluster (once I have the money) so they just lost a sale.
Since I am in the process of evangelizing the advantages of non-M$ Computing the contacts I made this past week will be helpful.
I found it interesting to see Sun's efforts. I think their Java Desktop System was an interesting take on an old friend. Their new environment could be the best GUI around if they are able to optimize it.
One thing:
I love working on an OSS, but I think future Linux Worlds should try to make a better effort to attract end-users. I understand some companies might not want to be on the exibition floor if they are not going to increase sales, but the second you find out I am an end-user (not a developer/IT Manager/Purchase Order Manager) you should not give me polite push to the .org pavilion. I spent a lot of time updating my skills, and I plan to spend more time attempting to evangelizeing to people that migt attent future LWs (even in Boston) who might be in a position to make a large scale purchase.
Look a how that other Bi-Annual IDG Conferences value end-users.
a SuSE 8 full distro (thanks SuSE)
Seems a lot of people think highly of SuSE.
I'd like to try their distro sometime. A shame they refuse (or can't due to licensing conflicts) to make their goods more readily available via ISO disc images.
timothy, man, come on! /. editors need to have basic wildcard skills:
:-)
2* already means "any year starting with 2"; for single-digit substitution use ?:
2??? is the year of desktop linux.
man bash | grep -A32 "Any character"
And yes, desktop GNU/Linux is just around the corner
"As usual, the ".org Pavilion" was where everything interesting and fun was. Crowds of friendly, smart, kind-hearted people mulling around the back-corner, kindly paid for by corporate interests, a small bone thrown our way."
Actually, the whole thing was paid for by the "corporate interests". It cost big bucks to rent the space for those big booths. You should say "Thank you, corporate interests."
It seems odd that MS would hand out CD's of UNIX Services for Windows at a Linux show. Not that long ago MS was saying how the GPL is a "cancer" and yet they include GPL'ed software in their UNIX Services for Windows. I guess the GPL is OK if it helps the bottom line of MS and a "cancer" if it is any competition to them?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I'm proud to have been one of those "punks", but I am sure he was referring to esammer and his wife. It was great meeting everyone who came by the booth and we all had a fun time. -- wolf31o2
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
This is the evolution. Linux will create corporate millionaires and billionaires, and like Microsoft, someday will be the mega dominate OS. The next thing will be driven by the hackers and 'punks' all over again. I selected Linux because the money my consulting company saves in not paying MS licenses, (ie more profit for us and not Microsoft) helps go toward my second home purchase. This software is wonderful.
Workstations aside SGI had the coolest baddest stuff there! Nice description of the best in show!
Anyone who went: were any of the newer Exchange alternatives shown? I know some of the groupware systems, but I'm looking for one that is outlook compatable and end user indistiguisable from Exchange. Prefereably for a low cost :-)
It seems as if the who Corp. world has taken over the Convention and only given a little bit of space for the true geeks. Not like the days when people who had jobs would take a day off to bring everything there and show off their stuff. I miss those kind of conventions, more like a non-gaming LAN party these days. Any how I think it is good to go to these big shows and see what commercial "stuff" is around, but remember-that's not all Linux is about.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Was Sco there?
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
In fact, the jargon term for an organisation large enough to actually need middleware is - "enterprise". They're often not referred to as companies because (i) they may not be commercial organisations and (ii) they're often large enough to include several organisations that are large companies in their own right.
So, perhaps the words "enterprise" and "middleware" seemed to the reviewer like vague corporate fluff words simply becuase they don't correspond to things in his/her world-view. However, they're real concepts and useful words.
No half-naked nerd pictures like they got from Autralian convention? *sigh*
Mod parent troll.
Well, except that 2??? is at once more optimistic and realistic than 2*. 'Cause it's definitely not going to happen in year 2, or year 248, and I certainly hope it's not going to happen in 20482...
desktop GNU/Linux is just around the corner :-)
Oh, yeah? How close?
200[45]
200[5-9]
201[0-9]
:)
Does anyone know the name of a small tech company thats been prospering as a result of being a supplier to RedHat? I read about this company several months ago and failed to record their identity. Thanx for any help.