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?"

Comments

Been there, done that

[a XOR b XOR a XOR b]

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.

Corps?

[zonix]

And the smell of Corps was thick in the air.

Am I the only one who read that as corpses at first? :-)

z

great swag though

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Wasn't SCO there?

[91degrees]

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.

First time @ LinuxWorld

[Shant3030]

I went to LinuxWorld on Thursday and it was my first time... some thoughts.

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 .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.

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.

Re:First time @ LinuxWorld

[Devil]

We were not playing Dance Dance Revolution, we were playing PyDance, a from-scratch DDR lookalike that was written by one of the guys on our mailing list; it runs off a Linux box. It's just so well done that you thought it was regular DDR.

they're not even co-branded

[Anonymous Coward]

"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

lol

[theNote]

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.

Re:lol

[jamienk]

Just when I was ready to try linux again, I read this paragraph and remembered why I got rid of it last time.

To be fair, this was developer software under development, not something for your average desktop user. Here's more info.

Rose-colored glasses

[PCM2]

Let the stuffed shirts and corporate bigwigs make money from the Free code. Let the pundits question what it will take for Linux to succeed on the Desktop. There is massive innovation in Linux userspace, driven by the same geeky joy that, in another era and in other fields is called "intellectual curiosity." That's what I see as the main force behind the Open Source movement; not corporate possibilities, as the LinuxWorld convention pretends, but brutal candor, mischievous smartness, self-mocking over-eagerness. The corporate successes of Linux are just the results of an overflow of energy, the excesses being mopped up. The hacker ethic is driving the corporations. We don't need them, but they need us.

Umm ... OK.

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.

Re:Rose-colored glasses

[jamienk]

Corporate technology companies have portrayed the computer as being driven by companies. Linux development has been driven by hackers. At Linux World, the corporations put their accomplishments and offerings front and center, but they still somehow get dwarfed by the independent developers, who are more creative, more excited, more genuine, and more fun. I have no problem with businesses making money, touting their wares, and spinning their services. But they are the less interesting side of the story, a predictable sideshow.

2nd or 3rd time

[LinuxHam]

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.

Re:"scalability"

[radish]

But those are all perfectly useful words. You know how people make fun of us geeks because we make up all that jargon? (WIMP, GUI, IDE, SCSI, ATAPI, RS232, ...) Well we do it because we need words to describe the things we're talking about. Business is the same. "Enterprise" means something. It means a large company. "Engineer" is a good word for what I do, seeing as I have a degree in Software Engineering from an engineering university. I'm happy to be called an engineer. "Scalable" means something which can be expanded to handle more transactions per second, or more storage, or whatever, easily. That's not a common thing - I've worked on many older (and some newer) systems which certainly are NOT scalable. So using it as a differentiating factor when trying to sell me a product is GOOD. Of course, just telling me it's scalable isn't enough, but people sell cars by saying they're "comfortable", or "safe" or "ecnomical". There's no difference. It gets me kind of mad when I hear one bunch of smart people completely dissing another bunch of smart people just because they don't understand them, or think they're "better". It just shows you've got a closed mind and a serious superiority complex. Get over it. If it wasn't for big business paying the bills, there would be no software industry, and most /. ers would be working at McDonalds.