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

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.

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

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.