My LinuxWorld Report

[nhdonny]

I popped down to Boston today to stock up on pens and Tshirts for the coming year. While playing at the Expo here's what I saw.
http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/


Mambo had a booth - I assume Miro financed it. Whatever, it was great to chat with a couple of the guys seriously focused on Mambo. I met one who plans to look into a Moodle 4 Mambo integration I need for a customer. We also kicked around some ideas on cleaning up Mambo to make it 508 accessible compliant. Mambo was the legit. reason I gave myself for the trip.

The show was large and very crowded unlike the past couple of years at these events. Big players are serious about Linux with a huge focus on the enterprise. Intel, IBM, HP, Sun, CA, Oracle, Unysys all had a big presence but the monster was Novell with booths all over and ownership of the Web Cafe.

Intel's Itanium 2 Game Show was a gas but I didn't win the notebook backpack.

Unisys had the best BBs with Redhat coming in a close second dressed in Red Sox looking Red Hat baseball uniforms. :wink2:

MySQL had a boring partners booth. Penguin software wasn't much better. Penguin did have the biggest Penguin.

What impressed me were the number of .Orgs, the OSSIs etal. Also the focus on hardware which only excites me if they have a great tshirt. There were loads of storage systems and networking companies. The Vortechies would have felt like they were at the Mall.

I got 5 or 6 pens, all sizes of squishy penguins, 2 calculators, one Penguin tshirt for my wife and the Linus life story they gave out with the free admission. Best pen was Intel. Best bag was Intel.

Serious gamers may actually cry when they play the game I saw on the Sun AMD 64s. Latency. Whats that?

The biggest news:

Downstairs and also free was the Web Services Edge Expo. It was empty!
Most of the booths were either unsold or the people packed up and went home. The few exhibitors were talking to each other and wishing they were upstairs.

Not sure if anyone cares but thats it from the trade show junky.

[mfennell]

i'm a tad jealous... When I used to teach linux certifications (and M$ /Novell) I got to go to all the cool conventions...

The last one I went to even had a M$ booth, it was pretty cool seeing them tough it out in such an anti M$ area.