Showjob

"I have no use for rules. They only rule out the possibility of brilliant exceptions." - Ed McCabe

Trade shows have rules. Some strict, some loose. But the game always looks the same. Booths, badges, press conferences, sessions, BOFs. Not much in the way of brilliant exceptions, at least not in the usual places.

But that's what I look for at trade shows like LinuxWorld. So for the next few paragraphs I'll try to run down a few of rules & exceptions that have characterized the show.

Woe-Fi

For the third streat year, the wi-fi in the press room was provided by the attendees rather than the show. The difference this time was that some of the attendees simply used their laptops as wireless hubs, redistributing DHCP from wired to unwired ethernet. They'd plug the ethernet cable in one hole, and hub the connection out to the room from their wireless card.

Out in the session rooms, we weren't so lucky. I didn't attend a single session where either wi-fi or power strips (lstandard at many other conferences -- O'Reilly's, for example) were present.

In the last comment on Part I, Augie of Schwer Log was this:

The big story from an attendee point of view was the total lack of open and free wireless at the show. I know I wasn't the only geek searching in vein for an open AP to check my email, or coordinate with other Linux users at the show.

I would have even paid for it if they had good coverage, and I could get some descent bandwidth. It seems kinda silly that I would have to leave Linux World and walk the block and a half to a Starbucks to get on line.

The significant phrase: from an attendee point of view.

That's what matters. Attendees. Users. Hackers. Technologists. The guys and gals who get stuff done.

So I'm talking with Mark Tobenkin of LPBN.org, the Linux Public Broadcasting Network. (Here are his SourceForge projects.) a reporter with

http://lpbn.org/

start a 24 hour streaming station of creative commons licensed meeting. knoppix bootbable cds. they can replicate a perfectly legal signal. gathering media from bands. opening offices in philly , new yhork,

Bruce Perens talk

We have to remember that SCO is a failed Linux company called Caldera.

One of our biggest problems is bad legislation.

Jason Mahler, CCIA, speaking at Bruce's talk. Created the OSAIA, open source industry alliance.

10-12 people on staff.

worked with zoe lofgren.

www.osaia.org.

looking for people to join the organization.

the real subject of the show is a social movement. own ideas

the only social movement other than art hat makes real products. lover 2 billion worht of software for free use.

makes enemies.

sco and microsoft funding.

the two current sco cases will be disappointing

sco has no reason to see eithe of these cases go to verdict. they'll settle the case. will IBM and RedHat push for a definitive verdict. We may never see ....

the mot dangerous part of sco is that it distracts us from more dangerous threats.

sco is nothing beside the threat that open source faces against software patents. call for public comments. Most call for

open source is economically significant.

all anti-software patent arguments are rejected out of hand.

we have a recently created fund to help defend open source developers from legal claims.

the american

it costs $2 million to defend a single patent case. And we expect hundreds of them.

expect these to be much more of a problem than SCO.

thre is no doubt that IBM

none of our corporate partners other than red hat haven't ...025

026 change to licenses iwth muthal patent defense terms. If you sue ...

027 shift from free software to proprietary open source.

it happens that the license on the advanced servers ....

what's driving linux into shops is that oracle certifies some distros and not others.

you give up access to multiple service vendors

we're not looking at why we turned to open source

freedom of access to popular culture will matter in the future.

031 story of HP

would have been violating dmca

032 we are starting to be denied access to pupular culture.. we will have web pages that are progectedfrom saving, or printing ...

038 fed an addiction model

(idea... get the customers to pressure vendors)

040 I owrry that when IBM owns redhat and Novell owns suse things aren't going to be quite so nice

042 most of these people are already in comptia that operates against open source. members of aia, behind the oregon open source bill.

something about burning microsoft products.

they created a business opportunity to downgrade.. 007 008

012 i don't believe there's any free software.

ernie ball, sterling ball

it's not about circumventing licenses. my goal is to run my business, and be as productive and creative and proactive as possible. I figure I've saved at least a couple hundred grand, just on stuff I didn't buy.

I coup;dn't have built out vusines without microsoft.

how many employees work for me?

about half.

023 me too operating system experience.

thinik of bicycles....

i want to thank microsoft. I got to avoid licensing and pay increasing workers comp premiums in california.

they

the abilitgy to run any .Net application on Linux. this is what Mono provides. Essentially Ximian gives Novell a suite of open as well as closed source products, services and environments.

"the entire stack is what we're after."

006 Nat: we discovered that Novell linux was wehre the industry was going, open source was the nmodel. Novell was the first enterprise software company to do that.

At ximian we always had a grand set of ambitions. around the desktop, and around a large number of machines in an enterprise.

There was no integrated groupware environment. So we did that. to do .Net development. Needed to modernize tools. We couldn't bulild an integrated solution. If you were the government of brazil, or a regisonal government in spain, we didnt' have the infrastruc to do that.

we were shocked to discover the high level of commitment to linux.

the desktop is the next big thing for linux. the most nonincremental and expolosive growth in the next two years. It'll be edge-in. Like Linux came in with small single purpose servers. Start with unix workstations. customer relationshi[p management stations. Then the general knowledge worker. It's hard for a small company

check google zeitgeist. Linux has been hovering at 1% for awhile.

David Patrick: Ximian has been focused wholly inside the enterprise. excited about merging with a companyh that can address the enterprise on a global scale. large world class.

Chris Stone: a user model will become more prevalent. It is inevitable taht palm will move to some kind of an embedded linux model.

thre is a groupwise back end. there are connectors from ximian. the plan is to integrate all these components. We'd loiketo bet to a universal client.

Nat: novell has a lot of critical serivces that don't exist on Linux, frankly.

Will keep the ximian brand name.

jack. we're not dropping netware, we're adding linux.

you'll be able to figure it out from our financial statements when our earnings are released in a couple of weeks.

this stack will be on SuSE and Red Hat. will support suse, and working on red hat.

jack there ahbebeen a numb er o f unsubstantiated claims. Thre has been a lot of fud thrown at linux. I have to admire red hat for the steps they took yesterday. There's a lot going on that can't be said.

The Main Event hasn't even started and already the air is thick with news. In the Had to Happen Department, Red Hat launched a legal offensive against SCO (here's the press release). The gist:

Red Hat announced that it filed a formal complaint against The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX, "SCO"). The purpose of this complaint is to demonstrate that Red Hat's technologies do not infringe any intellectual property of SCO and to hold SCO accountable for its unfair and deceptive actions.

In the Unexpected Surprise Department, Novell announced it was buying Ximian. Other News2be includes the usual announcments by Leading Vendors and earnest wannabes from the lower castes (ones that don't do big sponsorships and give requisite keynote addresses. IBM (). HP is selling a pile of servers to Sandia Labs for a supercluster, plus a bunch of new high-water performance benchmarks. Dell is selling 1450 servers to the NCSA for a supercluster. Sun and SuSE have a new global alliance (and where are the cheap desktops they announce a year ago?). Linuxcare is launching Levanta (didn't they do that last year?)

So here's a challenge for you: Try seeing the market without vendors. what's going on then?

So let's review a few items we can chalk into the Done column. Then we'll visit the UnDone.

The Demand Side. Yes, it's a Good Thing that IBM, HP, Oracle, Red Hat and other vendors are pushing Linux and offering an exploding variety of "solutions" based on it. But fundamentally Linux is something that happened when the demand side started supplying itself.
Enterprises. IT folks all over the place are using Linux and the open source applications it supports. If the day has not come when nobody gets fired for specifying Linux; but it's in sight.
LAMP. The LAMP family of platform components (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, Python, PostgresSQL, PHP) is now firmly established as a development and deployment environment. Note that many of those components are deployed where Linux meets the Net and the Web.
Embedded. Linux is so easily and widely deployed in embedded devices that calling it a success is an understatement.
Red Hat. Yes, Debian and SuSE are winners too, but Red Hat has become the predominant Linux distro.
Debian. There will always be a need for a distro that's as free, non-proprietary, and removed from commercial purposes as can be. That's why Debian is locked in just as solid as Red Hat, though with far less publicity.
GNU. Same story as Debian, only older and with many more components. We may not all like the GNU/ prefix when it show up, but in many cases that's what gets deployed.

Now for the UnDone:

The desktop. Here there are two questions:
1. What will it take to make Linux desktops — including (perhaps especially) laptops — ready for the mass marketplace? (Glenn Stone has a good take on the subject.)
2. What will it take for the major PC makers to start marketing those machines, and not just floating half-hearted efforts (mostly outside the U.S. and Europe) and mumbling platitudes about "waiting for market demand" that they could create with one good ad campaign?
The Big Vendors. Here we're talking mostly about HP and IBM. (Dell's story is still pretty thin.) HP has been coming on strong in its PR and advertising, and the Linux content on its Web site getting much fatter with useful information (even though it's still thin in places). But IBM's is just freaking huge. I get the sense, from both HP and IBM, that their Linux Strategies go far beyond TCO calculations, expressions of love and server consolidation on mainframes. Linux now runs across all of IBM's eServer lines. Yet it's still a special order on desktops and laptops. Two big questions there:
Research. Given the size of the Linux Phenomenon, and the degree to which has happened as a result of the demand side supplying itself, there is an Xtreme paucity of good information about any of it. "Market shares" and "server shipments" are fun and interesting, but tell an incomplete story. Customers of all sizes could use some good information about how, where and why Linux is succeeding -- and not just in terms of who is selling and shipping stuff. There's too much about Linux, LAMP and open source deployment that can't be described in those vendor-centric terms. What's it going to take to provide that information? Who's going to step up and provide it? Whatever the answer, the market opportunity is there.