Looking forward to LinuxWorld

The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo happens February 14 through 17 in Boston. LWN editor Jonathan Corbet will be wandering by the event for the first time in a few years. Among other things, he will be giving a talk in the O'Reilly booth on Wednesday at 1:30; one can only hope that there will be no rap bands or accordion players in the neighboring booth at that time. Such problems are not unheard of at LinuxWorld.

It would, of course, be a disservice to our readers if we failed to point out that Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition, by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, and Greg Kroah-Hartman, will be released (and available) at the show.

The first LinuxWorld event was almost six years ago now. LWN was published that week only because the kind folks at Linuxcare let us stay in the exhibit hall past closing and plug the laptop into their network hub. That conference was an eye-opener. Even for those of us who had been convinced for years that Linux World Domination was inevitable, the level of interest - and the amount of money - to be seen at LinuxWorld was shocking. The wave was clearly building, and it didn't seem that anybody had any real control over it.

The memories of the Red Hat party - or the disturbing lack thereof - will be with us forever.

Six years later, LinuxWorld is a different experience. It's all executive keynotes and expensive exhibits; the conference program almost seems like an afterthought. The more development-oriented conferences, such as OLS or Linux.conf.au (where your editor will also be speaking), are much more fun. LinuxWorld remains the preeminent commercial Linux show, however, at least in the U.S. As a place to get a sense for what the business of Linux is doing, it is hard to beat. Your editor, masochist that he is, is looking forward to having his nose rubbed in the hype for a few days, seeing where people think the money is in Linux, and meeting some LWN readers. See you there.

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