LWN goes to LinuxWorld

Your editor returned to the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo last week for the first time in five years. LinuxWorld has been an important conference since it began; there may be no better place to see what is going on on the business side of Linux. But the development-oriented conferences are much more fun. Still, LinuxWorld proved to be an interesting experience.

Attendance at the Boston LinuxWorld was on the order of 7,000 people. The east-coast version of the event is clearly quite a bit smaller than the San Francisco edition, but that is still a significant crowd. Attendees were heard to say that the show felt smaller than last year's event in New York. The organizers seem happy with the turnout, however, and plan to move to a larger conference center (still in Boston) next year.

There were some 140 exhibitors on the busy trade show floor. Of these, 24 were in the .Org area. By a conservative count, close to one third of the exhibitors were pushing some sort of proprietary software for Linux; backup software, configuration management, and databases all seem to be highly active areas. Security too, as could be seen by all of the attendees who were willing to accept - and wear - "virus free" stickers from one of the more in-your-face booths.

The design of the conference center caused the exhibit floor to be divided into two rooms. The conference organizers made use of that division to great effect: they separated the two communities in attendance at LinuxWorld. The larger room was dedicated to commerce; that's where all the large booths from the usual suspects (Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Sun, etc.) were to be found. The displays were flashy, the speakers charismatic, and "solutions" were flying by at high speed. But the community which creates the software that makes all this possible was nowhere in evidence. In early LinuxWorld conferences, it was common to find developers hanging out in their employers' booths. In 2005, those developers have found somewhere else to be.

Jim Gettys

The interesting thing is that a fair number of developers could, indeed, be found at LinuxWorld. They tended to prefer the other room, however, where the ".Org pavilion" was located. That side of the hall was far less flashy, but much more fun. The people who create Linux do still wander by LinuxWorld; you just have to know where to find them.

The early LinuxWorld conferences included a reasonable program of talks along with the exhibit floor. At the first LinuxWorld, your editor complained that talks by Jon 'maddog' Hall, Larry Wall, Jeremy Allison, and Miguel de Icaza had all been scheduled simultaneously. There are few such problems in 2005. Though the conference did offer some interesting speakers (among others: Jeremy Allison, Matt Domsch, Chris Wright, Jay Beale, and, inevitably, maddog), the conference program was fit into a mere three slots per day. The talks are clearly not the main attraction at LinuxWorld.

Your editor got a chance to try out booth duty, giving a talk from the O'Reilly booth. For the morbidly curious, O'Reilly's Greg Corrin has posted a picture of the event.

Bruce Perens

The only talk your editor attended was, interestingly, not on the conference program. Bruce Perens gave his "state of open source" talk, instead, in a press conference format - complete with free food. The core of the talk was concerned with software patents - in Europe, and in the U.S. The community has, says Bruce, no defense against patent suits, and free software developers cannot count on assistance from large corporations when an infringement suit comes around. He was apparently recruited to be an expert witness for "the defining Linux patent infringement case," only to be dropped when the (anonymous) party realized that Bruce would not testify in a patent holder's favor. According to Bruce, the solution to the software patent problem can only lie in "clean-up" legislation at the Federal level.

Bruce also touched on Sun's situation (from which the company has "no good exit"), the SCO suit (interesting things may come from the turmoil at Canopy), and the need to emphasize the "free" part of free software. A focus on freedom will help the community to occupy a moral high ground which will help when trying to obtain friendly legislation. Bruce has posted his speaking notes for those who are interested.

One notable absence this time around was any mention of BSD. The BSD branch of Unix was well represented at early LinuxWorld shows; the booth staff tended to stand out in the crowd of Linux folks. BSD remains an important part of the free software world, but its distance from Linux appears, sometimes, to be growing.

LinuxWorld reflects the commercial side of Linux; that side is an important part of the greater Linux ecosystem. This conference is also where new users tend to start. So it is an important event. It's important that the community be there; we can help guide users toward the heart of the free software movement.

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