A trip to LinuxWorld San Francisco 2003

This LWN editor has very limited trade show experience. The Linux Business Expo (LBE) at Comdex 1999 and the LBE, Comdex 2000 and a couple of local shows comprise the sum total of my experience. In comparison, LinuxWorld 2003 is a smaller show than the LBEs of the past, though larger than any local show. In 1999 many small companies came to the LBE hoping to be acquired by larger companies who were planning IPOs. LWN and an Australian company called Moreton Bay were among those small companies with booths near the back of the LBE. In 2000 LWN was acquired by Tucows.com and Moreton Bay was acquired by Lineo, and life seemed pretty rosy, for a while. Now, in 2003, LWN is once again independently owned and operated, and so is Moreton Bay, with the new name of SnapGear.

At LinuxWorld 2003 SnapGear joined other survivors of that era and newer companies, with small booths to the east and north. The .org pavilion took up the northwest section, leaving the center floor near the entrance to the larger companies. IBM took up the most space, with a sprawling pavilion and additional crew in partnering booths, like those of Red Hat and SuSE. Other companies with prime real estate include Sun, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, and Intel.

Microsoft was in a slightly smaller booth near the edge of the main space, close to the .orgs. There happy customers were eager to talk about how well Microsoft products work in their clustering, number crunching, high availability environments. Elsewhere open source and proprietary go hand in hand as applications and appliances use Linux and other open source components to power not-so-open products. A single person from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had free (as in beer) CDs with tax preparation software for Windows and Mac.

On Monday your editor went for a long walk around the streets of San Francisco, with the old LWN camera. By Monday night it was clear that the old camera has seen better days. There may may or may not be pictures hidden inside, but if they are there they are inaccessible, so unfortunately there will be no photos to brighten this essay.

Tuesday began with Red Hat's press conference announcing the filing of a lawsuit against SCO. At the press conference Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik also talked about the creation of a Legal Defense Fund for the open source community. Red Hat hopes that other companies who depend on open source software will add to this $1 million fund to help pay for the future legal needs of open source developers.

The next stop on my agenda was with SGI, who shares space in the Intel booth. Ginny Babbitt and the LWN fan club at SGI build multi-processor Altix systems with SGI ProPack software. Irix, SGI's proprietary UNIX, is still used for some jobs, but more and more Linux rules at SGI.

Later, in the meeting rooms Dell Director Reza Rooholamini talked about Dell's high-performance computing clusters (HPCC) with PowerEdge servers. Among Dell's HPCC customers are the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (NCSA). That Dell HPCC cluster runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ranks among the fastest supercomputers in the world. Dell can customize any system, whether a supercomputing HPCC or a home PC, with your choice of OS, including several flavors of mainstream Linux. Reza told us that Dell puts Linux on just under 30% of their sales.

Tuesday night at the SnapGear party we celebrated independence and new business models that are more realistic than, 'get acquired and make a killing at the IPO'. SnapGear makes small VPN/router boxes embedded with uClinux and other open source software, so that when you plug the box in, "it just works". They will build custom boxes too, if you want something beyond the standard models, and the boxes all come with source code.

Wednesday morning started very early, with the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) advisory board meeting. Lots of topics were discussed during the course of this not-quite-two-hour meeting. To begin with Evan Leibovitch, President of LPI talked about the the new LPI website, available in thirteen languages; and how they manage to keep all the translations current.

We also learned that many certification organizations from many different disciplines are part of a larger group that addresses some common problems, like cheating on tests. LPI is now a member of the Information Technology Certification Security Council (ITCSC), a membership funded organization, formed "to preserve the security and integrity of certification tests for the benefit of certified professions, their employers, and those companies granting IT certification".

Lintraining.com is now sponsored by LPI, making it easier than ever to find the training people need to become certified.

Another topic was making exams available to everyone, not just those that can easily come up with the fee. In developing countries people are sometimes trapped in a situation where they are unable to afford certification testing, but they also cannot find a job without the certification. The other side of this is that LPI is setting up testing labs where at least a part of the test is done in a hands-on computer lab, making the testing facility more expensive.

Level 3 exams are in the works, but there are questions about the form they will take. LPI strives to create exams are that distribution neutral, but at level 3 there are system administration tasks are done very differently by different Linux vendors.

Sponsorships keep LPI running, and Evan thanked Novell for becoming it's newest sponsor. At the end of the meeting he also mentioned that SCO is still listed among LPI sponsors. Caldera was LPI's first sponsor in 1998, he told us, and many of same people are still at SCO, working in the trenches to do good things, in spite of the actions of a few people in management. So SCO's logo remains on the site to honor those Calderan's who continue to do good things from the trenches.

Later that morning, in the Oracle meeting room, I talked to Wim Coekaerts, Oracle's main kernel hacker. Oracle's customers want Linux, so Oracle has made agreements with the major Linux vendors to provide Linux along with Oracle products and services. Oracle handles all the service calls, working with the distribution vendor when necessary to resolve their customer's problems. Linux is used in-house at Oracle.

The Oracle database, however, will remain proprietary for the foreseeable future. Wim said that when Oracle released it's ClusterFS under the GPL, their customers didn't care. Not a one ever submitted a patch or paid the slightest attention to the source code. It seems that Oracle customers don't have much, if any, IT department. Instead they rely on Oracle to keep their systems running. They like Linux because it's reliable and inexpensive, not because they can see the source code. Oracle provides a total package of software, hardware and support. Open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSGL are no competition, because they really aren't in the same business.

Oracle had a statement prepared August 5, 2003 to respond to any mention of SCO. "Oracle believes that anything that leads to a more rapid resolution of the issues raised by SCO is good for the industry and for the open-source community. Oracle has seen nothing to date that has caused us to question our tremendous commitment to Linux as a customer, promoter, supporter, and developer. We are continuing our deep commitment to Linux and look forward to seeing these issues resolved as quickly as possible. We will continue to work with our close partners such as Red Hat and other Linux distributions to promote continued adoption of Linux."

Booth strolling took up part of Tuesday and Wednesday. Many booths were visited and there were conversations with many people, too numerous to name here. Most people shared a desire for the swift resolution to the SCO mess. Overall, people seemed confident about the future of Linux and of their business.