Linuxworld 2004
Here's my report on this years
Linuxworld Conference and Expo where
Debian once again had a booth in the .org pavilion.
Some of you may already know my theory on how the location of the .org
pavilion indicates the health of the Linux business world. For those
who don't, here's an explanation. In the glory days of yore when Red
Hat and VA Linux had mega-IPOs, Mozilla was open sourced, and the
penguin hordes were about to reduce Redmond to a charred and smoking
ruin, the .org pavilion was relegated to the very back of the show
floor. As times became more dire, it started creeping up until the fell
winter of 2003 when it was actually in the front where ordinary people
could see it. This year it was in the middle and to the left side so I
predict a good year for the Linux industry. The booth was your basic
10' x 10' at the end of a row with a table, two chairs and a waste paper
basket. We had one ethernet feed so had to bring in a hub. There was
supposed to be WiFi access but hardly anyone ever got it working.
Debian developers manning the booth this year for one or more days were
Clint Adams, Phil Blundell, Adam DiCarlo, Jimmy Kaplowitz, Joe Nahmias,
Matt Taggart, and myself. We were also visited by Andres Saloman,
Laurence Lane, and Bruce Perens who wanted to get his key signed so he
can get back into Debian development with his
User Linux initiative.
We decided we were going to do some proper PR this year but had some
mixed results some of which were due to totally underestimating the
response we thought we would get. I was going to produce posters and
flyers. The first printer I
approached to make the posters botched the job so at the last minute I
had to have one made at Kinkos. They charged a hideous amount of money
so I only had one made. The flyers were good but I didn't make enough
and they were gone by Thursday morning. Kinkos struck again with the
banner Jimmy was going to have made. It never showed up. Luckily we
didn't pay for it either because once again they charged way too much.
Matt and Adams' efforts were more fruitful. Matt brought swirl
t-shirts, this year in powder blue with "debian/rules" on the back. (We
also had a box of beige shirts with Tux on the front courtesy of
TinyApps.org.) and Debian stickers and case
badges. They were a huge hit as always. Adam did a phenomenal job in
procuring CD donations. They also flew out of our hands in breathtaking
quantities. One slight miscalculation was I asked him to get lots of Sarge
netinst CDs with beta 2 of the new installer. My reasoning was that the
perennial complaint is that "Debian is too hard to install." so people
would be really interested in trying our new installer. But it turned
out it was 7-cd sets of Woody which people were really interested in
which surprised us all. All these efforts netted us as a total of over
$2,000 for the project, a substantial increase over last year.
Once again Sun lent us a computer and once again
we had trouble getting Debian installed on it. (Though for a different
reason than last time.) We gave up and showed Debian on our laptops.
Phil had an IPaq too which looked really cool. Over in the
KDE booth they were demoing KDE on Debian machines
and our favorite distro was to be found scattered throughout other
booths too.
Last year the big event which drew people to us from other distros was
Mandrakes' bankruptcy. This year it was
Red Hats' refocus of their distribution. Now I
understand their reasons (and I'm not just saying that because of the
gift of a cardigan I got for attending a presentation for RHCEs) but it
has a lot of their customers and supporters worried and Debian is looking
like a tempting option for such people. Over all, I was impressed by
the more sophisticated knowledge of the various distributions people
were showing. Well I did get one person asking me "what is a Linux
distribution?" but that was only one. Debian seems to have much better
name recognition these days. Even novices want to use Debian. I felt I
had to caution them, "Are you sure? Debian is not the most
newbie-friendly distribution." but no they wanted Debian. A lot of this
publicity is due to commercial distributions like
LibraNet, Lindows,
and Xandros as wells as Live CDs like
Knoppix and Morphix
which are based on Debian.
On Friday, I was interviewed
by SYS-CON radio and may also do an article about Debian for Linuxworld
magazine which they publish. The interview went pretty well. I didn't
mumble or ramble on too much. I forgot most of the DFSG and social
contract which is a little embarrassing but did manage to mention the
more salient bits.
Next year the show is leaving New York for Boston so this may be my last
as an Exhibitor but I had a good time and met many interesting people.
Getting thankyous from satisfied Debian users really makes all the work
worthwhile.
I would like to personally thank all the developers and volunteers who
manned the booth, About Debian,
BSide Internet Media, The
Computer Depot, the crepe lady, DebianVendor.org,
Innovation Software Group
linux-cd.com, Linux
Central, the Pakistani taxi driver with who I had an interesting chat
about the similarities between Islam and Hinduism even though we missed
the Javits center in the process, Red Hat (haha),
The Sphere, Sun, SYS-CON Media, tinyapps.org,
and any other helpful person or company who I may have inadvertently
failed to mention due my lousy memory.