So, I went to LinuxWorld 2004. It was quality.
No, not the expo itself. Linux expos in the UK have been getting steadily more shit as time has gone on. There was virtually nothing, no stand, that was even remotely interesting. A great big Novell stand full of SuSE presentations, a great big HP stand full of big servers and a load of Oracle shit, a big Sun stand full of the Sun Java Desktop, a big Veritas stand full of people trying to bring the horror that is BackupExec to Linux, and some people flogging hardware. Woo. Oh, and OpenAdvantage, who rock the world.
The point of the expo for me, though, is not to get sold products. As Jeremy Allison said in the Great Linux Debate in response to me asking whether the corporate dominance of the expo was a bad thing, it’s not about technical stuff. (My question didn’t relate to technical stuff, really; it was more about small companies, and I was seriously disappointed that there weren’t more small firms there. Speaking to a couple of people, stand pricing might have something to do with that.) The point of it all for me is to meet cool people. And to get drunk on the first night. I managed both with stellar success.
Firstly, a big shout out to Matt Bloch and Patrick at Bytemark Hosting. It is deeply reassuring to disaocver that the people from whom you purchase hosting are not only providing a superb technical service but are also really cool guys as well. We also met up with Schwuk, and he and I had a barney about Mono. That was really rather fun. The usual suspects were all there: Paul Sladen for Debian, Brian Tiemann, Jon Masters, and it was cool to see them all again. It was also marvellous to catch up with Kam, who made it down for a couple of hours; I bent his ear about Ubuntu, and he was most helpful. It’s pretty cool knowing a massively influential guy :) We also had lunch with Phil Hands and Matthias Ettrich—how cool is that, eh? Matthias was a really interesting chap: serious and committed, but a real technical star, and he’s got some strong ideas. All in all, it was a great, great couple of days. I love going down to the Expo. Jono will have photos, I suspect.
Oh, and Jono’s talk was pretty darn good, too, but don’t tell him I said that.
And this is LinuxWorld 2004, written , and concerning Uncategorized
Comments
Paul
sil
Hey, it was after midnight and I was tired. :)
sil
Oh, and HP tried to tell me loads of Oracle shit like the Oracle Collaboration Server. Hm.
Paul
You are not wrong that Oracle Collaboration Server is shit. I know cos I had to use it. (luckily I can use Thunderbird instead)
pascal
disaocver — still drunk?
:D
sil
Oops. Tired was more accurate, I think. :)
Bill
As tired as a newt?
Dave Farquhar
If Backup Exec gets ported to Linux, I’m switching to FreeBSD.
“a big shout out” ?
I didn’t realise that you were either an american, or a channel 4 TV presenter ;)