Linuxworld report
I wrote this for my weblog[1] but thought I'd also post it here for people
who don't read that.
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 t 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. Here is
a picture from NewsForge of Adam and Jimmy in our booth.[2]
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[3] 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[4], BSide Internet Media[5], The Computer
Depot [6], the crepe lady, DebianVendor.org[7], Innovation Software
Group[8], linux-cd.com[9], Linux Central[10], 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[11], Sun, SYS-CON Media, tinyapps.org[12], and any
other helpful person or company who I may have inadvertently failed to
mention due my lousy memory.
[1] http://www.braincells.com/debian/
[2] http://www.newsforge.com/blob.pl?id=bdfec2b4297c24dd1f881ea967bda704
[3] http://www.linuxworld.com/story/40006.htm
[4] http://www.aboutdebian.com/
[5] http://bsideinternet.com/
[6] http://cdepot.net/
[7] http://debianvendor.org/
[8] http://www.innovationsw.com/
[9] http://linux-cd.com/
[10] http://linuxcentral.com/
[11] http://the-sphere.org/
[12] http://www.tinyapps.org
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/
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