LinuxWorld 2004 - Open Source: Ready for Prime Time

I attended LinuxWorld in San Jose for the first time in 2000. Five years later, LinuxWorld 2004 has been the mirror of the world of open source evolving from being “open for freedom” in 2000 to becoming “open for prime time business” today.

Welcome to LinuxWorld 2004, Moscone Center, San Francisco

This year’s LinuxWorld in San Francisco highlighted participation from every company in the mainstream IT industry who wants to make it big riding the open source software wave. IBM, Novell, Sun, Oracle, CA, HP, Intel, AMD and even Unisys (yes, the very same company that wanted to take everyone to court for their “gif” patent just a few years ago). Open source companies such as Red Hat, Mandrakesoft, MySQL, Zend, Zope and others were there too.

The “.org pavilion” with the OSS community was the place “to be.” You could meet first-hand key team members from Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, LTSP, Trolltech, and a whole gamut of other cool open source projects responsible for changing the paradigm of IT today.

Notable sessions, keynotes and announcements

Although the number of talks were fewer than at OSCON, stellar presentations were easy to find. A panel discussion with Andrew Morton on “How the Linux kernel gets built”, Brian Aker of MySQL on “MySQL replication and clustering” and, Jim Stallings of IBM on “Linux in Asia Pacific emerging markets” were well worth attending.

Red Hat booth at LinuxWorld

Both Matt Szulik and Nick Donofrio delivered excellent keynotes - on innovation. Red Hat’s Szulik emphasized the urgency to reform US patent law to protect innovation, boost economic sharing, and presented the need to use open source software for education. IBM’s Donofrio reiterated his company’s support for open source and Linux and drew appreciation from the OSS community for his statement that IBM would not enforce its patents covering Linux kernel technologies.

Amongst the big announcements made at the conference were release of Xandros’ Business Linux Desktop, IBM open-sourcing Cloudscape, a Java based embedded database through the Apache Software Foundation, CA’s $1 million dollar Ingres tools contest and release of Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 with kernel 2.6.

How about a ball game after the show!

Giants game at 3Com Park, San Francisco

To top off the show, a party organized by EFF and Red Hat at the Yerba Buena gardens near Moscone center and tickets to the SF Giants ball game were popular drawings with the attendees and vendors alike.

At LinuxWorld, one felt that Linux has become more about business than about technology and that open source technologies are what enterprises are looking at today. It may be fashionable for big corporations to show open source has become ready for prime time. However the IT industry which has wholeheartedly adopted Linux, still has to work with the technology creators and collaborators who are part of a larger open source system of collaboration. One hopes that future LinuxWorld events, will have the core open source projects represented by the “.org pavilion” in the center of the expo floor rather than on the fringes - to demonstrate open source is part of mainstream life.