At LinuxWorld 2005

Once again LinuxWorld, held at San Francisco’s still glamorous Moscone West, represents Open Source’s hottest foundry for forging a durable blend of corporation and community. The resulting alloy may seem less noble than many may wish for, but the show did provide a peek into the progress of technology funded by the deep pockets of significant business interests.

A highlight of the event was the ‘.org pavilion’ located on the second floor lobby and separated from the main exposition area. Showing off many of the projects that form the foundation of the open source community, the .org pavilion formed a hub of social and technology networking. Projects included Fedora, Eclipse, Gentoo, Debian, Mozilla, X.org, KDE, EFF, and FSG.

Demonstrating the global diversity of Linux users and sharing the floor with the .org pavilion, a China Linux beachhead was organized by the Beijing Software Industry Productivity Center (BSIPC). This China pavilion was promoting Beijing as the new Linux Capital of Asia. A variety of Linux based software outsourcing opportunities as well as products were being marketed by vendors such as Red Flag Software, Sun Wah Linux, Redflag Chinese 2000 Software, and Beijing Co-Create Open Source Software. Unfortunately, if Beijing’s intent is to successfully compete in the markets of the West, it must improve its English language skills.

The centerpoint of LinuxWorld — ‘the Expo’, featured large booths from the usual crowd of commercial organizations including Red Hat, MySQL, IBM, AMD, Sun, SAP, and many others. Booths buzzed with demos and talks, displayed big-iron hardware and showcased both open and proprietary applications as well as support services. Clustering, virtualization, system and application management were hot. But hold on… right in the middle of this hubbub of activity, a wild-west type of rodeo ride drew in the curious and convinced the brave among them to ride the rowdy mechanical bull. Linux is truly cowboy country.

Among the best presentations of the show, Eben Moglen’s talk on the future of GPL3 highlighted the work required to modernize the GPL 3 and get it adopted amidst the tremendous expectations and pressures from industry and the community.

Significant announcements at the show included creation of OSDL’s Patent Commons project, Novell’s opensuse.org project and the delay of Red Hat’s Fedora foundation.

The ‘Golden Penguin Bowl’ trivia game themed as ‘good vs. evil’ (played as ‘Google vs. Microsoft’) was moderated by Jeremy Allison of Samba fame. The game highlighted the fun side of the conference. Fortunately, Google’s ‘Geek Squad’ won the day.

From hot hardware to hot ideas, LinuxWorld often transcended the simple marketing hyperbole common at conferences such as this. Still, at other times, some of the largest sponsors oversold their wares and services and lost credibility. As with everything, there’s always room for improvement. Perhaps next time, vendors will strike an even better balance between sales and genuine engagement. After all, Open Source and Linux and LinuxWorld are all about collaboration.