LWE Day 1

Linux World Expo 2004 started off with a bang this year with Matthew Szulik giving a rousing keynote concering choice and the world that we live in. I was impressed that a man in his position would wear his beliefs so openly on his sleeve; I would say I was even refreshed by it. The Red Hat theme for this years LWE is choice. Choice for the customer to have flexibility in choosing solutions. He ended his speech with “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you.” You could not walk out of their without goosebumps. Then the exposition opened up and we all hit the floor in our custom tie-dye shirts. We were a sight to behold.

We headed over to the .org pavillion to meet with the folks that we do hosting for. This would be your Gentoo, Debian and cAos Linux as well as a few others. It was good to see everybody, hand out some of our shwag and connect in person.

One of our big goals at the OSL is to help out community-based projects that are in need of hosting. So when I visited with Leon Shiman at the X.org booth I was a little taken aback that he saw our efforts as a bit selfish and detrimental to open source as a whole. “Of course you want these projects co-located at your facility; you’ll have better access to grants and $$ because of it”. Let’s just say it didn’t leave me with a good taste in my mouth about the future of X.org.

I also spent a fair amount of the day talking with folks in the Gentoo community. I’m really curious what makes that beast tick and so I cornered everybody I could find. More on that later (most likely the topic of a future talk).

The vendor booths were just insane; big booths, booth babes, shwag, the whole nine yards. In talking with folks at the conference it almost seems like the vendors are restless; like they aren’t sure what they are at this conference for. It is, afterall, a pretty tough sell. How the heck do you sell something that is free? (I know, I know … its not really free).

Spent the afternoon walking the floor and talking with folks. At 5:30pm we headed over to the OSDL reception at the W hotel. It was a quite nice and got a chance to catch up with folks from Intel, Red Hat and IBM as well as the OSDL folks.

At 6:30pm Alex and I were off to the Gentoo community meeting at the convention center. I took a few minutes to talk to the group (about 30 or so people) and tell them how excited we were with their success and handed out t-shirts and our custom leathermans. Quite fun and good to connect with everybody. To me, these are the folks in the trenches doing the brunt of the open source work.

Finally, we ended up the evening going to “Gaylords” which was a fantastic Indian restaurant. We hooked up with the Gentoo folks so there were like 14 or so of at this restaurant. Very fun. Then off to bed as we have another big day ahead of us.