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Linux Business

LWCE Wrapup 154

Posted by michael from the bean-counting dept.
Okay, let's close out the Linuxworld Expo news as best we can. CNet has an article on the march on City Hall (there's also an AP article) to promote open source in government (some people even want to get Linux certified). CNN loves Linux. Bruce Perens, as we mentioned last night, is bailing out of Hewlett-Packard. And Newsforge has several stories from the Linuxworld floor: 1, 2, 3, 4. And finally, CmdrTaco and Chris Dibona (Gamara here on Slashdot) were on TechTV yesterday (and repeats today). Viewer discretion advised.
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LWCE Wrapup More

LWCE Wrapup

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  • Sun, IBM, Oracle...

    No wonder some of the people were complaining about nausea from too much corporate speak.

    Internal MS reports from the show should be interesting, if ever made public.

  • ah yes... (Score:2, Funny)

    by jeffy124 ( 453342 )
    ... the Million Geek March. If only we could get a million geeks away from their machines.
    • A million geek march... probably not. What about a Million Book March? The DMCA threatens the future of all digital media, and as Lawrence Lessig points out, Adobe eBook reader and its ilk threaten a lot more people than geeks. They threaten librarians, students, and academia. If we could each dump a book on the lawn of the capitol to symbolize the death of the Freedom to Read, now that would be something.

      KWTCMA
    • Well, the two-dozen Geek March, at least.
    • The simple solution (although expensive) is to get each geek a PDA with wireless internet access. That way they can keep in touch and check up on their machines... kind of like a baby monitor.
    • If only we could get a million geeks away from their machines.

      Someone could try convincing Natalie Portman to show up as a featured attraction...I hear she has a pretty big fan-base among geeks.

  • I'm toooo curious... does anyone have any photo's of the MS booth? I have to see it to believe it.

    • It was nothing special... lots of Windows machines, but over on the right side there were a couple of GNOME setups. Obviously the only reason GNOME was there was to keep their Mono people happy.
  • While Cmdrtaco is hanging with the TechTV people, I would be greatly disappointed if he didn't try to get Megan Morrone [techtv.com] to do an interview.

  • I've yet to hear word on the actual experience of Microsoft in the belly of the beast? What sort of stuff did they have there? Did anyone approach them, or were they shunned? Did they "respectfully" keep a distance from people so as to not be exposed to the open-source cancer? Were they brutally GPL'd? Wha happen?

  • Preaching and impossible message. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@@@gmail...com> on Friday August 16, 2002 @11:33AM (#4082786) Journal
    I know and you know that it would be completly impossible for government to go open source only, atleast for now. We need to do this is baby steps. What we should be preaching is open formats, then we can work on open source. Government has a responcibility that its public records can be read by anyone. And that its private records can be read at a later date. Push open formats, thats what government really needs. Nothing illogical about its requirement, and it will open to door to competition and open source in government IT purchases.

  • Upcoming quiz (Score:3, Funny)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @11:34AM (#4082792) Journal
    What will Bruce Perens' next job be?
    • Astronaut
    • Mayor Quimby's bodyguard
    • Beer baron
    • Union leader
    • Springfield Isotopes mascot
    • Missionary
    • Springfield Squares guest
    • Cowboy Neal
  • Jeremy was on a winning team for a change! The Geeks, in the Golden Penguin Bowl, soundly defeated CmdrTaco, Bruce Perens, and some guy picked from the audience with questions like:

    (?; \d/) Line noise or Perl script?

    Bonus question: what does it do?

    RedHat handed out...red hats. Ximian was absent for some reason. The EFF seemed a little more sure of themselves this year. IBM didn't hand out t-shirts. Neither did HotLinuxJobs.com.

    Anyway, way to go Geeks! See you next year! (and here's hoping Chris can check his repepetitive spelling mistakes)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It's obviously a plug for Mono, which is an open source project subject to Microsoft's "guidance".

      Actually, in some senses they're right about their influence in a lot of the open source projects related to GNU/Linux. KDE and Gnome have been heavily influenced by Microsoft's designs, even if they're not following the exact same APIs the principles behind the technologies tend to be "copy, and try to improve, but copy first", and there does seem to be an attitude amongst mainstream open source developers that if Windows does it, then that's the way it has to be done. Including really ugly hacks like using filename extentions to determine what application opens what file (why in Slashdot's name is file meta data still not a part of the Unix desktop?), or attempts to clone the registry as per gconf.

      Whether I'd describe these as the "best" open source projects is another matter, however...

  • Who knew about the march to city hall? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ciurana ( 2603 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @11:49AM (#4082883) Homepage Journal

    Quote:

    But open-source guru Bruce Perens, who marched alongside Tiemann, lamented that most technologists simply aren't paying attention. "It's obvious only a tiny bit of people from (LinuxWorld) turned out, and that presents a problem," he said. "Either they don't understand the issues or they have a business partnership that doesn't allow them to talk about it."

    I live in San Francisco and knew nothing of this march. My friends attending LWCE didn't know about this march. "Expected turn out of 20 to a 100" is bollocks. They didn't announce this in advance, or they'd had more participation. I could have gathered at leat 10 people to go with me. Yesterday I was working on a project *downtown*, so a stroll to city hall was very doable *if* we knew about it.

    Sheesh...

    E
    • sorry to burst your bubble of ignorance, but it has been announced everywhere like at:

      http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/11/1356 22 1&mode=thread&tid=162

      and at:

      http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002- 08 -14-003-26-OS-LL-PB

      and just for kicks at:

      http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2002/pre ss _alert_march.html

      Sorry, but people knew about this, and are afraid of being labeled extreme. To the average American who does not understand these issues, joining groups like the EFF is extreme, and marching on City Halls is extreme.
    • Well, there was a whole article [slashdot.org] about it on slashdot, posted last Sunday.
    • In the streets surrounding the convention center, I saw two flyers advocating other rallys (Not about linux or computers: One was regarding healthcare reform, the second was about the War on Terror).

      I wonder why Bruce & friends didn't put up similar flyers? Or heck, at least print something up for people in the .ORG pavillion.
    • OK, so it was posted on Sunday on /.

      First, I don't believe it was posted on the main entrance screen. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't recall seeing it. And I did check /. *once* on Sunday evening.

      Second, why post it on a fsck -ng Sunday??? It would've got more exposure during the wk, with a gentle reminder on Slashback or somthing.

      Third, there just wasn't more awareness here. The BALUG page didn't say a thing about it either.

      Cheers!

      E

  • Where are there pictures? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FurryFeet ( 562847 ) <(moc.oohay) (ta) (xnaduoj)> on Friday August 16, 2002 @11:55AM (#4082920)
    Anybody knows where can I find pictures of this expo? There's nothing on the site. I'm particularly curious to see Microsoft's booth...

    • Re:Where are there pictures? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://events.kde.org/info/lwce-sf-2002/pictures/
    • The M$ booth was pretty cheap - more like one of those you see from a struggling startup - it was against a 'wall' rather than in the center of the show (maybe they felt safer with their backs against the wall :-) and was about twice the size of the .org booths (KDE, FSF, Gnome etc). They had a fishbowl for biz cards to get an xbox and a blackboardish sort of display in the background promoting (as far as I could tell) ksh (I suspect they were really trying to establish their linux street creds).

      It was suprisingly packed - I had to take my eggs home, couldn't get a clear shot at all

  • I can't help but feel that all this "fighting" among the big companies (e.g. Sun, IBM, HP, etc) is not going to end up well. It seems to me that there is a lot more interest on Linux right now, than there should be. Is there really enough market for all these big companies to make money? It would be a pity if they got all cranked up, found out that there isn't enough money for all of them, and gave up altogether on Linux and Open Source.
    The whole thing seems eerily familiar like the dot.com boom and subsequent crash.
    • These are the same folk who fragmented Unix with all their infighting. But I have since come to the conclusion that it is the GPL which prevents fragmentation. *BSD are just as good in the big picture, yet don't get the press and publicity, and to some extent, don't get the community support. Methinks it is because the BSD license allows proprietary forking, the GPL doesn't. Sometimes I waver a bit and wonder how much personality clashes have to do with it, but there are just as "ownery" ones in the GPL camp. I always come back to the license. Long Live the FSF and GPL!
    • Yes there is a big enough market from IBM, HP (and maybe Sun)...

      The reason they are intrested in linux is because IBM, and HP sell hardware. They are intrested in Linux because when software is free it becomes a commodity thereby increasing the value of the complement product, hardware, which they sell.

      So the bigger and more user maintained the Linux community becomes the less it costs IBM, HP and Sun to make sure Linux is a viable option, and a good reason for them to cooperate.

    • Is there really enough market for all these big companies to make money?

      Probably. If not now then soon there will be. I doubt we'll be able to avoid some of the distro companies going bankrupt though, in fact I'm amazed that so far there haven't been any high profile distro companies going under.

      One thing that irritates me is this reference to the slightly over 500,000 "server shipments" that Linux has, compared to several millions that Windows has. I seem to recall reading that Linux has 25% of the server market, and that was in 2000. IDC never released the figures for 2001 (why?) but this statistic about preinstalled server shipments is misleading. It makes it sound like Linux is way behind in the server arena when really (if IDC is telling the truth) it's not at all. I'd guess this is because most Linux server installs are not preshipped big corporate servers - instead being installed over Windows on a recycled box, or simply not a prebought industrial server. Am I right in this, can somebody clear up this apparently massive discrepancy?

  • Anybody know if there is a streaming/downloadable video of the TechTV report? I don't get TechTV in my area.
    • I've looked and find nothing. Perhaps someone captured the show on a tivo and could share it with the rest of us that way?

      Suggestions anyone?
  • "While they're spending money suing the monopolist, they're also feeding the monopolist with the other hand," Tiemann told the crowd.

    #include <MHO.o>

    I just can't understand why even the thickest politician cannot comprehend this. Purchasing from a company that's under Federal investigation makes about as much sense as hiring R. Kelly [yahoo.com] as a Girl Scout troop leader.
    • > > "While they're spending money suing the monopolist, they're also feeding the monopolist with the other hand," Tiemann told the crowd.
      >
      > #include <MHO.o>
      >
      > I just can't understand why even the thickest politician cannot comprehend this. Purchasing from a company that's under Federal investigation makes about as much sense as hiring R. Kelly [yahoo.com] as a Girl Scout troop leader.

      When the government sues Microsoft, it gets to spend lots of taxpayer dollars.

      When the government buys from Microsoft, it also gets to spend lots of taxpayer dollars.

      If the government's objective were to (a) have the best tool for the job, or (b) take a uniform principled stance for/against the company's business practices, this would be an inconsistency.

      From this, it's reasonable to conclude that neither (a) nor (b) can be the government's objective.

      I would note that if the government's ojective is (c) to spend as many taxpayer dollars as possible in every department in order to inflate headcounts and assure budgetary allocations of more taxpayer dollars next year, all inconsistencies vanishes, both from the government's point of view and from the taxpayer's point of view.

      The world makes a lot more sense when you stop using words like "taxpaying citizen" and "civil servant", and you start using words like "cow" and "farm hand".

    • Re:The bleedin' obvious (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You #include .h files, not .o files

      Wannabe

      • You #include .h files, not .o files

        Fair enough. Good catch, though I don't know why you'd stay anonymous for that one. :) Just dealing with too many objects today for a $box_kernel that all I'm thinking is *.o.

        but I digress...

  • Way to go... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JimPooley ( 150814 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @12:29PM (#4083183) Homepage
    Quote from the article on the two dozen saddoes saunter...

    At one point, marchers came across a historical plaque that was sponsored by Microsoft. They groaned and quickly papered over the software giant's name with a bumper sticker

    Ah, Vandalism. Marvellous way to bring people around to your way of thinking...
    • Ah, Vandalism. Marvellous way to bring people around to your way of thinking...

      Hardly vandalism - that would imply that actually damaged the plaque. A bumper sticker can simply be unpeeled: what I want to know is, what did the sticker say?

      "Shit happens" perhaps? ;)

  • Small fry... (Score:4, Informative)

    by stefanlasiewski ( 63134 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMstefanco.com> on Friday August 16, 2002 @12:38PM (#4083254) Homepage Journal
    Linuxworld seemed like two conferences in one. There was the "Linux, the home-user and small office product" and then there was the "Linux, spend lots of money on this superduper mainframe".

    I'm small fry. I use linux at home, bug hunt for some OSS projects, administer linux & UNIX at a 60-person company. My linux world revolves around home users, small offices, and nonprofits.

    I couldn't even get anybody at the IBM, HP, AMD or RedHat booths to speak to me. They just wanted to scan my card and send me info. But when I asked simple questions ("So, tell me about the s390" "Do you have any server products for smaller offices or for nonprofits"?), the salespeople got huffy and would go pursue some bigger fish.

    It was like they could tell, just from my haircut, that I don't have $400,000,000 to blow on an s390 mainframe.

    Sun was the exception here. Out of all of the Big Business booths the folks in the Sun booth were really excited to show off their products to everyone. The Gnome 2.0 folks were thrilled to talk about small office users. The Cobalt Qube guys really wanted to show off the Qube interface.

    I spent a good amount of time in the .ORG pavillion. The folks there were mostly friendly and talkative, and seemed equally happy to talk with suits, end-users, or administrator types like me.
    • I have been at confences that Sun was at and I have always found that their people are always nice and ready to speak to anyone. It might have to do with the fact that quite a few Sun millionaires are hippies and that the company culture is still set a bit in the sixties.
    • I couldn't even get anybody at the IBM, HP, AMD or RedHat booths to speak to me. They just wanted to scan my card and send me info. But when I asked simple questions ("So, tell me about the s390" "Do you have any server products for smaller offices or for nonprofits"?), the salespeople got huffy and would go pursue some bigger fish.

      Well, they only have a limited amount of time at the conference and there's no sense wasting it on someone who isn't going to buy their products. You'll get that from any conference though. Say you're with the Department of Energy or something and are interested in "workgroup" level hardware. They may bite and talk to you about their smaller solutions in the hope that you'll pass along the good word to your other departments that may be looking for enterprise level products. On the other hand, like you said, Sun seems good about talking to everyone. I guess they just have better sales weasels.

  • But what about my lunch tab? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Spencerian ( 465343 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @12:39PM (#4083257) Homepage Journal
    I don't want to dampen the Linux love fest at all, but I want to know if any attendees picked up a Mac OS X user's lunch tab while they were there. [linuxworld.com]

    Lunch in SF can be pretty expensive, and Mac users have already given their shirt to buy a Macintosh, so... :)

  • Taco (Score:2)

    by JohnG ( 93975 )
    Is it just me or does CmdrTaco look alot like a bigger version of professional wrestler Spike Dudley? They seem to share the same facial type and expressions.

  • Ya know, I never thought much about who or what kinda person Taco is in real life cause, frankly, it really didn't matter that much. But, I decided to flip on the tube and catch the TechTV deal with Taco and Gamara, just cause it seemed kinda nifty after reading so much on /. . I hit a brick wall (or something along those lines) when Taco mentioned that in his attempt to play NWN, he had installed XP 12 times on a box... 12 times... twelve freaking times. ??? What was he doing? Smashing the HD with a hammer during the install process? I mean, come on. I thought this guy was supposed to be halfway intelligent, but he can't even figure out how to get XP working after even a couple installs? Heck, even I typically get 99% of the Windows boxes I set up going after the first try. XP is not hard to install at all (even with some really odd components, they just might not work right away) - MS has made it that way on purpose. I believe he mentioned a few hardware failures (something about having to replace the MB and perhaps another component), and this is all fine and dandy, but I find it hard to believe that in the process of setting up an XP machine he ran into 11 hardware failures. In all of the computers I have ever built and set up, I think I've run into maybe 2 or 3 hardware failures during even the first year of operation (which included at least 1, perhaps 2, failures due to power interuptions from the power company). Maybe he was trying to set up the box during a storm, outside, in the rain, with the covers off all the time, I might understand that. Anyhow, just thought I'd say something about that cause I found it rather ludicrous. For anyone who wasn't able to catch the episode, don't spend a whole lot of time trying to find some way to view it, there really wasn't much substance in the interview. A couple comments were made about a prototype of a new folding, pda-type gadget at LWCE were made (which looked rather cool) but no hands-on reviews were allowed by that company. And then they talked briefly about 64 bit stuff, but that was about it - nothing you can't find online without much effort.

    Note: I've setup Windows, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and various Linux distro boxes before, and the only major install problems I ran into were with some of the Linux and Windows boxes not recognizing some hardware (some normal hardware with Linux, and some oddball stuff with Windows). And Taco, if you're really having all sorts of troubles setting up an XP box, just bring it over to my house, I can get it going for ya, and I'll let you slide on the labor costs this one time.

    • I thought this guy was supposed to be halfway intelligent, but he can't even figure out how to get XP working after even a couple installs?

      Well, installed XP for my dad over top of 98 (I told him not to bother with XP, but anyways...) and it was unstable as hell, MOHAA would crash constantly, etc. This is on a 2 year old stock Dell system.

      So, I backed up his data and reformatted the drive, and tried again. Same results.

      Finally, I start pulling components out of the system. After numerous tries, I finally figure out that XP doesn't like one of his DIMMs. No problems under 98, but somehow XP was crapping out.

      Trust me, you don't laugh at other people having problems with their PC, you feel sorry for them.

  • Inept lobbying (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @01:05PM (#4083463) Homepage
    That's one of the most ineffective attempts at affecting government I've ever heard of. It's so incompetent that it makes one think that Microsoft secretly backed it to make the open source community look stupid.

    Ten to twenty people, many of whom aren't from San Francisco, "march" on the San Francisco City Hall for a state issue. Nobody from City Hall meets them there. That is so clueless.

    It would be a lot more effective to find some application San Francisco is running, badly, on closed source, and help them out. (Hint: the City Assessor's office is a mess.) SF tax revenues are way down since the dot-com thing tanked, and some help might be welcome. Once you get one or two successes, hold a press conference.

    Just publicly donating a copy of Red Hat (since Red Hat's CTO was behind this) to the city, with the explaination that "you can make all the copies you want", made with suitable press coverage, would be more effective.

  • Thank you Bruce (Score:5, Interesting)

    by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @01:06PM (#4083466)
    I thought I should say this loud. Bruce Perens is becoming one of the public persons I respect the most. He is resigning from a comfortable position at HP in order to be able to be more active in politics, and he wants to be politically active in order to defend the public interest, and ideals like freedom.

    Most people have unfortunately ethics a posteriori. They (we) do whatever benefits them (us), and then find an ethical justification for whatever we do or we are. He is going the other around.

    Bruce, let me just say thank you. People like you make this world a little nicer :-)

    • Re:Thank you Bruce (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not giving up a comfy job, he's only giving up some so-so benefits (HP benefits are nearly as nice as they once were) by going contract. He'll still be working for HP and still getting paid by HP, but the IRS won't classify him as an employee so no benefits, but also less risk for HP. I'm sure he makes enough money that benefits really aren't a big issue (it doesn't take much, most employers far exaggerate the value of their benefits, something you don't find out until you try going it alone).

  • Too politcal vs. too productive (Score:3, Insightful)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @01:09PM (#4083492) Homepage
    It's understandable to be too productive to be someone else's employee because you're not being most efficiently utilized, but being too political to be someone else's employee is a different story. Maybe you should look at the Santa Clara unemployment rate and figure out if political inclination is as underutilized as it feels, before resigning from HP.
    • It's that his politics don't agree with theirs. HP stopped Bruce from doing the DVD demo at the encryption convention, which he was doing to point out how the DMCA protects stupidity. About two days later HP sited the DMCA while trying to stop a press release on a security bug in HP-UX iirc. I'm sure he's just being rational and trying not to burn that bridge.
  • Yes, it was a small step and probably had no effect on legislators -- but it was still a step in the right direction.

    I think if there had been ten people walking the floor of the show either handing out flyers or just loudly announcing the march, a lot more people might have joined in. It needed to be better publicized!!

    So next year, let's do it again and bring signs and bullhorns. There are really vocal paid lobbyists for the other side; it's time that we made some noise of our own.

    And besides, it was a lot of fun!

  • Sun Linux update (Score:2, Informative)

    by DavidBurns ( 518946 )

    My company has done some market research for Sun, and we attended Sun's VIP Day presentations at LinuxWorld.

    Here is some information I gleaned from the presentations, Sun's website, and the LX50 documentation:

    Kernel version: 2.4.9-31

    Apache version: 1.3.22

    Tomcat 3.2.1

    J2SE SDK 1.4

    SunOne ASP (Chilisoft ASP) 3.6.2

    Red Hat 7.2 ships with the 2.4.7 kernel and with Apache 1.3.20, so Sun has done some buffing of the distribution. It may be 7.2 with errata applied. 2.4.9-31 is Red Hat's recommended kernel for 7.2; it closes the zlib vulnerability.

    The Sun/Chilisoft ASP support normally sells for $495.

    For more information, see our market brief [sealrock.com].

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