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LinuxWorld Exhibitors' Responses to Slashdot Questions 191

Posted by Roblimo from the with-pen-and-notepad-through-the-unholy-land dept.
Most of the questions we got for LinuxWorld exhibitors were pretty general, with no specific exhibitor attached to them. I did my best to get appropriate people to answer them. Here are the results. (And for those who wonder... Kevin Mitnick emailed - he's been traveling and busy, but hopes to get his answers to us shortly.)
Strategies (Score:5, Interesting)
by Oculus Habent

For Hardware Vendors:

What basic strategies are you employing to better penetrate the server/appliance market with Linux systems?

I chose to ask Lou Martelli, the PR guy for InfiniCon Systems this one first. He said, "High-performance, low-cost clusters on commodity servers, specifically that work with InfiniBand." Okay, fine. He then launched into a spiel about InfiniCon products that had words like "value" and "interoperability" in it but didn't answer my question. I asked again, and got another sales pitch. Okay. Fine. This company's strategy to better penetrate the appliance/server market with Linux is to use a lot of marketing buzzwords.

Tim Lee, president of Pogo Linux, did better. He pointed to the products on display in his company's booth, and they looked so good I wanted to take them all home with me on the spot. The company's "Why Choose Pogo Linux?" Web page, which Tim pointed me to, showed more of their strategy: Strong Linux commitment.

Tim also said, "We're right across the street from Microsoft. We sell a lot of stuff to Microsoft people. There's a lot of Linux running at Microsoft. A lot of Microsoft developers prefer to work with Linux."

Heh. If Tim and his crew are making money selling Linux systems to Microsoft, well and good. You start getting the geeks in a company interested in Linux, and as those geeks get promoted up the management ladder, more often than not Linux starts to infiltrate the company's server rooms. This often takes place without top management's knowledge. We'll want to keep in touch with Tim, and see how big the "server/appliance market" for Linux systems gets inside Microsoft.

Dear Redhat Software (Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward

What is your response to the vulterant claims that your Gnome/KDE setup is breaking QT apps and causing havoc for developers who make use of QT?

Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan said any KDE breakage was unintentional; that the big problem is that Red Hat's developers are almost all Gnome people, and Bero (Bernhard Rosenkraenzer), their only real KDE person, left the company last year.

(Bero has since started his own distribution, Ark Linux.)

Anyway, Hogan says, the breakage is only in Red Hat 8.0's default hybrid Gnome/KDE Bluecurve desktop, but "if you just run KDE, not Bluecurve, there are no problems."

And for the followup questioner who wanted to know what "vulterant" meant, it doesn't show up as a word at dictionary.com and a Google search with "vulterant" as a keyword returned zero results.

To Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
by gmuslera

Considering that this is called "LinuxWorld", what product will you release next for Linux?

See the answer to the next question. Might as well handle these two together...

To Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
by Oculus Habent

Do you plan on producing Open Source components to any of your products? This primarily refers to server components, such as HTTP, DNS, IMAP, etc. which could function externally to the base programs (Exchange, ISA, etc.) and offer simpler and more granular control over active services.

I approached a person in the Microsoft booth whose badge identified him as "John Kotas" and asked him what products Microsoft planned to introduce for Linux. "I don't know," he said. I turned to one of Kotas's coworkers, whose badge was not visible, and asked the same question and also the one about producing open source components for Microsoft server products. Again, "I don't know."

I tried again, both questions, with a Microsoft person whose badge identified him as Jeff Albertson. He said, "As far as I know Microsoft has no plans for Linux products, but I'm not a media spokesperson, hold on, I'll get you one."

I turned around, and there was smiling, affable Mark Martin, an account executive with Microsoft's PR firm, Waggener Edstrom, who said, "I can work on getting an official spokesperson for you," when I asked him about Microsoft's Linux product plans.

In response to the other question, he said, "Microsoft has made its bet on Windows, and at the present time continues to stay the course. We hear from customers that they are getting great value from the Windows platform.

"We realize it's a heterogeneous world, and that's one of the reasons we're at LinuxWorld, talking about Unix services, which are also applicable for Linux."

Then we talked about football. Mark thought the Raiders were going to win the Super Bowl. I figured the Bucs would take it. He offered to help me set up any interviews I needed with Microsoft people. I will take him up on this offer. (In the past, Waggener Edstrom and Microsoft have been very poor about returning calls and emails from Slashdot and NewsForge people. We will see how well this promise is kept. We haven't interviewed a Microsoft exec for a long time.)

What is the best giveaway item? (Score:5, Interesting)
by burgburgburg

In your experience as a convention exhibitor, what is the most effective giveaway item you've ever used to draw people to your booth long enough to make a pitch? What will people wait in line for, sit through demos for, fill out long questionaires for, let you swipe their card for, jostle others to get?

Conversely, what was the lamest giveaway item you were ever saddled with? Where you had to throw it at passersby, and even then they recoiled in dismay?

None of the exhibitors I talked to wanted to go on record with this one. A Red Hat person said (on condition of anonymity), "Demo CDs are always the best." This was echoed by other software vendors: A Linux crowd likes demo software more than anything else.

In the press room, long-time tech journalist -- and now owner of food site eGullet.com -- Jason Perlow said his favorite was a miniature Rubik's Cube on a key chain from Intel. He also liked an HP giveaway: "It's a stuffed, squeezable penguin that you only get if you sit through a presentation first. It's very nice to hold. It could double as a marital aid, too."

Ummm... okay, Jason.

Other journalists chimed in. A Favorite was the foam penguin marionettes several had spotted around the show, but no one remembered who was giving them out. The journo crowd also liked the Red Hat (red) baseball caps, which were being given out at set times, and you had to line up to get. The SuSE lizards were also prized.

On the down side, t-shirts were considered passe, at least by the tech journalists at LinuxWorld, most of whom go to enough trade shows that after a few years they have a lifetime supply of corporate t-shirts and don't need any more.

One well-known reporter said, "I've seen so many giveaways over the years that the only way to get my attention now would be to give me a server. No, make that a cluster."

To icculus.org (Score:5, Interesting)
by alkini

To icculus.org (booth #9): What is it like to be a small organization at a big convention with people like HP, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc? Do people give you any credit for what you are doing?

The obvious answer: Icculus was the darling of LinuxWorld. Their booth drew more traffic per square foot than any other display.

A deeper answer, by email over the weekend from Icculus dude Ryan Gordon:

As to being a little organization:

There were really two types of people coming by the booth. One would say, "Wow, you can do this on Linux?!" and the other would say, "How much are you selling this for?"

This tells me, contrary to popular belief, that people don't always expect handouts when looking at open source software. However, they don't see something that impresses them as often as they should, and it's gotten to the point where a product with any amount of polish is assumed to be commercial...and anything free is buggy, ugly, slow, something. I remember feeling a sense of awe the first time I loaded Enlightenment many years ago. Maybe people were feeling that same awe while watching a round of PyDDR: the sense that the technology that's been staring you in the face all this time can be much, much cooler than you ever dreamed. You can't get that feeling of awe from a presentation on how Company X's servers are 20% more scalable than their competitors.

Video games are sexy. People need to be aware that GNU/Linux is more than just something to drive your webservers.

Oh, and representatives from all the "Big Companies" stopped by at various points in the show to play the video games. Including Microsoft. I'm not threatened at all. :)

As for credit:

A lot of people (myself included) feel that video games are a major factor in getting GNU/Linux to the masses. I can't count the number of people that have said, "Thanks for porting [GAME X]! It was the only reason I kept a Windows partition around!" I heard this a million times at the show from people that don't even consciously consider themselves gamers. I also had a lot of students ask me how to get into the video game industry. We're the answer there, too. Just look at our ports of Quake 2, Freespace 2, Alien vs. Predator, etc. Commercial games that have been open-sourced are a great way to see how the pros did it, and give you a means to tinker with the code (experience, experience, experience). The amateur games we host (Black Shades, Bitstream, OES, etc) are also an attempt to nurture future game developers that are Unix-friendly. The person writing Battle Pong today might be writing Unreal 3 tomorrow.

A lot of people see icculus.org as a kind of Loki reborn. I don't know about that, but overall, people seem to be happy with what we're doing, both as a project hosting site and as game developers.

To the KDE team (Score:5, Funny)
by secondsun

Which will come first, Duke Nukem Forever or KDE 3.1?

I didn't manage to hook up with KDE. Sorry. I went to where their booth was supposed to be, but didn't spot them. Another journo said they weren't around.

Perhaps a KDE developer reading this can fill us in.

To Macrovision Corp. (Score:5, Interesting)
by josh crawley

To Macrovision Corp. (booth R10)

As I understand, your main stakes are in the encoding of ntsc and pal video signals as to make them uncopyable in receiving hardware (correct me if I'm incorrect).

As that stated, why are you involved with Linux? Are you contributing to the video section (V4L) of the Linux kernel or making user-land utilities? In general, what are your open business plans with Linux?

Nancy Robbins of Macrovision said, "We're not with the video group." She offered to put me in touch with the people at the company who are. (Perhaps we'll talk with them another time.)

The Macrovision people at LinuxWorld were from their Enterprise Software Division (formally Globetrotter Software). They were there to push Electronic License Management and Software Asset Management products.

Ms. Robbins described this as "electronic licensing for software" and said their new Java-enabled version worked with Linux. She explained the value of their "license management system" and talked of how one of its great "value-adds" was its ability to handle "multiple pricing models."

Apparently Macrovision believes there is now enough commercial software being written for Linux -- by companies that want to use encrpyted "unlock" keys to prevent unauthorized used of their precious intellectual property (sigh) -- to make it worth their while to be at LinuxWorld.

As a follow-up question, I asked how long they thought it would be until their licensing scheme was cracked. Neither Ms. Robbins nor her coworker, Pam Watkinson, had an answer for that one.

To Linux Software Vendors (Score:5, Interesting)
by MyGirlFriendsBroken

Is Mac OS X a big enough competitor (for want of a better word) to the Linux server/desktop market to warrant porting products over to either OS X or to Darwin?

This is with focus on the server side.

I asked Pete Goodall of Ximian this one. He said, "Not that it's not viable, it's just a lot of work. We have no plans [to port to OS X] at this time."

One of the software engineers at Cylant (whose CylantSecure 2.0 was named Best Security Solution at LinuxWorld) said, when asked about a Mac OS X or Darwin port, "That's not for us, I don't think. No." He ruminated for a second, then added, "That's because there aren't enough Mac servers to make it worthwhile."

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LinuxWorld Exhibitors' Responses to Slashdot Questions More

LinuxWorld Exhibitors' Responses to Slashdot Questions

Comments Filter:

  • Slightly dissapointed about the Darwin responce (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Neophytus ( 642863 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:11PM (#5168647)
    'We wont develop because there isnt enough of a target userbase' - If good applications are developed that outweigh the rivals then surely a userbase creates itself? Or am I just naive in thinking that eventually Apple servers could stand their own against MS and *NIX servers

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:21PM (#5168709)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Apple really needs to get it together in the way of documentation before I'd consider OS X a "practical" server platform. With Linux or *BSD, at least I have the source, so I can figure things out. With OS X, substantial portions are available in binary form only, and so it's kind of important that documentation is available.

    • My original thinking when I asked the question was that I seems to me that more "geeks" are taking notice of OS X, I'm one of them. With this in mind on a corperate level I think that IT/IS (whatever) bosses might be more inclined to go with a non M$ platform if it is suported ny a large corperation. After all it has a nice GUI and is easy to use and so it alows managment to feel they have more ownership of a project than perhaps there techical ability would otherwise enable them to.

      It is with this in mind that I think the the userbase may come (I hope so) but only if there is the software products and a will amoungst both workers and managment to use OS X

    • Re:Slightly dissapointed about the Darwin responce (Score:5, Informative)

      by vipw ( 228 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:55PM (#5168872)
      I work at Cylant, I was the engineer asked the question about porting to Mac OS X.

      I also run Mac OS X at home on my powerbook, so it's not like my answer was put out in an attempt to poison the platform. I do think that Apple's servers can hold their own, they do lack a little variability but they have a great package for the low-middle range.

      The above poster was absolutely correct, security in today's market is seen as an afterthought. You have functionality that *must* be provided and if you can find some mechanisms to provide security on your systems that are being put at risk it is only then that security becomes something you are willing to purchase.

      The Xserve is a great little server, but most of its installations are internal to provide print and file services. CylantSecure is more targetted to internet servers where Mac OS X isn't making large enough inroads. I work for a computer security vendor, but I know better than to think a security product can be the "killer app" that drives someone to a platform. The most important thing a company has to provide is functionality, security and reliability are for making sure there are no problems with providing the functionality.

      Anyway, those are just some qualifications for why I responded with what I did.
    • Until they stop costing 2x as much as an equivalent BSD server, they will never hold their own. Sure, they might be easier to work with, but at 2x the cost, I could just get two servers that are more secure, faster, and have a wide base of admins who know how to handle them. Apple made a step in the right direction with their adoptation of a BSD kernel, but the price is still too high

  • Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wzm ( 644503 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:13PM (#5168657) Homepage
    So, why did MS get that best of show award? Sure, they have Services For Unix, but if it doesn't run on Linux, why should they get any sort of press at LinuxWorld? Am I missing something?

  • Overall mood (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Amsterdam Vallon ( 639622 ) <amsterdamvallon2003@yahoo.com> on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:13PM (#5168658) Homepage
    What would you say was the overall mood at this year's conference? How was it different from years past (I don't know because I've never attended one)?

    Thanks,
    - AV

  • kde 3.1 or Duke Nukem Forever (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:14PM (#5168668)
    Which will come first, Duke Nukem Forever or KDE 3.1?

    i don't know about duke nukem, but 3.1 is here today. http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html. check the mirrors.

  • cool (Score:4, Funny)

    by pummer ( 637413 ) <spamNO@SPAMpumm.org> on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:14PM (#5168669) Homepage Journal
    I'm gonna become a tech journalist. That way I can walk around wearing my Red Hat cap, Microsoft T-shirt, Linux press badge, carrying a bag full of demo CDs. I can also have in my duffel a Rubik's Cube keychain and, to top it all off, a squeezy penguin.

    Worth the price of admission?

    • Re:cool (Score:3, Funny)

      by mttlg ( 174815 )

      I'm gonna become a tech journalist. That way I can walk around wearing my Red Hat cap, Microsoft T-shirt, Linux press badge, carrying a bag full of demo CDs. I can also have in my duffel a Rubik's Cube keychain and, to top it all off, a squeezy penguin.

      As a self-declared expert in the field of free stuff (see my web site, the writing section in particular, for more information), I must caution against such a lifestyle. Sure, it looks glamorous, but what are you going to do with all the stuff? It won't be long before your closet is full of pens, pencils, highlighters, note pads, refrigerator magnets, keychains, t-shirts, hats, letter openers, stress balls, water bottles, plastic cups, and all sorts of other little things that may or may not be useful at some point in the future. You'll realize that the things you use every day, from your drinking glass to your coasters, your swiss army knife, your eyeglass cleaning cloths, and even your mints, were all free, and you won't know what you would do without them - you might actually have to buy something! Trust me, that's not the kind of life anybody wants...

      • How can you say these things? It's Free!!!! All Free!!! Stuff and swag and gimmees. Free! Free! Free! What else is life about? There is stuff, cool stuff, dumb stuff, dull stuff, tasty stuff and people are handing it out for FREEEE!!!!!

        I'm tired now. I'm going to go take a nap.

    • Tech journalists never pay admission. Unless they really suck.

      Don't forget the free meals.

  • RedHat on KDE (Score:5, Funny)

    by niom ( 638987 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:16PM (#5168681)

    Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan said any KDE breakage was unintentional

    the big problem is that Red Hat's developers are almost all Gnome people

    the breakage is only in Red Hat 8.0's default hybrid Gnome/KDE Bluecurve desktop

    So RedHat's default setup broke one of the two big Linux desktops and there's nothing to complain about because they only did it out of incompetence and not on purpose? Well, that's like totally vulterant.

  • ... vulterant=vulturine? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:22PM (#5168712)
    Perhaps the word the questioner was looking for was:

    vulterine [m-w.com]

    Main Entry: vulturine
    1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of vultures
    2 : RAPACIOUS, PREDATORY

  • Macromedia or Macrovision? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shiflett ( 151538 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:22PM (#5168713) Homepage
    "Nancy Robbins of Macromedia said..."

    Where was she from, Macromedia or Macrovision? The question was directed at Macrovision.

  • Services For Unix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kourino ( 206616 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:23PM (#5168716) Homepage

    Is it me, or was anyone else really confused by the response by the Microsoft guy? They're there to "talk about Unix services"? Well, it makes more sense in terms of their Services for Unix. Incidentally, reading the page for SFU, it's good to see real Unixy stuff in Windows. (No, I don't think it will "take away" market from existing Unix products. (Windows + Korn shell) != FreeBSD. I admit to being a little leary about the prospect, but I don't see it happening.)

    Anyone have any experience with this Services For Unix thing? I don't have access to Windows machines to run the trials on.

    I'm still confused as to why they're at LWCE, when the webpage bills it as "the #1 place for companies that sell, market or promote Linux based products, services, applications and solutions," and they claim to have no plans whatsoever to sell, market, or promote Linux-based anything. I guess that leaves reasons for coming sowhere around building mindshare in the Linux world :3 Although the fact that they seem to be using GPLed utilities [newsforge.com] in their SFU is very interesting. (And perhaps their foot in the door.)

    Disclaimer: this is not a Microsoft flame. I am not an anti-Microsoft junkie. Do please refrain from flaming if you want to reply.

    • Even without SFU, it's a convenient way for them to dispel FUD and counter ridiculous conspiracy theories made by zealots.

      They can perhaps give some insight to corporate show-goers about how linux and Windows can exist on the same network, talk about TCO and whatnot.

      There are two sides to every story. They belong there, IMO, to balance the zealot-crappery which would drag the convention down into the gutter with namecalling and uninformed software-bashing.

    • Re:Services For Unix (Score:3, Informative)

      by reaper20 ( 23396 )
      Anyone have any experience with this Services For Unix thing?

      It is pretty cool. It's nice to have an NFS share tab right along the SMB tab, all integrated into the GUI and MMC.

      Of course, it's pretty pathetic that you have to spend another hundred bucks on TOP of the ~$800 you paid for 2000 Server just to get it export NFS shares, like every other OS on the planet.
    • I'm still confused as to why they're at LWCE

      unlike other software companies, they've got $$ to spend on resources to fill a booth (people, gizmo's booth rental, etc).

      it's always better to have the booths filled up with something than to have them sitting empty *cough*KDE*cough*

    • Re:Services For Unix (Score:5, Funny)

      by bbh ( 210459 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:42PM (#5168822)
      After 5 years in development, we're proud to announce we've developed echo and discard for Windows XP.... This shows we wish to bridge the gap between UNIX and the Windows Environment. Quote Of The Day (QOTD) is currently in development but should be ready for Windows 2003. We hope to have further earth shattering announcements at next years LinuxWorld! Maybe a quote expansion pack for the 2004 LinuxWorld!

      bbh
      • Not to spoil a funny joke (5 years for discard, heh), but MS's "Simple TCP/IP Services" have been around for a while now, which include not only echo and discard but other such favorites as daytime and chargen!

        At my last job I set up the login script for all the clients on the Win2K network to do a quick "telnet mainserver 17" in order to provide all the random "Quote of the Day" goodness a user could possibly want.

    • They were there for the same reason that everyone else was there: to sell stuff. It's that simple. There's no deep meaning philosophy behind it. No conspiracy. They're there to sell.
    • I'm still confused as to why they're at LWCE, ...

      It's called "R&D"

      you might say that microsoft has an "outsourced" R&D department. the only thing is, the guys on the outside of microsoft, dont actually realize they're doing the work for microsoft at the time...

    • Re:Services For Unix (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dunkirk ( 238653 )
      I've used it for awhile. It basically has 3 parts: NFS (client and server), korn shell (and really basic utils), and Perl. (It also has a revamped telnet server, but so what?) The NFS stuff is... well, NFS. I hate NFS. (For some reason, I keep getting it cocked up such that I need a reboot.) The shell is worthless. The Perl is ActiveState's [activestate.com] version, and you can get that for free anyway.

      If you really want to put a bunch of Unix tools on Windows, you ought to look at CygWin [cygwin.com]. I've tested it only briefly, and it's even got an X server. In that regard, it's pretty cool. You can load what bits you want and leave the rest out.

      The problem with putting Unix tools on Windows is that it's still Windows. I'm not trying to be funny here. The main advantage of having a shell is being able to administrate the system under which the shell is running. While it might be nice to do some awk'ing and sed'ing natively under Windows, you still can't do a whole lot of administration with it. Let's face it, for more than a few lines of shell script, Perl's a better way to go these days. At that point, what's the use of spending money on this product? NFS? Just put samba on your NFS servers instead and quit fooling around with the clients.

  • Globetrotter/Macrovision's flexlm is in wide use (Score:5, Informative)

    by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:27PM (#5168735) Homepage

    How do you think that companies like nVidia design and test their chips? Answer: by running expensive electronic design automation tools and simulators, mainly on big server farms running Linux or Solaris. Almost all of these tools, which cost thousands to tens of thousands per seat, use a flexlm-based license manager. With this kind of setup, as many machines as you like can have the tool installed, but the tool checks out a license from the networked license server in order to operate.

    Your question about how long it would take people to crack such schemes isn't interesting: it is not extremely difficult for a good assembly language programmer to crack it, by, for instance, patching the binary executable with a hex editor. However, in practice this does not matter, as the price of being caught might well be expulsion from the chip design business: you can't design chips without tools, you need upgrades to the tools on a regulat basis thanks to Moore's Law, so you can't piss off your suppliers. In that sense, your license manager is just a technique to monitor your compliance with your contract (e.g. that you have 250 Verilog simulator licenses).

    • Except that when you are a small company using software that you have paid for that happens to also use flexlm for license management it can be a major pain in the administrators butt.

      We have two such products that both need to run on the same server. Both products in their start up and install scripts start-up flexlm, on the same port. Every time I do a patch/upgrade/reinstall I have to force feed the programs to listen to differant ports, which is sort of like bending over backwards in the case of these particular programs.

      Now mind you, both these programs that use flexlm came from another software company than macrovision, but god damn, its annoying as hell! Plus the time I spend on other systems filling out forms and faxing it into the company to be gracious enough to get back to me within 24 hours with the license key for the privliage of using the crappy software that we licensed from them for 30 grand.

    • Re:Globetrotter/Macrovision's flexlm is in wide us (Score:5, Informative)

      by t ( 8386 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @03:09PM (#5168983) Homepage
      I once had a chance encounter with a woman who turned out to be an employee of flexlm. I asked her if it had ever been cracked and she said "oh yes, several times." She said that the company always takes legal action and has successfully silenced all cracks. Her statement is undoubtedly true since flexlm is and has always been a crappy product, largely unchanged for years, to think that they stumbled upon the perfect copy protection scheme is ridiculous.
      • Having tested (and deleted) a copy of the beautiful Maya rendering program with pixar extensions protected by flexim, I can assure you it hasn't been silenced.

        The grandparent to this post is right, Flexim works because it provides an authoratative, though not necessarily effective, way to keep your legal licencees in line. Who cares if a group of smart 18 year olds with absolutely nothing else to do all day can crack it in a months? Our youth have always been more intelligent than we gave them credit for, but our youth don't go on to make feature-length multimillion dollar films, or the other uses that flexim protects against.

    • FlexLM is a curse (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Many years ago I worked on a competitor product to FlexLM for a three letter company that no longer exists. It was a vastly superior product from every aspect, except due to a management meltdown common for this company (remember, it no longer exists), the product never shipped.

      It is sad but true that in most ways FlexLM is the WORST of class for these software licensing products. Yet, it continues to live on while its competition is long forgotten (anyone remember NetLS?). I believe this is because it is VERY easy to deal with from a software producer prospective. This of course is yet more proof that the end user sometimes really does have little say in what they must live with.

      As for the prospects of something ever displacing FlexLM... don't bet on it. There is a very high cost of entry to this market as to be even slightly competitive the competitor product must be pervasive, available on all platforms. That costs lots of $$$s.

      Which is all a long way of saying that the (minor) tragedy of our project's failure is it probably was one of the few efforts sufficiently funded to compete with FlexLM, and it failed for purely internal reasons.

      And thus we all must continue to live with FlexLM many years later....
  • --I'd be interested in hearing from anyone here who uses these cylant security products and would like to comment on them. Thanks in advance.

    • Re:cylant (feedback) (Score:4, Informative)

      by scottwimer ( 628340 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:49PM (#5168844) Homepage
      Disclaimer: I am the CTO Cylant.

      We've been running CylantSecure on our external systems for the past couple of years. We've been eating our own dog food, so to speak. All I can say is, "mmm, tasty!" :) Since early 2000 various different companies and goverenmental organizations have evaluated and experimented with CylantSecure, so far we've consistently gotten positive feedback.

      To make evaluating CylantSecure easier, it has a built in 30 day fully-featured evaluation period.

      scottwimer

  • vulterant (Score:5, Funny)

    by ryants ( 310088 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:29PM (#5168741)
    Krabappel: You know, before I came to this web site I never even heard of the word "vulterant".

    Hoover: I don't know why, it's a perfectly cromulant word.

    The only thing I can come up with is "vult + erant", which would be Latin for "he/she/it wants + they were".

  • Not across from the main Microsoft campus (Score:4, Informative)

    by Flamesplash ( 469287 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:29PM (#5168742) Homepage Journal
    Tim also said, "We're right across the street from Microsoft. We sell a lot of stuff to Microsoft people. There's a lot of Linux running at Microsoft. A lot of Microsoft developers prefer to work with Linux."

    Not to take away from anything that was said but they are not across from the [yahoo.com] main Microsoft campus, but rather between the smaller satellite and the main campus. This gives them less MS visibility though, than being across the street.

    • Re:Not across from the main Microsoft campus (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Being a Pogo Linux employee, I have to say we are infact across the street from Microsoft. Building 119 to be exact.

      There are plenty of benefits being so close to MS, I take the shuttle buses regularly to get around for lunch. :)

  • Vulterant (Score:3, Funny)

    by nuwayser ( 168008 ) <pete AT tux DOT org> on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:30PM (#5168750) Homepage Journal
    Egads! Vocabulary creationism rivaling Dubya! How misinappropriate!

  • Meaning of "Vulterant" (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:30PM (#5168755)
    No, I didn't create the word; so I'm just taking an uninformed guess. "Vulterant" (vulturent) might be a created term meaning "in the style of a vulture or buzzard"? Since a "vulture" can be defined as "a person of a rapacious, predatory, or profiteering nature." and this is of what Redhat was accused with their mucking about with KDE; the derivation reads logically to me.

    Then again, perhaps "buzzardly" was already taken or wasn't politically correct enough.

    Qvacks.
  • What is your response to the vulterant claims that your Gnome/KDE setup is breaking QT apps and causing havoc for developers who make use of QT?

    (...)

    Anyway, Hogan says, the breakage is only in Red Hat 8.0's default hybrid Gnome/KDE Bluecurve desktop, but "if you just run KDE, not Bluecurve, there are no problems."

    Eep! If the default settings are broken, and 80% of users use the default settings, then there is no 'only' about it.

    "Sure, the tires will burst of you drive faster then 50mph, but that only happens when you use the default tires that come with the truck."

    'only' is a word when you talk about a minority of people, as in, "it only breaks for KDE users who use Sawfish as their window manager".

    • Re:'only' broken with KDE/Bluecurve? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A question for the KDE guys who get bent out of shape about what Redhat did: Would it upset you if Redhat dropped KDE entirely?

      (This isn't sarcastic, nor a flame. I am actually being serious, and there is no hidden meaning.)
      • You're question isn't directed to me (I'm a completely biased Gnome user), but I actually think it would be a good move.

        If RedHat really is composed of Gnome people, then they should drop KDE, not because KDE is an inferior product, but just because sometimes it's wisest to remove the duplication of effort and focus doing one thing well. There is already too much duplicate effort when it comes to desktops (Gnome, KDE, others) and applications (OpenOffice, Gnome Office, KOffice... etc, etc).

        Sometimes it's better to drop a project then to release a project that is half-baked.
      • I used to be a KDE user. When 8.0 came out, having read about all of the controversy, I put GNOME on my 8.0 box. I found I liked it better. I see no reason to go back. If RH dropped KDE, I would not shed a single tear.
      • I love Kde (2.x), so I'll respond.

        Red Hat obviously has a strategy of simplifying their interface and options, and standardizing across their default installations. As Red Hat gets used more for servers than desktops, the choice of KDE or Gnome seems kind of ridiculous. "Do you want that sandal to come with the velvet or suede winter boot cover option?" If I want a computer to be bogged down in UI, I would (and do) install Mandrake. If I want a svelte sverver install across many machines with service, Red Hat would be a good option. Do I care if I can write shell scripts in Koffice? Not really.

        If anything, a dropping of KDE would allow Red Hat to focus on what it does best, and would make clearer the distinction between several different distros. I say go for it, my felt fedora friends. KDE away! And the mice shall play.

        -C

    • Re:'only' broken with KDE/Bluecurve? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Perhaps they meant that it "only" breaks for users who think "vulterant" is a real word.

      ;-)

    • Eep! If the default settings are broken, and 80% of users use the default settings, then there is no 'only' about it.

      Thing is, the default isn't KDE/Bluecurve, the default is GNOME/Bluecurve - as such, the only thing needed to remember is that if you change from GNOME to KDE, you need to change the theme as well.

    • Eep! If the default settings are broken, and 80% of users use the default settings, then there is no 'only' about it.

      Could somebody PLEASE explain exactly what has broken in KDE BlueCurve? Everytime somebody mentions this I have asked what exactly broke, and so far haven't got any satisfactory answers, only links to a page on mosfets site (for those who don't know, mosfet is hardly the most reliable source around). People keep mentioning "breakage", other than the UI tweaks I'd like more info on this.

    • The answer as quoted is not correct.
      Bluecurve is a theme, and some default
      configuration options. It does not to my
      knowledge break anything. A theme + config options
      should not even be able to.

      We introduced a bug, renaming .desktop files,
      but that was since fixed and I would not categorize it under the name "Bluecurve" anyway, it was just a random bug.

      Here is a not-affiliated-with-Red-Hat link that
      catalogs everything in some detail:
      http://www.cyber.com.au/users/mikem/redha t8kde.htm l

      But in general, please send specifics if anything is broken; we have rapidly fixed everything we've
      been told about or discovered.
    • Normally I let paraphrasings, and out of context statements go, they exist and you live with them. And I know Rob wasn't being vulterantinentatioustic.

      But, since this post took issue with specific phrasing that fell even out of the quotes, let me clarify:

      Problem One: I never let Rob finish his question. He said "A reader wants to know..." I said "Why 'we broke KDE'?"... to which he replied "Yeah, have you seen the post?"...I said "No, but we've been accused of it enough times for me to guess..." and went into the same answer I have always given (which comes later.)

      As such, I never dealt with the issue, which is a false assertion that we are "breaking KDE apps", false for one, b/c there is one known issue, with one qt library, affecting KDE, and no third party apps. And two b/c 'broke' in the context of being 'vulterant' implies we did it on purpose.

      Sigh. Which I might as well mention was the attempted point of a follow up poster, that breaking something accidentally, implies incompetence. Many times this is called a bug. Trying to do what we did, is a complex task. The fact that there was one known library incompatibility is a pretty mean feat.

      Now that I've answered the question readers actually asked, let me go ahead and clarify what is left to look like "Red Hat says, run Bluecurve and it breaks, run KDE and you're okay..."

      Do I have to say how stupid I would look actually saying that? Or how career limiting the manuever might be?

      Here's what I said, or much closer, and certainly in fuller context:

      (Recall my seguay into the canned answer) "Breaking software in our release only makes us look bad, any breakages are incidental. The most complaints *I have heard* were from those trying to switch out of Bluecurve and run the default KDE, and of those left, most were configuration issues lost in an upgrade. Those running KDE natively *or* the default, don't seem to be complaining."

      Or words to that effect. Another reader brought in Gnome, which never really came up beyond the Bero part, but I might as well get to that too, as it's related to this post's focus on 'only in Red Hat's default hybrid...'

      I would never call Bluecurve a hybrid, nor did I. This is most likely why this part was left out of quotes. Bluecurve is a theme, and default configuration. The behavior of gtk or qt apps that look the same, are a result of this, not an effort to hybridize or negate anything.

      Bero barely came up. I wouldn't say there was any 'big problem' with Bero's departure, other than a quality engineer is no longer with the company. Yes he was our KDE package maintainer. But he's still fighting to good fight at his own company. Red Hat has had more Gnome developers than KDE for awhile now.

      --jeremy

  • w00t! (Score:4, Funny)

    by dolson ( 634094 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:40PM (#5168806) Homepage Journal
    The person writing Battle Pong today might be writing Unreal 3 tomorrow.

    When do I start???!!?

  • Swag (Score:1)

    by AlgUSF ( 238240 )
    I would go just for the swag (as long as my company was paying for me to go). Nifty keychain rubik's cubes, stuffed penguins. I would probably get kicked out though for heckling the Microsoft booth. I would probably frisbee AOL CDs at them or something... Am I the only one who finds it kinda stupid the MSFT was at LinuxWorld?

  • KDE 3.1 is out. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ftp://master.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.1/

    Really, it is.

  • Vulterant (Score:5, Informative)

    by Koyaanisqatsi ( 581196 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @03:01PM (#5168912)
    Now it does return at least one [google.com] result. Damm, google is FAST.

    • Wrong! (Score:2, Informative)

      by dbCooper0 ( 398528 )
      As an A/C also pointed out...Google finds ZERO results and then goes looking for "veteran".

      Just goes to show that some moderators don't even check on something before they click :-(

  • Picky dogs or some really bad dog food? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pmz ( 462998 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @03:12PM (#5169016) Homepage
    Tim also said, "We're right across the street from Microsoft. We sell a lot of stuff to Microsoft people. There's a lot of Linux running at Microsoft. A lot of Microsoft developers prefer to work with Linux."

    When given a choice, engineers will choose the best tool rather than follow corporate dogma. This quote speaks volumes.

  • What's wrong with this? (Score:5, Informative)

    by jdreed1024 ( 443938 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @03:17PM (#5169046)
    Apparently Macrovision believes there is now enough commercial software being written for Linux -- by companies that want to use encrpyted "unlock" keys to prevent unauthorized used of their precious intellectual property (sigh) -- to make it worth their while to be at LinuxWorld.

    Why does this merit a "sigh"? They're not talking about another DRM implementation here - apparently Roblimo doesn't understand this.

    Asset and License Management Software has been around for years. In case you're confused, Macrovision is NOT talking about the product activation you see in Windows XP or TurboTax. Rather, they're talking about something like KeyServer [sassafras.com], which allows large organizations to buy one copy of Photoshop or something, and "Key" it, so that it can only be unlocked by talking to a KeyServer. This allows you specify the number of concurrent users on the network, and any other number of restrictions (which workstations can use it, etc). This is extremely cost-effective for companies - they buy, say, 5 licenses of photoshop, key it, and then make sure only 5 users can use it at once. Thus, when the BSA comes knocking on the door and says "Hey, you have 100 computers - we demand 100 licenses", they can say "sorry, we enforce concurrent use of no more than 5 copies of the app. Have a nice day." It also prevents employees from stealing a copy of Photoshop and taking it home with them (it won't work). However, this solution is only available on Windows and Mac (and, for the longest time, it was Mac only). I don't see why this is such a problem that it now runs on Linux.

    What this means is that WidgetCo, which uses, say, Matlab, and has 200 workstations, can save a ton of money by only purchasing 50 licenses. The MathWorks (matlab makers) won't have a problem with this as long as they can be assured that no more than 50 copies will be running concurrently. (And no, the honor system doesn't work anymore). FLEXlm [macrovision.com] software (what Macrovision is offering) can help assure this. This setup is what many colleges or large institutions use to assure that commerical software on UNIX is abiding by the terms of their licensing agreements or package deals.

    So now WidgetCo can save even more money, because instead of having to buy costly Solaris licenses to run a platform that supports licensing software, they can now use Linux, and yet another big institution will be running GNU/Linux.

    I know it would be nice if everyone using Linux also used other GNU software to get their jobs done, but really, there's always going to be commerical software. We should be cheering the fact that there is one less obstacle for large organizations to adopt Linux and still maintain their licensing agreements with the big commercial software firms. In fact, FLEXlm has been around for a long time (at least since '91), but it was only for certain flavors of UNIX (read: Solaris). All that happened is that Macrovision bought out the company, and released a version that runs on Linux. Good for them.

  • Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .101retsaMytilaeR.> on Monday January 27, 2003 @03:22PM (#5169092) Homepage Journal

    The question: "What basic strategies are you employing to better penetrate the server/appliance market with Linux systems?"

    The Response: "He said, "High-performance, low-cost clusters on commodity servers, specifically that work with InfiniBand." Okay, fine. He then launched into a spiel about InfiniCon products that had words like "value" and "interoperability" in it but didn't answer my question. I asked again, and got another sales pitch. Okay. Fine. This company's strategy to better penetrate the appliance/server market with Linux is to use a lot of marketing buzzwords."

    What was so wrong with the guy's answer? If you're not willing to accept his answers, maybe you should try asking different questions or maybe even send someone else. Your question is basically, "what strategies are you going to use to sell Linux?". His answer was, "we're going to focus on value (i.e. price) and interoperability (i.e., flexibility and technical agnosticism). What the hell was wrong with his answers?

    Exactly what answer were you looking for?

  • Why the Flamebait?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by josh crawley ( 537561 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @04:59PM (#5169759)
    ---As a follow-up question, I asked how long they thought it would be until their licensing scheme was cracked. Neither Ms. Robbins nor her coworker, Pam Watkinson, had an answer for that one.

    Why in the hell did you ask that question? As much as everybody dislikes Macrovision, I was TRYING to stay away from asking something like this. No company's going to know whether they have critical problems in a certain product - expesially when the third party's going to trust the run-time license (like sayyy.. Adobe).

    Trust me, I hate Macrovision cause they lobbied congress to put a Macrovision chip in all DVD's, got tape players forcefully to install an AGC circuit (which enables Macrovision), all the while reducing quality on tapes afflicted with this crap. Not only that, but then they patented the decryption circuits and code so that it's illegal to even rip the shit-vision out.

    Still, I TRIED to stay away from flamebait like the question you asked. Hopefully, you didnt attribute that to me...

  • Interesting "Best of" cluster (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @06:14PM (#5170214)
    It's interesting that RHAS got best of show for clusters. It's verbatim the same code we [missioncriticallinux.com] showed at linuxworld in 2001. They just put it in a box and slapped the redhat name on it two years later and all of a sudden it's award worthy. I guess we didn't give IDG enough money.
  • I wrote this just in case it was of interest:
    http://icculus.org/~chunky/writing/ms-a t-linuxworl d

    Gary (-;
  • A Favorite was the foam penguin marionettes several had spotted around the show, but no one remembered who was giving them out. The journo crowd also liked the Red Hat (red) baseball caps, which were being given out at set times, and you had to line up to get. The SuSE lizards were also prized.
    Those were hands down my favorites - I have no idea who gave out the foam penguins: I was waiting for a "red red hat hat" when I noticed a penguin had been left behind in the chair I was standing at. People starting asking me where it came from. Lots of people. I decided to start saying "I don't remember," then I took the little foamy bastard!

    My cat has attacked the penguin, the SuSE lizard is on a door knob (wonderful prehensile beanbag tail), and the "red red hat hat" is lost in my room somewhere.

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