I made the trip to Boston today to attend the LinuxWorld Exposition. It was well worth the drive and subsequent pain of Big Dig traffic. This was my first ever computer-centric exposition, and I was pleasantly surprised. My fellow IBM co-op and I pre-registered for the Exposition portion of LinuxWorld beforehand. We decided to forgo the conference portions of the Expo, stick to the show floor, and save IBM a few bucks.
What first jumps out is the dazzling corporate presence. After about fifteen minutes on the floor, one experiences a veritable marketing information overload. These companies do absolutely everything they possibly can to make their name stick. All of the big names of the IT – and more specifically, the Linux – industry were present: IBM, Novell, Red Hat, AMD, HP, Intel and Sun. Despite the prominently displayed marketing material, the vast majority of the booths were occupied by partners of each company, showcasing their solutions using various Linux-related technologies. Also astonishing was the sheer volume of IBM Partners; it seemed as if everyone was operating under the auspices of Big Blue.
The “other” side of the show floor – completely separate from the corporate entities – housed the .Org Pavilion. These booths provided a stark reality check from the glitz and glamour of the big corporations. In attendance were folks representing Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Gnome, KDE, X.org, and Mambo, among others.
Since the beginning of the LinuxWorld Expo, several large announcements have been made by various companies. Recent developments of note that were seen being promoted on the floor were Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, IBM’s ChipHopper solution, and Novell’s Hula, among countless other software and hardware offerings. (More on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 in the near future.)
Of course the highlight of any exposition is the same as always: schwag. We were able to amass quite a bit of nifty (and some completely useless) Linux-related items from the various vendors around the show floor. There were also quite a few contests for items a tad more lucrative than the odd logo-emblazoned pen, many of which required listening to a number of spiels and amassing a requisite number of “brainwashing” stamps. I faithfully obliged, and entered into a few contests, coming away with a USB flash drive from AMD, but nothing more. I did manage to collect six quality T-shirts, a nifty red hat its namesake company (of the baseball variety, no fedoras for me).
The cleverest marketing item? Red Hat’s Boston-esque baseball jersey. Sure got a lot of praise in Beantown (and more than a few snide remarks from our cousins from the Big Apple).
The most interesting item of the day was a talk given by Jay Beale for O’Reilly. He’s the author and editor of a series of open-source, security-related books, as well as the maintainer of the Bastille Linux project. Jay walked the attendees through the benefits of proactive Linux security, as well as some of the motivation behind many of the black hat hackers and the steps being taken to circumvent their wily schemes. (Did I mention he made me a certified script kiddy? What fun!) Much of the content was stuff I’ve learned before, but it was an interesting seminar nonetheless.
In retrospect, it was quite the enjoyable experience. If the opportunity arises, I’d definitely jump at the chance to go again.
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LinuxWorld Boston 2005
I made the trip to Boston today to attend the LinuxWorld Exposition. It was well worth the drive and subsequent pain of Big Dig traffic. This was my first ever computer-centric exposition, and I was pleasantly surprised. My fellow IBM co-op and I pre-registered for the Exposition portion of LinuxWorld beforehand. We decided to forgo the conference portions of the Expo, stick to the show floor, and save IBM a few bucks.
What first jumps out is the dazzling corporate presence. After about fifteen minutes on the floor, one experiences a veritable marketing information overload. These companies do absolutely everything they possibly can to make their name stick. All of the big names of the IT – and more specifically, the Linux – industry were present: IBM, Novell, Red Hat, AMD, HP, Intel and Sun. Despite the prominently displayed marketing material, the vast majority of the booths were occupied by partners of each company, showcasing their solutions using various Linux-related technologies. Also astonishing was the sheer volume of IBM Partners; it seemed as if everyone was operating under the auspices of Big Blue.
The “other” side of the show floor – completely separate from the corporate entities – housed the .Org Pavilion. These booths provided a stark reality check from the glitz and glamour of the big corporations. In attendance were folks representing Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Gnome, KDE, X.org, and Mambo, among others.
Since the beginning of the LinuxWorld Expo, several large announcements have been made by various companies. Recent developments of note that were seen being promoted on the floor were Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, IBM’s ChipHopper solution, and Novell’s Hula, among countless other software and hardware offerings. (More on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 in the near future.)
Of course the highlight of any exposition is the same as always: schwag. We were able to amass quite a bit of nifty (and some completely useless) Linux-related items from the various vendors around the show floor. There were also quite a few contests for items a tad more lucrative than the odd logo-emblazoned pen, many of which required listening to a number of spiels and amassing a requisite number of “brainwashing” stamps. I faithfully obliged, and entered into a few contests, coming away with a USB flash drive from AMD, but nothing more. I did manage to collect six quality T-shirts, a nifty red hat its namesake company (of the baseball variety, no fedoras for me).
The cleverest marketing item? Red Hat’s Boston-esque baseball jersey. Sure got a lot of praise in Beantown (and more than a few snide remarks from our cousins from the Big Apple).
The most interesting item of the day was a talk given by Jay Beale for O’Reilly. He’s the author and editor of a series of open-source, security-related books, as well as the maintainer of the Bastille Linux project. Jay walked the attendees through the benefits of proactive Linux security, as well as some of the motivation behind many of the black hat hackers and the steps being taken to circumvent their wily schemes. (Did I mention he made me a certified script kiddy? What fun!) Much of the content was stuff I’ve learned before, but it was an interesting seminar nonetheless.
In retrospect, it was quite the enjoyable experience. If the opportunity arises, I’d definitely jump at the chance to go again.