I just got home from LinuxWorld Expo in the San Jose Convention
Center.
Here are some impressions, in no particular order. If it isn't
obvious, these are all my personal opinions. It should also be
obvious that I'm writing this for a varied audience, and parts of it
won't be interesting to everybody. Sorry.
General
=======
Lots of Sony Z505 laptops and Picturebooks. Everywhere. Mostly in
the hands of Very Young Persons. Prior to today, I don't think I'd
ever seen anyone other than myself carrying one. Of the eight people
in the 10x10 perlmonks.org booth, four had Z505s and one had a
picturebook. (One person had some other kind of laptop, and the other
two people were playing a martial arts game on a Dreamcast.) I saw a
Picturebook in the linuxjapan.org booth (japanlinux.org? something
like that) running a video capture window (under Linux) from the
built-in camera. I asked the owner what app he was using, but he did
not speak English. I asked two other Picturebook users about it, but
neither knew how to capture video without resorting to Windows.
Speaking of packed booths, there was a booth called the Docking
Station. It had a power strip and an Ethernet hub, and was jammed
with people sitting, squatting and crawling over each other to plug in
their laptops and check their mail. I kicked myself for having
forgotten the camera -- it was a funny scene.
The Slashdot booth was similar. Lots of beanbag chairs and lots of
people using laptops. Rob Malda and Hemos sat in Aeron chairs and
played with their laptops and joked around while lots of people
lounged around and played with their laptops and pretty much ignored
Rob and Jeff. They just sat and hung out all day. I saw lots and
lots of 802.11 wireless LAN cards -- mostly Lucents (nee WaveLAN, nee
Orinoco). I think 60-70% of all laptops had one, and *everybody* had
a Linux laptop. I don't know whether the whole hall was on an open
802.11 net or what.
I've ordered WaveLAN cards -- our house will be "wired for wireless"
by this weekend. But today I was a wireless wannabe.
The crowd was younger this year, I think. Also better-dressed. Yes,
the suits have discovered Linux. The exhibit hall was at least twice
as big as last year, maybe thrice. The booths were generally
better-decorated (i.e., more expensive), too. The .ORG pavilion was
very poorly laid out, and didn't draw or hold a crowd. All the 10x10
booths were in a long row along the back of the hall. Of course, last
year, Slashdot was the biggest draw in the pavilion, and this year,
Slashdot was in the VA booth, 500 feet away.
I learned that Debian is pronounced "DEB-eeyun".
The most buzzword compliant booth was PocketLinux. I quote from the
brochure: "Capture the power of Linux, XML and Java with PocketLinux."
What that blurb doesn't mention is that their product runs on
handhelds. They had a couple of the new Compaq iPAQ handhelds running
Linux. Those are sweet. The size of a Palm, a brightly backlit
display, running Linux (or that dead-end proprietary OS). PocketLinux
also had some other very thin handhelds that I didn't recognize.
PocketLinux' product may or may not be vaporware, but the iPAQ is real
(but not yet released). There was yet another VAIO Z505 in
PocketLinux' booth, but it looked humongous surrounded by handhelds.
Wireless computing is a myth. Almost all the laptops (and the
abovementioned iPAQs) were tethered by their power cords. Even the
ones on wireless LANs were all plugged in.
SGI's booth (I used to work at SGI) was huge - 50x50. The first time
I went by, it was jam-packed. They had a stage performer, kind of a
carnival barker/magician type. The show had nothing to do with SGI or
Linux, though he did remember to mention the right buzzwords often. I
went back when he was between acts. Walked through the whole booth,
couldn't find a single person I'd ever seen before. Not one. At
least thirty people were working the booth. (SGI has had some
turnover in the last year.)
I did run into Dave McAllister who's at 3ware now, and Bill Earl whose
company I forgot, but they're a 3ware customer. Saw Scott Henry and
Bill Shannon, but did not talk. Ashok Yerneni saw me and offered me a
job, wanted to know if I knew anybody who wants to work on video w/
Linux. His company is building remote security camera systems or
something.
3ware has an IDE RAID product. Their button says "IDE rather not be
SCSI." Eight independent IDE buses and a CPU (x86 architecture, but
Dave wants to put a MIPS R5000 in the next gen for $3 more) on a
full-height PCI card for $500 list. Dave emphasized that that's NOT
the street price. They've benchmarked 101 MB/sec. They also have
2-bus and 4-bus versions for less money. Bill Earl says, "Storage is
a great place to be. It's about to really take off." Donna, if you
want to see Dave tomorrow, his booth is outside the main hall, near
the front stairs.
I stopped by the Veritas booth, but nobody would talk to me.
I saw an Ogg Vorbis T-Shirt, but no other show presence. They
were going to make a big announcement, I thought.
Other hardware that might be interesting: somebody put a flyer for
"ServeLinux: $999 Linux Rackmount Server" in my bag. (Honestly, I
don't remember seeing them or picking it up.) ZFLinux Devices has a
box called zPortPC. They have a highly integrated chip and they plan
to build a desktop PC about the size of a box of cereal. From the
flyer: "Total System Cost Low Enough To Give Away!" Lots of people
selling 1U rack systems.
Eazel
=====
I talked to Robin somebody, a developer at Eazel, for quite a while.
Eazel's primary product is Nautilus - that's what all the developers
(12 of them) are concentrating on. Nautilus is a file manager (like
the Mac Finder, with a lot of Microsoft's ActiveDesktop functionality
and some of MacOS X's advanced imaging). It uses Gnome Bonobo plugins
to open various document types. In MacOS terms, imagine OpenDoc built
into the Finder. All their graphics and skins were very nicely done
-- somebody at that company is a fine graphic artist. It handles mp3s
very well too -- there's a screen shot of that on Eazel's web site.
Nautilus is really slick -- when it releases, it'll be beyond today's
state of the art just as much as Apple's Aqua is. (Yes, it has
scalable, alpha-blended icons.) They're talking October or November
for release, I forgot which. But you can download pre-beta today.
But Nautilus is GPL'd, so it's no revenue stream. Eazel's money is
going to come from their "services" which is an automatic update
system -- you launch the updater (which is a web page) and it tells
you what to update. They also want to do a network storage thing --
you pay them to back up your files, I guess. I don't know whether
anybody is working on the "services" -- they had nothing demoable.
Anyway, I think Eazel was founded to produce some cool technology, and
trying to make money was an afterthought. The nice thing about GPL is
that even if Eazel goes broke, we keep Nautilus.
Eazel is in Menlo Park, CA.
Helix Code
===== ====
Then I went two booths down to see Helix Code. Helix is developing a
Gnome Outlook clone called Evolution. They also ship the Helix
Desktop, which is all the Gnome stuff packaged up neat, not a full
Linux distro, just the desktop. (in fact, they have a version for
Solaris and some other non-Linux systems.) Helix is going to give
away a Linux update service for free on their web site, for all major
distributions. (I think that's what I heard...) That'll interfere
with Eazel's subscription service, I think. Evolution and Helix
Desktop are GPL'd. Helix says Nautilus will be part of Helix Desktop
when it's stable. The Helix guy also said they're going to have some
kind of subscription service, but I didn't catch the details. I
scored a Helix Desktop 1.0 CD. I'll install it soon, I promise.
Helix is based in Cambridge, MA, but has a lot of telecommuting
developers. They're at 40 employees and "hiring like mad".
Sun GPL'd StarOffice last week, and Helix is making noise about
Bonoboifying it and plugging it into Helix Desktop too. Don't
know whether the project has started yet.
They ran a demo on a big screen TV every 15 minutes or so. During the
demo, they showed the Gnome theme manager. There was a set of themes
named "Buffy". The demo jockey clicked on Buffy Monet, and yes, it
was the Monet scheme from IRIX Indigo Magic. Buffy Rio and Buffy
Magic were two of the others.
In general, the skins on the Helix demos looked unimpressive,
especially compared to Eazel's.
SourceForge
===========
I went to the SourceForge BOF. It was cool, but only about 40-50
people showed up. SourceForge, if you don't know, is funded by VA
Linux, and chartered to promote open source. It does that by offering
free hosting and project management to open source projects. They
launched last November, and they're now at 7800 projects and 52000
developers. Read that last sentence again. Zero to 52000 developers
in nine months. 7800 projects in nine months. Even if 99% of the
projects produce nothing, that's a lot of free software. They have a
huge array of hardware (details are on their site,
http://sourceforge.net/) for web hosting, CVS, bug tracking databases,
and compile farms.
They give out shell accounts on Intel, Sparc, PowerPC boxes with like
15 different version of the various Linux distros and BSDs. They also
have some IA64 (aka Itanium) boxes for compile testing. The IA64s run
TurboLinux. They said the "stable" release stays up for about a day.
The "development" release stays up for six hours. Pre-2.4 kernels, of
course. They're in talks with "commercial Unix companies" to offer
shell accounts on commercial Unices, but wouldn't name names until the
deals are final.
Anyway, they had a lot of stories about projects gone awry and how
they're making all their policies on the fly. So far, nobody's tried
to abuse the system by putting kiddie porn in the CVS or anything.
SourceForge has 8 developers, 1 manager, and 2 product marketing guys.
They're in Mountain View, CA.
In addition to the web site, they offer SourceForge as a free software
product, and have a ProServe group that will build your company its
own SourceForge site, using VA hardware, of course.
OSDN
====
Speaking of deals, the single most-publicized thing, as in you can't
look anywhere for 3 seconds without seeing an ad in a booth, on a
wall, hanging from the ceiling, or on a T-shirt (which at least 20% of
the crowd was wearing), and they even had this goofy photo booth right
at the registration desk, is the Open Source Developer's Network,
OSDN. It's some kind of joint venture between VA Linux, Sun, HP, and
probably some others, and so far as I can tell, it's a portal service
for developers. Go to www.osdn.com and see if you can get a better
sense of it. Maybe I just don't get it.
Conclusions
===========
VA was far and away the most visible company at the show. After all,
they have lots of brands: VA, SourceForge, Andover (slashdot,
freshmeat, thinkgeek, themes.org, newsforge), and OSDN. They have the
best booth location, and it's large, probably 60x100. Completely
eclipsed RedHat. IBM, Caldera, HP, and Sun all had medium-small
booths. SGI had a big booth, but it was in the back.
Oh, and BSD and BSDi were everywhere. BSDi was giving out Devil's
horns, and lots of people were wearing them. They also bought the
ad space on the back of the attendees' badges, so a BSDi ad was on
everybody's chest, too. I looked into the BSD BOF, and it was
well-attended (maybe 200 people). I did not see Rob Kolstad.
Computing prices continue to plummet. Lots of companies based on free
software products, with plans to get revenue from something related or
no plans to get revenue. Lots of new ideas for ways to give stuff
away on the web. Hardware prices are still plummeting, and hardware
is getting smaller (e.g., PictureBook, iPAQ). Information wants to be
free, and information processing machines want to be damned cheap.
Microsoft is as good as dead.
Four stars. K<bob> says check it out.
--
K<bob>
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.jogger-egg.com/
