A week ago, I meant to post this a week ago. Before it's too late, I've got to put my thoughts down.
I went to the Wednesday Apr. 5th show, didn't see the keynote because I wasn't about to get up earlier than I do for work just to see the keynote from Dell. I enjoyed wandering around the exhibition hall, but since this was the first show of its type I've been to I was a little bit overwhelmed. I had nice, but brief chats with people form KDE, Trolltech, Tyan and a couple other folks. I wanted to chat a bit with the Gentoo people but they seem more interested in talking to each other. That was too bad, I hope they didn't do that with everyone because it left me with a somewhat bad impression of them.
I listend to a couple of talks on the expo floor, at least one each from Red Hat, Novell, and one of the companies hawking Xen based VM products. (I refuse to call them solutions!) I listened to a talk by Andy Oram of O'Reilly, who talked about the difference between community and traditionally published documentation. It was interesting, and appealed to me because I want to write more blog entries like my Python Taglib Tutorial.
I also listened to the Keynote involving the business guys from MySQL, JBoss, XenSource and SugarCRM. It was interesting, Fleury from JBoss is a real character and liked to but in at times. Martin Mikos from MySQL had what I thought was the best comment overall. To summarize he said that if you're asked, "What is the point of having source available from a vendor, if only say 1% of your users will even look at it, especially if your binary is also free?" One response is, "Why put airbags in cars if only a few people need them?" I thought that comment was clever.
There was also much advertizing doo-dads to be had. I could have come home with more stuff, but I wasn't there to pick up flashing peices of plastic. I did take a picture of some of the stuff I did bring home.
