Today was the first day of the exhibition part of the trade show and here are my unbiased and overly positive comments. Debian guys! Finally a cowsay t-shirt. Whoa!! Its about time. Cowsay must be the unofficial mascot of Debian and its cousin “SL” which is a great joke on the standard way to list files (ls) on a Unix system always is good for a laugh. Perhaps the funny man pages also come in there somewhere. Thanks Debian for reminding me that life is indeed moo. Secondarily, IDG in their infinite corporate wisdom managed to get the dot.orgs in the right place almost. Now they’re stuck in a corner when they should be in the middle. If anything leads Linux its the work of these dot.orgs. A bit of remembering where all this came from is probably called for IDG.
The show is good and that’s probably because its in San Francisco and there is rampant Linux and open source running around these vallyes and peninsula towns and east and south bays. Its also good because there is a lot of big influence on open source out here as well.
There is no Redhat booth and I’m glad. There is just something about Redhat which distresses me most times. Its not the quality of their enterprise or community products because I think products that have to have the name enterprise really should be called something else. Novell included. You Novell guys with SuSE Linux with YAST and all its meandering GUI-ness should remember the KISS principle. I don’t particularly and personally care for Linux in those flavors at all; but I understand why others do and I work at supporting and servicing those that do. After all we cannot all be so enlightened to use Debian 
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The show floor was busy today and people came and went in waves. I ran into lots of people I wanted to run into and none that I did not. That’s a good mix. I tried to get our sales guy to go to the dot.orgs but he seemed clearly uncomfortable about that trip. Perhaps he sees no benefit in that walk. Don’t know. But all of this Linux gooey goodness springs from somewhere. Perhaps tomorrow he’ll relent and go visit that mountain with me.
Finally, the show was just plain fun. I walked the floor, talked with some folks I had not seen in awhile. Its fun because many of the people I see like Clay I know I will only see once per year at a show and then its really good to see them. Some folks I would love to see at the show just don’t go anymore. That’s too bad. I separate out the shows when I want to see a grassroots community thing I head to SCALE. When I want to see a corporate, enterprise driven fling its LWCE. Dig that SCALE has announced their 2007 venue. I am so almost there and will be there totally in Feb 07. Thanks to the guys at SCALE for doing it. Its a show to do if you want good papers, reasonable costs, etc.
