Unfortunately, I cannot do the last day; but I wanted to catch up on things from the second day. The overall impression I have is that its a good show but attendance is down or at least traffic to exhibitor booths is. I have a few reasons for this:
- The show is changing its venue effective this year. People want a common show that provides all of the goodness
- IDG really does not capture mindshare with the show at all and their messaging does not resonate to potential attendees or contributors
- The organization of the commercial entities and the free ones don’t align. Huge Motorola booths and the little dot.org. Somehow we have allowed an imbalance in the force
- No one doing Linux or developing tools or applications really cares anymore and they want something else. Perhaps a grassroots show like SCALE? Or maybe more focused regional shows that showcase various advances in open source
My overall impression of a show at Moscone is that its better than a show in Boston; but I also really liked the New York shows. Someone asked me at the show, “why even attend if you are not a large enterprise looking for something?” That’s a troubling question because open source goes beyond all those commercial solutions and really starts and ends up back the dot.orgs. Unfortunate that IDG cannot see the forest for the trees and cannot seem to build a show venue that will be more things to more people. Truly unfortunate that people that sell, presell, manage, and delivery solutions only see the Motorola booths and the HP booths and think that is Linux. To be successful and make a difference doing Linux solutions, one has to at least acknowledge that the community solutions have simply outlasted many of the commercial ones. And long after Novell dusts off SuSE and retires it, the community distributions will continue. Why? Because they are simply better and don’t rely on the kindness of strangers to even have an existance. When I started with Linu there were umpteen commercial vendors of Linux. Now there are umpteen thousand community ones instead. No big marketing deals, no co-branding, no sales imperatives. Take the Gentoo, the Debian, the others for a spin. If you want to make a difference in Linux; siupport them in a way that leads more to their doors. Its where Linux will be after the show hype.
I am not going back to the show today primarily due to family issues; but I think I’ve seen enough for yet another year. Thanks to Art, Ned, Greg and the group that did the lunch yesterday for Linuxcare Labs. I don’t know that I will organize another one. Perhaps the time has run out on that endeavor as well.
