“Changes. The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo (LWCE) in New
York City is different this year. Although I haven’t been able to
put my finger on exactly what the differences are, they’re real.
Instead of attending the high-tech keynote by IBM’s president and
chief operating officer, Samuel J. Palmisano, when the show
officially opened at 10 a.m., I took advantage of the relatively
low traffic volume during the presentation and strolled through the
exhibition area.”
“The aisles seemed wider this year, while at the same time there
appeared to be more exhibitors. All the major players were there:
Sun, IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat, SuSE, Compaq, SGI. The list of
tier-one names alone is too long to recite in its entirety. The old
Linux crowd seems lost in the land of suits. In contrast, I felt
overdressed because I was wearing a nearly new “GNU’s Not Linux”
black T-shirt instead of my faded glory that commemorates HoHoCon
’93….”
“And I finally got to meet James Hills, a young man who writes
game reviews, interviews, and other things. I’ve been corresponding
with him for about a year. James noted that the crowd at this
year’s Expo was more about business. Last year it was all about the
money that the big firms were throwing around. This year it’s all
about “OK, how can we really make this stuff work in our business.”
I think he made a very astute observation.”