by Emmett Plant,
Editor – LinuxToday
This morning I woke up and checked out of the hotel. On my way
out, I ran into Eric Raymond, and we went off in search of
breakfast. LinuxToday Editor Paul Ferris caught up with us on the
way back, and we all headed over to the conference while Paul taped
an interview. When we got there, I split up the group and headed up
to the expo.
George Romero would have been proud. Exhibitors that were
once vivacious and spunky were worn down as an after-effect of last
night’s knockout partying. It was The Day Of The Living Dead Linux
Community. One representative from a prominent Linux company
was limping pretty badly this morning from taking a fall last
night. Limping, tired and hungover, the Linux community had a great
time into today, the last day of the conference. In a lot of ways,
it was only a half-day, since the expo itself closed down at
2pm.
The attendance was slow again today, and for the most part
exhibitors just stopped working. When there’s no one to present to,
there’s really no point. That was okay with me, though. If people
weren’t doing presentations, they were able to talk tech with other
exhibitors. In the interest of science, I installed Corel Linux on
my laptop today, and when my sound wasn’t working, I just strolled
up to the Corel booth and pulled a tech away. I’m most of the way
to getting sound working now, thanks to the lack of conference
attendance.
A lot of the attendees of this show walked out with a wealth of
technical knowledge from the panels at TheBazaar, and because of
the sparse turnout in the expo, they could talk about programming
structure, perl and python with the professionals that use it on a
daily basis. On a technical level, TheBazaar was almost on par with
the Ottawa Linux Symposium, which doesn’t have a sales expo. I love
technical conferences, and it was good to see a lot of people walk
away with solid knowledge.
From what I could tell, there were no post-conference parties
going on tonight, and most people elected to get out of Dodge. Some
of the exhibitors started packing up as early as 1:30 so they could
get away as quickly as possible when the show broke down. It is
unfortunate that the show suffered from poor attendance. The
technical panels were great, and the exhibitors were top-notch,
with old friends like VA Linux
and new groups like Sleepycat
Software. It was also Corel‘s first major engagement after
announcing Corel LinuxOS last month at COMDEX.
In the end, we all picked up our bags, went to the airport or
the train station, and began the long journey home, hopeful of the
Linux World Conference and Expo in February.