IT Manager’s Journal: Enterprise Linux Forum: Small But Important Event

“Big shows like LinuxWorld get loads of press attention and,
because of this, are often where vendors and free software projects
make their most important ‘Lookit our new whatever!’ announcements.
But smaller conferences, such as last week’s Enterprise Linux Forum
[ELF], are just as important in their own way and may even be more
effective venues for Linux advocacy than the giants. That’s why I
like to go to them whenever I can.

“Sometimes it’s not the size of the audience that matters, but
the quality. It may seem wasteful to have a high-end speaker such
as Ximian’s Nat Friedman talking about desktop Linux advances to a
room with only 30 or 40 people in it, but when half of those people
are highly-placed IT executives or government agency CIOs, and many
of them are taking notes and asking cogent questions, Nat is
probably doing more good in a ‘Let’s spread the Linux
word‘ sense than he’d do in front of 200 LUG members who
already run Linux all day…”

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