LinuxWorld Expo, London, October 2005

by Stuart Yeates on 6 October 2005 , last updated 19 April 2006

Introduction

This was my second LinuxWorld Expo in London, and I’ve got to say that it was much better this year than last: there were more exhibitors, more attendees and more buzz.

The .org village was much better arranged this year. There were real stands, rather than the ghetto of last year and even the larger commercial players had gimmicks on their stands which were more linux-related.

Unfortunately the fullness of the conference meant that, unlike last year, there was nowhere a delegate such as myself could put out information, so some of the materials I took came home with me.

I was also very disappointed that the size of the room for the business stream of the conference was much smaller than the technical stream. Last year I recall them being the same size. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe the manager-level people now have other avenues for their information.

The exhibitors

Red hat, HP and Novell ran their stands in cooperation with their partners, who were very interesting to talk to, one step closer to the real world as it were. HP and Novell were giving away lots of things at their stand. Red Hat just had kernel hackers (and there were queues to take pictures of Alan Cox in a red fedora.

Open Forum Europe (OFE), OpenAdvantage and the Open Source Academy were sharing a stand. OFE have a big release coming up of their new certification system.

OpenAdvantage’s success appears to have spawned the creation of Most, which seems to be an OpenAdvantage clone aimed at the voluntary sector.

I had an interesting conversation about open content with someone at the Association For Free Software (AFFS) stand. The GNU audio and video archive is maintained in the UK and they use the licence “Verbatim copying and distribution of the entire speech recording are permitted provided this notice is preserved.” which is interesting to say the least, given the effort spent getting their software licences right.

Ray Miller and the rest of the UK’s Unix and Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) team were there drumming up speakers for UKUUG’s annual Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) were there seeking donations towards their their operating costs. The money seems to go towards international coordination (phone calls) and also professional lobbying in Brussels.

All in all, a much higher proportion of the exhibitors than I remember from last year showed an understanding of what this whole open source thing was.

The Talks

Klaus Knopper was the opening speaker in the technical stream. He is actively looking for someone to rewrite the hard disk installer (which is his way of saying he wants it done but doesn’t have time to do it himself). He also discussed some of the exciting new things that will be on the next version of Knoppix, which basically comes down to the wave of packages and reorganisations in the new debian unstable.

When asked about 64 bit machines and other architectures, he made it clear that he wanted something that most people could run (i.e. 32bit x86), but he was more than happy for others to do 64bit customisations.

When asked about how he felt about derivative Knoppix customisations, he said that he was more than happy with them because they reduced his workload by reducing the number of things people hassled him about, build the pool of experience, find and fix bugs that he would have had to have found and fixed and generate new ideas.

When asked about UnionFS, he said that UnionFS was a good thing independent of the existence of Knoppix, that Knoppix benefited greatly from UnionFS and that Knoppix going with UnionFS got it stable faster than it otherwise would have. A significant fencepost error was recently found in the memory allocation code by a Japanese coder and things have since been much more stable.

The second keynote speaker was Alan Cox, who talked not of his kernel work, but his work with the linux desktops (his Masters). For essentially historical reasons, there are two different Linux desktops, whose popularity varies geographically, ideologically and apparently randomly. All big distros include both, most users use the default (and prefer the default, because it’s what they’ve become used to). Both Gnome and KDE think their desktop is closer to windows.

Everyday users often don’t notice the desktop they’re using. To them Firefox and OpenOffice (and local tinkering with icons) are much more important.

Finally, Paul Cooper of OpenAdvantage talked about open standards and lockin, the best quote being Avoiding lockin forces companies to compete on quality, service and price. Paul has a blog which would be worth keeping up with.