The biggest booth of all, was HP's. I did not like it and to be honest, I don't quite understand their business with Linux. Instead, I asked for information about... HP-UX. They did not have anyone from the HP-UX team on board, while Sun did have a lot of Solaris stuff to show off just a few meters away from the HP booth. In fact, the Sun's booth was shared to many projects, like Solaris, StarOffice, Sun Linux, other third party Solaris-related companies and Gnome 2.0 (btw, their default configuration of Gnome 2 is even worse than the default Gnome 2). Also, all the CDE applications instead of evenly show in the Applications menu, they have their own folder on the root of the menu, called "CDE". Great integration Sun. NOT.
The booth that had by far the most people of all, and it was packed all the time, was Red Hat's. These guys are big. They ran the whole show at LinuxWorld. You go to Sun, they use Red Hat. You go to Google, they use Red Hat. You go to some other booths and products, and they still use Red Hat. Robert Young was there, very obviously happy, discussing business with some other people in their booth's mini-lounge. Ximian was using a bit of Red Hat's space floor too.
And if Red Hat was the strong player there, SuSE was the weakest one. SuSE gets the award for the worst "professional" booth at LinuxWorld. I was very disappointed by the people who were running it. The booth was very plain, they had nothing to give to visitors, and the guys were so no-enthusiastic, that really depressed me and made me wanna go away from their booth. Half of their booth was about SuSE Linux 8 and their email server product, and the other half was about UnitedLinux. Very few people around them. And the exhibitors did not help with their attitude. I heard from other media people (I went there with a "media pass") the exact same complaints for their performance.
And talking about Red Hat and SuSE, the biggest absent from the show was Mandrake! Where did these guys go anyway? A lot of Linux-friendly companies and lots of OSS projects were missing, but Mandrake's was the most obvious and un-excused one. [Update: I now hear they were there, under the AMD booth. Well, they were completely... undetectable.]
Intel's, IBM's and Borland's booths were pretty big, Intel was showing lots of embedded stuff. Netraverse was there showing their three products, Covalent, Google, and also lots of embedded-related companies.
This LinuxWorld was a bit corporate, not many geeks around, but still always a few, mostly around the .org pavilion. The kinds of products mostly presented there were either for the embedded world, or for servers. In fact, because of this very professional/corporate embedded-feel of the Expo, even Microsoft's presence was kinda making sense... However, in general, nothing ground breaking was shown in this Expo...
The highlight of the Expo would be AMD's multiple Opteron presentations really. And I am not even a lot into hardware (still happy with my dual 533Mhz)... It was kinda of a let down to not see ANY new desktop-oriented application presented at the Expo. There was no company exhibiting, that its commercial products would be truly for the desktop. No professional DTP applications, no video editors, no Illustrator-killers, no high end audio apps or 3D. Nothing. Just embedded and server stuff. A lot of Linux users try to convince us or establish the idea that Linux is or can be big on the desktop, but the absence desktop-oriented exhibitors, tell the opposite story so far - and this is indeed kinda of a let down.
Just 15 minutes before I leave the building, Michael Bego, the Xandros VP, spotted me (because of my back pack, a woolly sheep-bag :) and we talked for a while. Mr Bego is an exceptional, kind young man. He really does not deserve your harsh criticism to their (unreleased yet) product guys. He told me that because of the feedback from the OSNews forums, the colors and some of the icons and other elements of the UI will be changed and will be ready for the last beta, before the final release of the product. He also told me that the large majority of the Xandros Desktop 1.0 will be open sourced completely, and only some of their enhancements to the file manager, installer and some wizard pref panels that they were engineered from scratch won't be opened immediately. In fact, the company is studying the possibility of opening their source code at some point, to a (stricter) license scheme similar to SuSE's Yast2. But it is not certain yet, it is still under discussion. They are about 25 people working today for Xandros. I asked Mr Bego which kind of desktop users Xandros targets: The Linux-aware desktop users, or the completely unexperienced ones. Xandros apparently tries to play nice with all. He also said that Lindows bases some of their under-the-hood code on the Xandros one, however "While we both have similarities, we both do a significant amount of development in our own directions. That said, there are cool features that Xandros has that Lindows does as well. If you check them out, they have some pretty similar neat wizards, etc. that others don't," Michael said. However, Xandros respects the users and root Unix accounts (while on Lindows you are only logged in as root).
I got some pictures from the expo, but my camera is not digital (neither I am sure it works, haven't used it for 2 years :), so I will have to find some time and go and print them. It might take a couple of days to do so. Update: The pictures can be found here.
My... LinuxWorld Awards:
1. Best Booth: AMD
2. Worst booth (ever): SuSE/UnitedLinux
3. Most crowded booth: Red Hat
4. Less crowded booth: X.org and 2-3 others.
5. Most interesting project: Aurora Linux.
6. Most interesting product: Borland Kylix.
7. Most interesting person: The main Microsoft guy. Wasn't that guy sharp or what?
8. Sweetest person I talked to: Sharp Zaurus marketing manager (spoke to her at the Intel booth too) and Michael Bego.
9. Sleepiest person I talked to: All these guys at SuSE/UnitedLinux... What were they thinking?
10. Best Free Gift: Sun's Gnome2 light pen! Kewl... :)
Until next year!
- "Part I"
- "Part II (and even more interesting)"
