[vox] [fwd] The Death of Linuxworld

[Joseph Arruda]

The hyperbole aside, the show was neither good nor bad.  It was dull, 
but there were vendors there doing thing useful to 'the enterprise' 
(which in this economy is the only people worth attracting). 'the 
enterprise' tends to be dull to most LUG folken (if we are being 
remotely honest).

Now, that being said, the show was otherwise lackluster, but some 
vendors (Cloudera particularly) looked interesting, but I am biased 
because we are entertaining playing with Hadoop where I work now.  I 
liked seeing Talend and SQLStream, etc.  But I am coming from the 
position of someone looking at actual offerings for my own projects that 
I manage.

There were vendors I though had interesting but otherwise moot offerings 
(i.e. Cubetree, which could just as well be replaced by Wordpress MU 
with some additional plugins or with an adapted GForge/Joomla/Drupal 
rig), but lets face it, the real reason I went was to party with old VA 
Linux alumni. :)

ja

Bill Kendrick wrote:
> Darth's post to SacLUG about this year's OpenSource World
> (previously known as LinuxWorld).
>
> It sounds like it was even worse than I had expected, based on various
> random people complaining in their Facebook statuses a few days ago.
>
>
> Seriously?  Exhibit hall only one 1hr at a time?
>
> -bill!
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Darth Borehd <darth.borehd at gmail.com> -----
>
> Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:53:21 -0700
> From: Darth Borehd <darth.borehd at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Lug-nuts] The Death of Linuxworld
> To: General SacLUG discussing <lug-nuts at saclug.org>
> Reply-To: General SacLUG discussing <lug-nuts at saclug.org>
>
> Linuxworld died sometime at the end of 2008.
>
> I have been a regular attendee for roughly 10 years now.  I only
> missed the 2005 conference because my daughter was born on the same
> day.  I was a huge fan of LinuxWorld, I was an organiser of several
> LinuxWorld attending groups, I have a closet full of material from
> past Linuxworlds.  Senator, you are no Linuxworld.
>
> IDG claims they merely renamed it to "OpenSource World/NextGen Data
> Center/CloudWorld" but it's quite obviously they were out to remove
> anything that resembled the Linuxworld and try to pawn off a new
> conference as its successor.  It's not.  Not even close.
>
> Let me explain why.
>
> * The name change.  First thing you notice is the confusing
> buzzword-heavy new name where 3 conference share equal size and space
> on the banner.  Not only is it aesthetically unappealing, its
> confusing what the focus is going to be.  Sure they combined
> conferences before, but they were always auxiliary riders latched onto
> LinuxWorld.  It was the king and quite obviously the main event.
> There is no main event any more.
>
> * The size.  The conference was moved from the main Moscone Hall where
> it had resided for about 10 years and is now in a smaller space on the
> west side.  The main Moscone Hall now sits empty.  The exhibit hall is
> now .25 of the size of what it was in 2008 and even smaller if you
> compare it to previous years.  The number of conference/lecture rooms
> are roughly the same.  There are no testing centers for LPI
> certification or workshops.
>
> * The exhibit hall.  This is the *worst* part of the whole conference.
>  Now about a quarter of the size.  Just one of the major vendor
> squares from 2008 would have taken up the size of a half dozen booths
> at the 2009 conference.  Gone are a lot of the usual exhibitors from
> years past.  No VMWare, IBM, HP, CDW, Dice, Intel, AMD, Motorola,
> O'Reilly, and dozens of others.   Of those that were there, you
> quickly found they were staffed with salespeople and temp presenters
> hired off the street.  Dell was there.  Sun was there.  Both had
> competent programmers and engineers to actually talk to but the
> exhibit spaces were reduced to the size of two small booth put
> together.  The most frustrating thing is that the exhibit hall was
> only open for about an hour at a time.  Yes, you heard that right.
> After only an hour inside, security guards come and herd you into
> lecture rooms for the next 3 hours until the exhibits open again.
>
> * Alcohol.  During the last hour, they served free beer.  It would
> seem to me to be a stupid move liability-wise to serve alcohol to
> people who might be getting in cars and driving away when it closes.
> Also, they were not checking IDs and I personally met a young man who
> said he was 19 and had several beers already.  Beyond that, it was
> just annoying to see drunken people stumbling around.  It wasn't even
> good beer.  I don't drink beer, but I was told that it tasted like
> watered-down Budweiser.  Maybe some marketing maven got confused by
> the phrase "free, as in beer"???
>
> * Almost no Linux.  Roughly 3/4th of the entire conference was Windows
> oriented.  Increase that if you include Cloud Computing products.  The
> only distro present was Ubuntu.  BSD guys were there if you want to
> stretch to include them.  Even Sun did their presentation on a
> Macintosh.  Almost all other vendors ran their presentation on Windows
> XP or Vista.
>
> * .orgs treated like lepers.  They were all forced into a small room
> isolated from the main exhibit hall like the conference promoters were
> ashamed of their presence.  They didn't even get booths.  They had to
> share small tables.  Most didn't even show up.  No slashdot, gentoo,
> debian, linuxfund, sourceforge, fedora, etcetera.  The only two active
> tables were Clonezilla and Haiku OS.  A complete insult to the
> non-profit community.
>
> * Attempts to turn away "undesirable" people.  An environmental
> engineer I met at the conference was initially denied entrance because
> his "job did not include direct influence on the purchasing of IT
> products" and it would be a "waste of time for the exhibitors to even
> talk to [[him]]" (note: direct quotes except they said "you").  The
> fact he had pre-registered, attended previous Linuxworlds and made
> arrangements to attend made no difference. Only after the rest of his
> "desired target audience" threatened to leave did they grudgingly
> grant him access.
>
> * Lectures were non-technical.  Not only non-technical, but they were
> basic, vague, buzzword-laden, and vendor specific.  In other words,
> they were sales pitches--complete with flashy lights and Powerpoint
> presentations with terms like "in the Cloud", "Paradigm-shifting", and
> "Web 2.0".  Any attempts to ask technical questions were usually
> deferred to "offline" discussions.  What was left was the equivalent
> of sitting through an hour-long infomercial.  The only exceptions to
> this was the presentation by the California Secretary of State about
> Open Source Voting, a somewhat interesting panel about open source on
> netbooks, and an amusing "evolution of desktop" given by Jono from
> Ubuntu.
>
> * Outdone by a 6-booth career fair.  Dice had set up their own
> unrelated career fair a few doors down.  We stepped in and got a small
> taste of what Linuxworld used to be like.  Amazon had a C programming
> puzzle up for people to solve.  Phoenix Bios was there to recruit new
> employees but were happen to just discuss the motherboard BIOS
> subjects as well.  They had prizes and cool things to show with
> friendly and intelligent people.
>
> In closing, I do not plan to attend this conference any more.  I have
> to make a lot of arrangements months in advance to be able to attend
> and the pathetic excuse of a conference it has become is not worth it
> to me.  Linuxworld used to be more than just about Linux.  It was the
> IT departments of some companies showing off their latest stuff to
> other IT people.  Geeks talking to geeks.  Not only was it cool and
> fun, but I feel it did a better job of promoting those products.
> There are still some vendor contacts that I maintain from the
> conference and use professionally.  Many of the products I proposed
> and purchased for work I remember first seeing at Linuxworld.  The
> "OpenSource World/NextGen Data Center/CloudWorld" just doesn't do
> that.  I deeply saddened, but I must declare, that for me, the mighty
> Linuxworld has died.
> _______________________________________________
>