Ninenines.orgI was at the LinuxWorld convention two years ago at the Javits Center in NYC. This one was bigger: more big companies, a bigger space, more people. Conference attendees now span many different kinds of people:
- Mid-level corporate managers/sales people. These folk are amazingly canned and bullshitty compared to Linux enthusiasts. They try to talk the Linux talk when speaking one-on-one ("how many times did you have to patch Open SSH this week dude?"), but fall back on corporate speak when addressing a crowd ("middleware," "enterprise"). A mild look of fear in their eyes (cowed by the business hierarchy).
- IT staff hoards. They come in all shapes and sizes. For them, everything is a practical issue.
These two groups form an amorphous, uninteresting cloud throughout the Javits Center. Mixed in, but mostly around the fringes you have:
- Your older, bearded, MIT-engineer-types, stuck with 1960s styles (that was the easiest way to fit into society when they were in college -- too busy thinking to pay attention to dress, they took the path of least resistance, and kept on taking it over the decades). These folks work in IT departments around the world, and many of them are pretty politically aware. I spoke with a few people from this group who are unemployed.
- Your young geeks: hard-core programmers from around the world: India, Japan, Germany, the US. Some women included here. Surprisingly slim, ofter part of a nuclear family, but punks, and homeboy-types too. Hard-core geek-talk is preferred, but they are all very into trying to explain stuff to the uninitiated. Some entrepreneurs, but few who take their business overly-seriously. They look like Nerds, but somehow lack the fear, the self-consciousness, and the "loser" qualities so often attributed to their kind.
The LinuxWorld convention is corporate-oriented. 90% of the space is dominated by weird showroom setups of the standard big computer companies:
- Novell: SUSE is presented as completely separate from Novell, they're not even co-branded (yet?). Ximian is slapped into the middle of Novell's other, corporate stuff, which seems to include "middleware" "scalability" and other old, nebulous buzzwords.
- IBM: they were everywhere, wining awards for several of their "enterprise" projects.
- Microsoft: they're giving away free CDs of UNIX Services for Windows. To me, they tried to be hip, and self-mockingly anti-MS. Their UNIX services, they said, is just like CygWin, except FASTER, because its a new sub-system and you don't need to make win32.dll calls! Cool!! not.
- SGI: Showing off some cool looking rack hardware.
- Apple: See SGI.
- Oracle: They now recommend Linux for their customers for everything over anything else (except maybe if you have something like a 128 processor machine). They use Linux for all their internal work, except for Desktops where they use something that they called "the standard" (i.e., Windows).
- HP
- RedHat
Then there were smaller set ups for smaller companies whose Linux plans and offerings I think of as less standard:
- MySQL: They seemed to border on being a BIG company: they had lots of high quality logos, many uniformed workers, and a central location. MySQL now has around 120 workers worldwide, which surprised me.
- Progeny: I thought they were still just a little-used distro, but apparently this hasn't been the case for years. Ian Murdock (the "ian" from "DebIAN") and Ransom Love (head of SCO before they became the SCUM they are now) are among the heads of the company. I thought this an interesting match, as Debian to me means a morally Free Sofware, whereas Mr. Love always pushed Linux to proprietary limits to try to make a buck. Progeny, though, is about support, it seems. They will customize and support a distro based on your needs: that may be an old RedHat, a new modified Debian, or anything else that makes sense.
- Xandros: I was excited to see Xandros, because I held out some hope that they would make a polished Debian distro for the unwashed Windows-using masses out there. I asked them how proprietary software fit in to their business model (they have a closed source file manager). "Our customers don't care about the license of any specific piece." Maybe, but does Xandros care? They hope to leverage their file manager to offer services. (Remember Eazel? .Mac?)
It was disappointing talking to all of the above booths. Everything they have to say is calculated. They're all staff who's being paid to be there. They all want to swipe my card so they can spam me. None of them talked about software Freedom. With the possible exception of Progeny, none of them has a business plan based fully on Free Software -- one where they'd sell commodity hardware, or commodity services based on open code to which they would contribute in a GPL-spirited way.
The Free Software Foundation was wedged deep in a small nook in the back. I bought a GNU hat, and we talked politics. I wondered if the GPLed QT license wasn't better for Freedom than the LGPLed GTK+. Why allow proprietary software to be based on Free stuff? True, you can buy a non-GPLed version of QT, but at least then you have to give a monetary contribution to the QT coders. They argued, though, that if a proprietary product modifies QT, there could be a proprietary forked project; with GTK+, at least changes to the library need to be open. I'm still not sure about this: won't we soon start seeing the proliferation of GTK+ shareware -- small proprietary programs for GNOME?
As usual, the ".org Pavilion" was where everything interesting and fun was. Crowds of friendly, smart, kind-hearted people mulling around the back-corner, kindly paid for by corporate interests, a small bone thrown our way.
The Linux Terminal Server Project has come a loooong way. They now sell slick looking, cheap, silent machines in partnership with DisklessWorkstations. Over a 100Kb/s ethernet connection, I ran the GIMP, Open Office, Konqorer and all felt like they were running locally on a fast machine. Set one of these up to do 80211g with a MythTV box stashed in the closet... voila! The mythical, all-in-one TV appliance.
Gentoo was there in force, some of them were punk. The Linux Show was there, doing live broadcasts. A PHP group was there, proudly advocating programming for the rest of us. GNOME was there, the OpenGroup, Linux Test Project, Debian, etc.
Here's a few small cool things I learned:
- VirtualMin gives you an interface to administer your virtual hosts on Apache. I remember 6 years ago or so when this seemed the blackest of black arts.
- In KDE, you can now make a "Universal Sidebar" which show directory trees of any and all your main locations in a sidebar on the desktop. It has a really innovative and intuitive feel to it...
- The new GTKQTlib thing (where you can make GNOME applications use KDE dialog boxes, and save/print/open controls) can now be set to automatically make GNOME apps use KDE dialogs with no extra GNOME code. This should make it easy for distros to make GNOME apps integrate with KDE.
- I hadn't realized that Keith Packard's work on X has resulted in a new X server (client?) -- a replacement for XFree86... I thought he had just created extensions to XFree86. His implementation doesn't have good driver support though, and the XFree86 drivers can't be easily ported. Supposedly, the key to this work is that the code is maintainable and understandable. XFree86 code, it is said, is difficult to dive into as a result of some early optimization work which resulted in obfuscation.
- Once the KDE work on FUSE is done, you should be able to, for example, boot from Knoppix or Mandrake Move and mount an SSH server and use that as your $HOME directory. This means that you will soon be able to boot your entire environment from any PC with an Internet connection with no setup.
- Eskuel is a competitor to PHPMyAdmin, a very popular PHP-based front end to MySQL. It is much prettier than PHPMyAdmin, and seems to have the functionality. Competition is good!
The KDE people really impressed me. At one point one of them wanted to show me how you can write simple javascripts to create full KDE apps or dock applets. He didn't have it installed though, so he decided to download it from the net; there was a compatibility problem with the binary, so he pulled the code from CVS; he didn't want to wait for a long compile, so he decided to use the other processors on the LAN, but to do that he needed icecream; he pulled that from CVS... All this was done at a fast and furious pace, he had 10 or 12 shells running at the same time, was bouncing between them; other developers stuck their heads in: "which shell is patching...?" Development in action. It was cool.
Let the stuffed shirts and corporate bigwigs make money from the Free code. Let the pundits question what it will take for Linux to succeed on the Desktop. There is massive innovation in Linux userspace, driven by the same geeky joy that, in another era and in other fields is called "intellectual curiosity." That's what I see as the main force behind the Open Source movement; not corporate possibilities, as the LinuxWorld convention pretends, but brutal candor, mischievous smartness, self-mocking over-eagerness. The corporate successes of Linux are just the results of an overflow of energy, the excesses being mopped up. The hacker ethic is driving the corporations. We don't need them, but they need us.