Been there, done that, quite literally got the t-shirt… 
Saw lots of big companies trying to sell their enterprise systems to the wrong people. Saw a few small companies and .orgs doing some cool things with Linux. Was generally unimpressed by the whole thing though – as with LUDEx 2004…
It was smaller than LUDEx, but what was there was slightly more interesting. Less people selling Yet Another Distro/Firewall/Server™ than last time as well.
Managed to come away with more freebies this time (although I had to sit through presentations by HP and Novell to get two of them). For answering a question during the HP/Oracle talk, they gave me a copy of The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source – admittedly published by them…
HP and Novell were the dominant stands of the show, with IBM and Red Hat noticably absent (Red Hat had a small presence on the HP stand). Veritas had three people in penguin suits who seemed to be attempting to sabotage the HP presentations. Sun was probably the next biggest stand, and were notable for their half dozen out-of-work wannabe actors walking round in red, white, and black combat gear, yellow glasses and TFT screens showing Project Looking Glass suspended above their heads.
Was slightly bewildered to see Psion there until I realised they had a NETBOOK PRO running a version of Emdebian which was quite cool – all the functionality/power (and more) of the Zaurus in a sub-notebook size package. Shame about the price of the things though! They’re not sure yet whether they’ll release it as a product, or a download for existing owners.
Sat through the “Great Linux Debate” of which Jeremy Allison was the shining light for constantly defending Open Source and free choice attitudes, and IBM, HP, Novell, and Sun were the bad guys for pretty much continously plugging their products rather than answering the questions directly. Sun was by far the worst of these with it’s constant plugs for their Java Desktop (which I won’t bother linking to – go Google for it). I’d like to see more community personalities and less businesses on the panel for the next one.
Managed to blag our way in to see Jono’s talk about “The Linux Desktop as an emerging platform” which was quite good – he’s got some good ideas about how the various toolkits/desktops should try and work together to enhance the desktop experience which I’ve commented on before. I felt sorry for Matthias Ettrich who was giving the talk afterwards, because as soon as Jono finished, the six of us who’d blagged our way in, plus a few others quickly departed. Must have thought we didn’t like him.
The general consensus about these types of events are that they are less for learning/seeing things and more for the social aspect. On which note we spent most of the evening the pub, I had my first Persian meal, and spent most of the evening talking/discussing/arguing with Aq.
Oh, and before he comments, I do owe most people a pint because I had to take off for my train home before it got to my round…
Met lots of cool/interesting people: Jono and Aq again; Ade and Lee from WolvesLUG (LUG of the month apparently); David and Katherine of Clockwork Software (and also of Wolves LUG); Jon Masters (who seems to be going for the record of LUG mailing list subscriptions – he joined Cumbria LUG’s list whilst we were in the pub!); Matt from Bytemark who I proceeded to rib about Linode being cheaper for UML based servers; Lance from uklinux.net whom I might use for my ADSL when the time comes; Wookey and Phillipe from Emdebian (keep wanting to say ‘embedian’) who are doing some really cool stuff with embedded Linux, and are nice guys as well; Alasdair Kergon of UK LUGs and RedHat; and Antony and a guy that looked like Silent Bob (on the right) (sorry for not remembering your name, although I think it might have been Elliott) from OpenAdvantage who seem to be doing some good stuff for F/OS advocacy.
Honorable mentions goe to Jon "maddog" Hall whom I saw but didn’t talk to (I felt it was cheeky when he was there for a book signing and I hadn’t bought it ), and Davee who I was going to meet up with, but we never got anything arranged, although according to his “blog entry” it appears we were in the same place at several times…
Sorry, but no photos. Decided to travel (extremely) light this, which in hindsight was a mistake.
Hi Schwuk – yeah, I was one of the ones who legged it straight after Jono’s talk too. The room completely emptied – it was almost <strong>embarrassing</strong>.