The Cat That Ate the Penguin
I went to Linux World in New York yesterday. My, how the Linux world has changed; this was a regular trade show. People were actually selling things–things that are shipping. And the Linux community is trying to make it easier for people to build commercial software that can run across multiple distributions and actually make a profit.
This was not the Linux World of old. No joking about “total world domination”, no geekfests of extraordinary magnitude, and nowhere near the volume of freebies and public displays of geek pride that were present at the first conference in San Jose a few years back. Then again, the total world domination thing is much less of a joke than it was back then; while the community doesn't have the buzz it once had, that's a side-effect of its new corporate respectability.
I mean, even Credit Suisse First Boston is building production applications on Linux. How corporate can you get?
That's because the suits have swallowed the canary. One guy I talked to commented on how many former start-up colleagues he had seen wearing IBM polo shirts, or HP polo shirts, or Compaq attire. IBM's even got TurboLinux running on AS/400's now, for Linus' sake–yet another step toward the elimination of their proprietary OSs, and the cash they have to pour into supporting them.
I did run into a few old acquaintances at the show, though most of them were too busy to be approached by the riffraff. Miguel's company seems like it's got adult supervision and is actually selling product now; Evolution looks a lot more like a real Outlook alternative (for what that's worth) and they actually got the connector that Steve and I bugged them about a year and a half ago working (and using the WebDAV interface we suggested, too). I guess I'll have to buy a copy when I get a Linux desktop set up again.
Sean M. Gallagher 