LinuxWorld 2004 In Review

I leaned back in the narrow seat and looked at the fabric ceiling. Outside, the setting sun peeked over the blackened top of a factory, a dark shadow of rolling smoke rising in the orange sky. I twisted to reach my camera in the back seat.

"Plastic" he said.
"What?"
"The ceiling looks like fabric. It even feels like fabric, but if you pay
attention, you'll notice it's plastic. They cut expenses in all the right
places. It has all the power, all the efficiency, but it cost a fraction of the price."

I framed the factory and clicked the shutter. Perfect. Leaning back, I ran my fingers across the ceiling. He was right.

"Feel the plastic? Yeah. Easier to clean."

A plane passed overhead, and I took a photo of its silhouette in the deep sunset. Pollution does wonderful things to the Earth's contrast dial.

"So, what did you think? Did you get the information you needed? What did you think about Malte?"
I thought for a moment.
"It was definitely much different than I expected."

Ahead, the cars were so many grains of sand, trickling in the daily hourglass that flows into New York City every morning then flips around and repeats it every night. It was going to be a long drive home.

To tell the truth, I wasn't sure what to expect from LinuxWorld 2004. The world of GNU/Linux and open source is as diverse as our own globe. Entire ecosystems rise, compete, and fall around new technologies. Hallways full of business cubicles or coffee shops teeming with geeks can suddenly emerge into success or starve slowly until they disappear. The remaining people get reabsorbed and go on to feed the new great company, another promising project, the next tomorrow.

I pulled my hat down as Patrick and I walked out of the Copacabana's parking lot -- they rackmount the cars on hydraulic lifts to save space -- two blocks from the glass facade of the Javits Center. The stiff headwind made me wish I had glasses like Patrick, even if his hornrims did make him look like a short, slightly pudgy Austin Powers.

"Linux is everywhere" I said.
"Yeah?" asked Patrick.
"IBM billboard" I explained and nodded my head toward the waterfront.
"We must be in the right place then" he replied, and opened the door.

If we weren't sure before, we knew it was LinuxWorld as soon as we stepped in. Sure, the huge banners and walking penguin suit tipped us off, but so did the appearance of the "normal" attendees. Ecosystem? Absolutely. While Patrick arranged our passes, I took a look around. It seemed more like a geek Galapagos than a trade show, each species in distinct plumage. In one corner a knot of teenagers showed off t-shirts stamped with #/bin/perl instead of the usual Old Navy or Abercrombie and Fitch. Nearby, a man grinned and pulled the wool hat off his marble grey hair. He stuffed it into his windbreaker and followed his excited son into the show.

"Cubicle walls age a man quicker than kids," I thought, and sauntered toward the restrooms. A few well-groomed suits walked by me, straightening their crisp beige jackets as they delivered urgent calls into their earmounted cellphones. Only a small detail, like shoulder-length hair (carefully shampooed and combed, of course) or conservatively-colored sneakers gave them away. The shoe-shiners didn't look up from their newspapers. They weren't going to get much business today. LinuxWorld is the only place I have ever seen a long line at the men's restroom.

"Here you go, Nate."
Patrick handed me the badge. "Exhibitor" it read. Aside from wandering the conference, I was going to staff an exhibitor's booth with him for part of the day.
"The conference staff are using Windows, you know," he whispered. I chuckled.

We walked onto the carpeted expo floor, past Oracle's massive geodesic igloo, past countless blinking lights on wicked looking rackmounted servers, and into the Dot Org area of the expo. Here, small crowds gathered around the booths of exciting open source projects and nonprofit organizations.
"This is it." Patrick pointed at the OpenACS booth. I dropped my backpack behind the table and pulled out my notebook.
"We won't need you for a while. Feel free to roam around. I'll introduce you to Malte when you get back."

The expo floor was much smaller than I expected. Roughly half the size of a soccer field, most of the space was taken up by large corporations: IBM (Linux is Everywhere), Novell (We invest in Redhat), SGI (We sell pretty computers), Oracle (Unbreakable Linux for Grid Computing), and even Microsoft (Tools for Unix). Nearly every company built angled faux walls lined with sexy machines, like a lair, a maze leading to the center, where sales executives poised to release their pitch to unsuspecting bystanders. On the perimeter, a subtle raised carpet marked the predatory zone, and corporate employees trying to look geeky ranged as far as the edge, but now further. Step inside... and Pow! I avoided their eyes, as if they were each a head of a corporate medusa. If I looked at them, I would be frozen, stony, unable to escape until I had heard about high availability replication or the details of grid computing, or some other mixture of tech, terms, and chicken bones.

Besides, I wasn't interested in the fastest rackmount server, the smallest laptop, or the most expensive 24/7 support. Two men in shiny white plastic DETOX suits with vacuum cleaner hoses sticking out of their backs peered at me through their thin plastic visors. Linux Antivirus? I fled to the underbrush, emerging from the crowd in front of the Hewlett Packard display.

Where were the Web companies? Nearly everyone was selling high performance servers, heavy-hitting database software, or desktop systems.