LinuxWorld day 2
23 May 2005
The second day opened with Jon maddog Hall, who with practised ease delivered the argument I was trying to outline at Open Enterprise - that TCO figures don't really cover the total cost of a solution, and they don't take into account the money that can be saved.
maddog's arguments went down really well with the Rhodes geeks, and they were expounding on how software used to be developed for 1000 users with 100 developers, and now it is developed for millions with 1000 developers, and the obvious consequences of the changing of the ratio.
maddog's a great speaker, and I think I must now consider him the best I've ever experienced. He involved the crowd, starting them at the effects of mass-produced software on their happiness with their software, and leading them to the conclusion that Open Source has the best chance of coming up with software that will do what they want, and more importantly not restrict their way of doing business, which has a potential of lowering the cost of using that software and running business.
Werner Knoblich from RedHat was next. Lord, can RedHat not promote their product without slagging SuSE? Disgusting. I'm more and more on SuSE's side.
The previous day I was asked to assist in proctoring the LPI exams happening on this day, but unfortunately we never quite connected on getting me trained for it.
That left me with quite a bit of time. I spent the rest of the day at the expo, talking to people visiting the Go Open Source stand. The stand was great, dominated with the Geek Freedom League and its military theme, with rusted metal barrels with Ubuntufied HP laptops on them, coffee served in military-issue tin cups, camo bean-bags, and camoflage net covering. There was also a three-by-three TV matrix playing Go Open.
The LPA committee members manning the stand were doing good traffic, and I joined them to meet with maddog to discuss our future plans. maddog was very positive with our move towards individual memberships, and gave us a few good ideas.
One thing I forgot to mention about day one is that my boss from Jam Warehouse was up for the conference, and it seemed he got a lot of networking done. Too bad we're about a month or two away from our blitz, or KnowledgeTree could have been plugged a lot more.