Brainshare 2005
23 May
A short entry, since I think Brainshare in South Africa this year slowed down on the abstract and settled into the delivery. Exciting for the industry, but not nearly so for someone like me. Again, I have to thank Novell South Africa for having me up for Brainshare so I can report back to people on what's up with Novell and Open Source.
LinuxWorld and Brainshare
16 May
I'm off in a bit to Johannesburg to attend LinuxWorld and Brainshare South Africa. It looks like they're going to be the biggest events in the Open Source arena ever, so I'm very optimistic. I'll be covering them here, of course, and my favourite Open Source mag Tectonic will be doing special LinuxWorld coverage, and Rhodes Geeks at LinuxWorld have already covered their gruelling trip to Johannesburg.
The IT Manager of eThekwini Electricity, Philip Watkins, gave a talk on the migration issues encountered while planning for a migration from their old Windows 95/98 desktops to Linux desktops. Considers the Linux skills/support/training argument dead in the water, and was mostly concerned with just one application in their organisation - their ERP system.
Brainshare: Rest of day two
31 May
Well, rest of the morning, at least. I bunked the afternoon to look around the stalls, and to have an argument about whether one always has the right to run Open Source software that's been distributed to you. I attended talks about Migration from Windows to Linux on the desktop, and on Novell's Open Enterprise Server (basically Netware 7) which will give you the choice of running on a Netware or Linux kernel.
Well, the rest of the keynote were a few companies chatting about their involvement with Linux; nothing new here for me. But, Oracle did mention an upcoming RoadShow in collaboration with Novell happening in South Africa in the next few weeks. I wasn't sure what to expect when SAP was up, but Jonathan Pletschke from SAP didn't talk about Linux. Or SAP. He gave an excellent talk about the future of our jobs as computer practitioners, whether programmers or administrators. Quotes from Brooks always score points, as does mention of Knuth.
Running a bit late, the keynote of the second day started with an incredibly slick demo. A great demo, showing ease of use while keeping complete transparency of what's going on behind the scenes, since the BrainShare delegates include a large number of techies.
BrainShare: iFolder
27 May
Calvin Gaisford works on iFolder at Novell, and explained iFolder and how the Open Source project and the Novell product differ. I must admit, at first I was a bit concerned about the workgroup solution (as the Open Source project is called) being a bit crippled, but it seems it should do everything I'm likely to want to use it for. The enterprise solution (the Novell product) differentiates by bringing backup solutions, policies, directory services, support, and so forth.
Joe Ruthven, ``Linux Evangelist'' at IBM, announced that IBM and Novell want to build a Linux support center in South Africa, and we should expect to hear news about this in the second half of the year. I suppose I've always wondered about the ability of local divisions of largers companies to support Linux, so this should be something to watch.
The second half of the keynote involved a demo of Novell technology. Stafford Masie played guinea pig for showing off what one can do with Novell today.
Well, as I mentioned earlier today, Open Source was a big message to what seems to be more than 700 delegates at the BrainShare conference. This began as Stafford Masie, the Country Manager for South Africa opened the keynote slot. It was quite refreshing to see Open Source being discussed outside of the Linux platform, and also discussing proprietary software on the Linux platform.