LinuxWorld San Francisco COMMUNITY

Walking the Hall at LinuxWorld San Francisco NEWS FROM THE BAY

Linux enthusiasts gathered in San Francisco to learn about new tools, new initiatives, and even a new license.

BY JOE CASAD

he usual crowd of vendors, pro- grammers, reporters, and Tenthusiasts gathered at the Moscone Center in downtown San Fran- cisco for the US West Coast LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Organizers expected a turnout of around 11,000 visi- tors with 180 exhibitors on the show floor. Most of the usual companies were in attendance – including HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and Sun, as well Figure 1: Business was brisk on the show floor, where mobility was a major theme. as many smaller vendors. Some new names were also in evi- Maglen’s oratorial skills were most of that will serve as a common dence, including interesting tools such impressive, but he revealed few details base for their systems. Some Debian as Splunk, a log file management tool, of the next GPL. In the Q and A period at developers are skeptical of the project, and Black Dog, a tiny Linux device that the end, he did reveal some areas of con- although Debian heavyweights such as piggybacks itself onto a host system by cern, including warranty disclaimers and founder and former project pretending to be a CD-ROM drive. Even compatibility with the Apache license. leader have expressed couldn’t stay away. Although Moglen also provided some details on their support. the Redmond giant kept its head low, the elaborate global approval process Microsoft was around the fringes of the planned for the proposed changes. Conclusion event, handing out invitations and Expect a first draft of GPL 3 around the The West Coast LinuxWorld is always squaring off with Google in a geek trivia end of this year. one of the more interesting shows, with game. vendors and community groups saving OpenSuse big announcements for San Francisco. The Conference Novell announced the OpenSuse project, I stayed quite busy learning about new The conference sessions fell into the a new initiative to give outside develop- products and projects, although, as a usual categories, with an emphasis on ers more input in the Suse development member of the press, I was at greater lib- enterprise issues such as data centers, process. Community developers will erty to attend briefings and other events virtualization, clustering, and security. have access to the code in the develop- than the average visitor would be. A conference track that has appeared ment phase. Eventually, Novell will pro- Except for a few new products and at recent shows, “The Business Case vide tools and technical assistance to some regional companies, many of the for Linux and ,” brought developers who wish to contribute. booths were similar to ones I had seen in some predictable bouts of business- earlier this year at LinuxWorlds in speak, such as “Managing Competitive Debian Common Core Boston and Toronto – even down to the Advantage with Enterprise Open Source Alliance banner graphics. This is understandable, Software,” but also included some A major event of the LinuxWorld confer- of course, since every vendor cannot interesting presentations on legal mat- ence was the announcement of the really reinvent themself for every show. ters. Foundation attorney Debian Common Core Alliance (DCCA). But from a user’s perspective, unless Eben Maglen gave a talk titled, “What Several Debian-derived Linux distros you’re a news junkie, one LinuxWorld You Need to know about GPL 3.0.” Mr. formed the DCCA to produce a version per year is probably sufficient. ■

WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 59 OCTOBER 2005 93