LinuxWorld NY 2001

Day 2 of the largest Linux conference and exhibit in the U.S. was a day of interviews and exhibit trawling for the LWN.net crew. We roamed the halls of the massive exhibit areas in the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and sat down with the heads and arms (executives and developers) of various companies to find out what makes them tick, and in some cases, if they think they could keep ticking the till the August LinuxWorld in San Francisco!

Revolution OS!

As a sheer stroke of luck, Liz Coolbaugh ran into Jon 'maddog' Hall in the Javitts Center where he gave her his one extra ticket to the first public showing of the documentary "Revolution OS", created by J.T.S. Moore, a filmmaker with roots at Stanford and therefore personal connections to many of the folks at VA Linux, Penguin Computing and more. Doug Bone first convinced Moore to consider the Free Software, Linux, Open Source phenomena as a topic for a documentary. This is his first effort in this arena. Not being a film critic, Liz refrained from predicting the success of this documentary outside our own community, but personally, she loved it.

The film only has 90 minutes to capture its topic, so it did not attempt to be all inclusive or to capture the full breadth of the experience. Instead, it focuses on the historical thread that ties Richard Stallman's Free Software philosophy to Linus' development of the Linux kernel, to the creation of the Open Source branding and all the results that followed. It has strong narrative roots and focuses on telling the story of a few of the people caught up in this overall movement. Interviews with Linus, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens and Larry Augustin were used in bits and pieces through the film to give background and personal glimpses into this story.

Though many of us may be sorry that our own personal portion of this story did not get memorialized for all time, watching the film is an opportunity to immerse oneself in the fun and furor of the past six to ten years. We are tremendously lucky that someone with this talent and with such close personal ties to the community was the first one to choose to tell this story; he has done a fabulous job.

The film will make its first official public debut at the South by South West film festival in Austin, Texas, on March 12th.

Tim Wilkinson of PocketLinux. Tim Wilkinson of PocketLinux started our morning with an indepth interview on the history of this Java-on-Linux based solution for handheld and embedded platforms.

We talked to a lot of companies about this, that the PDA should take a more Web-centric model and they all said "That's very interesting," but they weren't very interested. So we raised a bunch of money on our own and started Transvirtual to write Pocket Linux with the Java virtual machine we wrote, Kaffe. We rebuilt an application framework for writing applications in XML - all the data is XML, all the communications is XML, all the visuals are XML.

LWN plans to launch a few changes in the coming weeks to our Weekly version, including a new Desktop section written by Senior Editor Michael J. Hammel. Mike used his time on Thursday to wander the show floor to meet the many desktop players on display and start to dig into what the Linux desktop is all about.

Ximian goes ape... "We have a product called Bonobo, a component model which is based on CORBA which makes seamless component integration of network objects easy to do", said Michael Meeks of Ximian. "A Bonobo is a monkey, and our marketing people are very creative so they hacked up this beautiful booth with the monkey and jungle". It was nearly as hard not to be taken in by the jungle theme of the Ximian booth as it was not to be overwhelmed by the sophistication that the GNOME desktop has developed over the past year.

A more thorough examination of Ximian and their products Red Carpet and Evolution, which is a replace for Outlook, is in the works here at LWN. Stay tuned and keep an eye out for the new Desktop page in the Weekly edition.

...and Eazel comes clean. Brian Croll, VP of Marketing for Eazel, also took the time to chat with Michael about his company and it's cornerstone product, Nautilus, which is based on GNOME technologies.

The vision, ultimately at the high level, is to make computers easier to use. Period. It's been a life long quest, really, for Andy [Hertfeld, Co-founder and official Software Wizard of Eazel]. So he just wants to take it to the next chapter. Now it's pretty clear that the way to do this in the most active environment was the Linux/Open Source environment. That was the most obvious place to focus.

Immediately following this interview Michael was able to attend the informal but very entertaining and informative talk by Eazel co-founder Andy Hertzfeld. Andy is an incredible speaker who, if you get the chance, you shouldn't miss. Andy's work on the Macintosh interface and subsequent experiences on user interface design and implementation give him a unique view of not only what the Linux desktop should be, but what it could be.

I don't think it's an impossible task to make the desktop great for the hackers, to make it great for the technical community but also to make it great for your mother. It's a harder job to try to make it great for a broad range of users rather than a narrow band of them. But I think it's a grand strategy for the Linux community to completely free the end user, to free the desktop, from the proprietary system.

Chillware surfs in. One of the suprises on the scene over the past year has to be Chilliware. Director of Technology for Chilliware Gautam Godse told us that this is a company to be reckoned with on the consumer desktop. " Lots of companies have small applications, most of the other companies are distributions. But none of them have clearly defined product lines that target specific markets like desktop publishing, contact management, email, web management and office suites. We're a rockin' company. We've got a strong development team in California and overseas, with about 200 people including programmers.

These products were conceived just a year ago and completed in 7 months of development time, which others have told us is a record time for development from conception to production and to actual retail sales. We have finished the first versions of 3 products - Mohawk, Mentor and iceSculptor - with more features in the next releases. For now, we have a complete product line and people are buying them. "

Chillware's iceSculptor product is a vector-based page layout product that is the first native application of this nature to ship to consumers. "Our most expensive product is $79, but all of our products are fairly inexpensive. Our Mentor product is free of charge. We want developers to adopt the Mentor standard to generate help files for their applications, using Mentor embedded in applications to view those files. "

The product supports import of many image formats and uses an XML format for it's image files, embedding raster images as plain ASCII text. Later, Chilliware plans on providing the necessary information to retrieve all information from their XML formatted files for use in third party products, as such as file format conversion utilities. The company plans an open source development site to support open source development, including free technical support for Linux newbies.

The Linux DB scene. Britt Johnston, the Chief Technology Office for NuSphere, gave a talk on "The Future of Open Source Databases". The last half of his talk focused on MySQL and, in particular, on the contributions that NuSphere is making to the MySQL development process. Those contributions are primarily in the form of a project entitled Gemini, a new OLTP engine for MySQL.

This new engine is based on technology from the Progress RDBMS, not a big surprise, since Progress is the funder behind NuSphere. Britt commented, "Gemini is designed to be independent of the database schema, doesn't know about record format, index key format, or the server architecture. It just knows how to provide reliable storage. It closely matches the MySQL Table Handler API even though they were independently designed and developed. That seems almost like fate; the synergy was there.

Liz also spoke with the folks at Great Bridge, the company now focusing on bringing support services for PostgreSQL to the market. A more in-depth report on MySQL and PostgreSQL will follow next week.

More in-depth coverage of Emperor Linux will be provided next week.

Digital Creations news. Digital Creations announced their Open Source Content Management System plans today as well. Note that Paul Everitt will be coming out to the Colorado Linux Info Quest on Friday, March 30th, to give details on what they are doing to develop an Open Source competitor to the likes of Vignette and other proprietary systems. "It is an area that is highly fragmented and has a highly dissatisfied customer base. That makes it a good market for an Open Source-based system", they commented.

Tivo Hacking! Below we've included pictures that Dennis Tenney took at the Linuxcare booth. They show a fun Tivo hack, a card that can be plugged into the Tivo to allow you to stream the full video feed directly to your computer. Note that glee in the developers' eyes ...