Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 23:11:23 -0600 From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo@tummy.com> To: lug@lug.boulder.co.us Subject: [lug] Linux Fest 2000 Report, Day One You can get this on the web at http://www.tummy.com/conferencereports/ Updates will be included there, as will pictures (though there are no pictures from day one) Linux Fest 2000, Kansas City Tuesday 2000-06-20 Sean Reifschneider, tummy.com, ltd. =================================== Today was the first day of Linux Fest in Kansas City. We arrived rather late last night, and the show web page and other announcements didn't include any hours that presentations were happening today. So it was easy to justify not getting to the show until after noon. The one thing we really wanted to see was Bruce Perens "Venture Capital" show. We have a new venture, you see. ;-) Unfortunately, that was at 10am. Fortunately, Evelyn ran into him in the halls, and he was bored, so he stopped by our booth and gave us some pointers on what to look for in financing our new venture. Apparently, the presentations today were very poorly attended (as in 6 people). The story I heard for this was that initially you had to pay extra to get into the business talks, but then there weren't many attendees, so they made it free. The problem was nobody knew today's stuff was free... Our booth is right by the LUGs, which is where we like to be. We spoke for a while with the Kansas City LUG folks, and watched the nasty rain storm. For the evening's festivities, Larry Augustin from VALinux was talking about Open Source Software. It was at a chain resteraunt/bar, so there was plenty of socializing before the presentation. Eric Raymond joined us for dinner and showed off his new Pride and Joy, a new configuration mechanism for the kernel called "cml2". http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/kbuild/ It's actually looking pretty sweet. It's a language which defines how all the configuration items in the kernel relate, and a hierarchical structure for presenting them to the user (you know, a menu). The tool itself contains a lot of smarts. For example, if you enable an option which requires other options to be enabled, it will enable them as well. The smart thing is if you later enable something else which relies on some of the same things, then disable the original option, the no-longer-necessary options will be disabled. It includes rather nice interfaces similar to "menuconfig" and "xconfig" for configuring the kernel... Eric now has to get a buy-off, but it sounds like a pretty easy sell. Want to enable USB? You can bring up a search, look for USB, and you'll be presented with a synthetic menu of *ONLY* the USB options. Larry's talk was fairly good. Attendance there was around 30 (not bad considering you had to pay an extra $20/each to get in to it, and it was before the show really got into full-swing). It covered: Open Source is inevitable -- Larry's opinion. :-) Open Source is dominating key markets. Apache is 60% of the web server market. Linux is somewhere around 30% of Internet servers. Open Source is more efficient. In a commercial environment, one person innovates, then the competitors have to scramble to implement that feature (or risk being uncompetitive), before they can go on and innovate for themselves. With Open Source, multiple projects can share code or merge (for example, within 2 weeks of 4 free Quake projects being announced on SourceForge, they had all consolidated). Open Source is not easy, but it's getting easier. The problems are similar to managing any large group of programmers on projects. Managing resources and the communication. However, things like Source Forge are making the job much easier. Many companies are hiring VA Linux to come in and implement an internal Source Forge for their company. The key to Open Source is: Participate. Larry gave an example of a customer tracking package which often costs millions of dollars. VA Linux spend a hundred thousand dollars on getting an Open Source project going to build one. They have something they can use. Ideally now, other companies will contribute similar resources into adding to this project, which will advance it that much further. We huddled and geeked some more. Kevin mentioned to ESR a natural follow-on to his kernel configurator project: a firewall configurator. Eric's eyes lit up. Look for it soon. :-) Tomorrow is the first real day of the show. It starts at 10am (contrary to the literature saying it'll start at noon). However, we've got a date from 10 to noon with Eric and some automatic weapons. Look for the pictures. -- "Ayn Rand books and guns... You guys take World Domination seriously." "It's our job." -- Conversation with Luke Jones about Rob Riggs place. Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com> tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python _______________________________________________ Web Page: http://lug.boulder.co.us Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug