crafterm's weblog

LinuxWorldExpo 2005 in Frankfurt

Yesterday Torsten and I attended the LinuxWorldExpo 2005, which was held in Frankfurt at the trade fair grounds in the city.

Wednesday was when all of the english speaking keynotes were held so I thought it would be good to head down and hear what the speakers had to say.

The three speakers presentations we attended were:

* Bdale Garbee - Reaping the benefits of the community development model

* Jon "maddog" Hall - Free and Open Source: The next twenty years

* Havoc Pennington - The future of Linux Architecture

I enjoyed all Jon's presentation the most, mainly due to his nature of presenting with anecdotes, side stories and quotes from moments in the computer history. His presentation also sparked a lot of thought, and was along similar lines to when I heard Eric Raymond speak at LinuxTag in Stuttgart a few years back.

It's interesting to see that Linux is still growing in commercial use today, many of the survey's showed that Linux is still being adopted by companies, replacing closed and/or proprietary systems creating an environment of mixed machines and operating systems. Now's more of a time than ever for interoperable systems.

Afterwards we got to speak with Bdale for a while which was great, as a Debian package maintainer it was great to meet a DPL.

Surprisingly Microsoft was also present in the exhibition hall. They were mostly advertising Windows and .NET which was no surprise, however there was some sign advertising interoperability services for Unix.

Most of the major Linux distributions were present including Debian, Gentoo, SuSE, Redhat, Ubuntu, etc, along with some major free software groups such as Samba, Asterisk, FSF, etc, as well.