The team has taken a bit of a turn for the worse, but better than half the players are on the disabled list. Is the coach responsible for the poor play? Or merely a victim of circumstance? Such is the dilemma that LinuxWorld presents for conference attendees. While it’s true that the premiere of Norbit was in all likelihood better attended than today’s keynote address from the brilliant Bruce Schneier, it’s also true that those not in before the storm yesterday had a very poor chance of making it in today. I’m not called the “bringer of storms” for nothing, after all. Either way, I’d love to be a fly on the all for some of the sponsors’ discussions following the show.
Apart from the rather sparse attendance, however, the show has been worth attending, and not just because I’ve been able to sit down with a few of our clients. There was the aforementioned Schneier presentation, which provided much food for thought (will be looking at Shapiro-Varian in more detail, in particular). The IBM press conference – using the term loosely, as they kept it very informal (a good thing b/c I’m in jeans) – discussed both the open client offering as well as a small horde of Power related news. In answer to the question of ISV traction for Linux on Power, which I raised – although it’s only tangentially relevant – because the folks from Canonical have deprecated mainstream support for their own Power distribution, Scott Handy reported that better than 2500 ISVs were now supporting the non-x86 chip. Not bad. Not Debian, but not bad.
On a completely different subject, the morning session on virtualization was notable for the attendance of several end users looking for answers to some interesting infrastructure consolidation issues (for the record, I’m still very skeptical of the virtual appliance proposition). As I’ve already mentioned in my del.icio.us links, I’m more than a bit skeptical of the awareness numbers Forrester’s come up with regard to virtualization, but there’s still no question in my mind that vitualization is nearing the tipping point in certain market segments. Whatever your approach – native, para, or other – virtualization is likely to be a part of your computing production computing future, assuming it’s not already.
Thus ends the summaries of the sessions I’ve attended to date; the rest of the day has been spent primarily on gossip, eavesdropping, or eavesdropping on gossip. And as we all know that what happens at LinuxWorld stays at LinuxWorld, so I’ll close for the day.
Tomorrow’s schedule is early breakfast with the Port 25 gang, a meeting and a couple of sessions in the morning, and then off to Boston via Acela. In the meantime, I’m going to head downstairs and see if Coop or Luis have decided to hit the bar in advance of our dinner. If you’re in the Northeast and getting hammered with snow, sleet, ice, or an unidentified falling precipitation, please accept my apologies.
