Seen and overheard at the conference in Boston this week.
Seen and overhead bits from the LinuxWorld conference in Boston this week.
HP takes the stage
Martin Fink, HP’s vice president of Linux, scored points for honesty during his keynote address at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in Boston. “My speech today can’t match the drama of Carly [Fiorina] leaving HP last week,” he told audience members.
Our hopes really rose when Fink brought two customers onto the LinuxWorld stage to discuss their open source installations. But the scripted, teleprompter-driven dialogue proved painful to hear and did make us wonder if lip-syncing could be far behind. At least Fink did get each customer to address what went wrong with their rollouts.
CA and SOX
Computer Associates CEO John Swainson drew smirks and eye rolls from the audience at his keynote address at LinuxWorld when he lamented the cost of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley rules. After all, the rules went into effect to clean up the sort of irresponsible corporate behavior to which CA has been no stranger (albeit before Swainson recently joined the company).
Giving away Ingres
Mercifully, Swainson finished his prepared comments early, which allowed time for a Q&A with the audience during which he become much more personable. One questioner asked whether Computer Associates’ move last summer to deliver its Ingres database to the open source community was mainly a publicity stunt: In other words, did CA see that Ingres wasn’t making any money for the company anyway, so why not give it away and have other people work on it? Swainson responded that Ingres pulled in about $40 million for CA last year (“not chicken feed”) and that Ingres continues to be important to CA in that the technology is embedded in many of its products. He said CA has no illusions of competing with IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in terms of its database budget, but added that CA still has over 100 engineers working on Ingres. “We think the [open source] community needed a robust, Unix-class database,” he said, further explaining the offering up of Ingres.
In Microsoft’s backyard
Talk about having some… gumption. Pogo Linux, which sells Linux-based servers and storage devices, calls Redmond, Wash., its home. President Tim Lee says that while the company doesn’t really work with Microsoft, it has sold the company a few of its boxes for testing purposes.
Enough of the penguin already
No penguins. That was one thing Greg Wallace says he was sure about when he and a fellow Nortel alumnus decided to start up Emu Software, a Durham, N.C., maker of products for managing open source server applications. “The penguin is overused,” he says. So he started thinking about other flightless birds, and Emu Software was born. “The options are limited,” he said.
Taking open source to school
Standing apart from many of the corporate booths at LinuxWorld, tucked into the “rookery” area for smaller open source organizations, was a booth for Oregon State University. The university has had a formal Open Source Lab up and running for a year to host open source projects and encourage collaboration among the open source community. By supplying system, network and human resources needed to support open source projects, more people can join the process, and updates to technology can be distributed faster and more widely, explained Scott Kveton, program director. The school hosts servers for such projects as Debian and Gentoo, he said. Some projects, he said, “might otherwise be hosted on a computer under some guy’s desk.” Kveton said that Oregon is becoming something of an open source hotbed, with several government agencies adopting the technology and seeking to collaborate with their peers in other states to develop open source applications. For more information on the lab, visit http://osuosl.org
Super Bowl ad material
A booming voice comes across the speakers for LinuxWorld attendees asking them to please take their seats. Almost like a preview to a movie, a commercial from Novell comes on the two gigantic TV screens. Two men watch a screen as they see their servers being overtaken by a virus. Then a man says, “Worms are what butterflies really are when you look past their wings.”
An ironic twist
A speaker at a security session at LinuxWorld delayed his presentation 5 minutes because of “minor technical difficulties.” He had to hack into the system to get his PowerPoint presentation. It is unclear whether he was hacking into the LinuxWorld system or his own.
Booth battle
Overheard from an occupant of Fujitsu’s booth, referring to the miked-up Intel hawker at the booth across the aisle. “Is she leaving? She’s annoying. I’m getting a headache.”
