I had no meetings scheduled for the afternoon, so I decided to trek into San Francisco and attend the Linux World Expo. I was mostly curious to see how the shakey economy had affected the world of businesses without business plans. I was expecting a blast crater on the exhibit floor, but was actually surprised at the fair number of booths that were reasonably well stocked with both workers and attendees. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that not all is rosy in the world of Linux.

All the big players had booths: IBM, HP, Sun, and Red Hat. Even Microsoft had a booth there, proudly hocking Embedded Windows and Microsoft Tools for Unix 3.0, whatever that was. There were large booths by AMD and Intel, each filled with large racks of 1U server solutions. There were a fair number of RAID suppliers. There were monitor suppliers. It seems like there was lots of business
interest in Linux.

Perhaps more telling than what was there was what wasn’tthere. Contrary to what you might here from the die-hard Linux advocates, I support free software because I think it is an interesting thing to do in its own right. I think that when people are able to interact with programmers, designers and users, they have an opportunity to make software that fufills needs which commercial suppliers have either not discovered, or have found to be unprofitable. If you want to learn to play the guitar, you don’t immediately hire a manager and roadies. For me, free software has been about enjoying the skill of programming and delivering new applications which people find useful.

It was this idea of exploration and sharing which seemed to be missing. I wanted to see the amateur projects, the one to five person teams that are trying to make interesting applications, not interesting products. There were a few small booths from such projects (the Etherboot guys were there, I’ve used their stuff before and have a number of thin client ideas going that could benefit), but they were pretty thin on the
ground. It mostly seemed like an opportunity to exchange business cards from hardware vendors, rather than a conference about free software.

I recognize that perhaps I am asking a bit much from an exhibition floor. After all, it does take money to attend these conferences, and it is perhaps only reasonable to expect that the show floor would be
dominated by vendors. Still…

I did manage to snag a nice new T-shirt, and also a free FM radio. The FM radio was
given out by bmcsoftware. While walking through the halls, a guy comes up to me and says "swipe yer card, you get a free radio!" Since I am always on the lookout for goodies, I went to swipe my card. They wanted me to fill out a form indicating how much of their product I was interested in, as well as vital statistics such as my name and address. Honestly, isn’t that why these cards were invented in the first place? While waiting to fill out my form, I started reading their banner material.

The funny thing is, after reading literally everything in their booth, I have absolutely no idea what
they do. None. From their website:

BMC Software helps you succeed in meeting your business goals. To have the power to be available 24×7, you have to be in control of what controls your business. Business availability is more than keeping business systems up and running. Today’s business demands that you proactively increase service levels, while reducing cost and providing more value to the business.

What does this mean? I have no idea. I also wonder why they thought it was worth $5 to give me a radio. Then again, I wonder why I thought it was worth receiving perpetual junk mail for a $5 radio.