The Apress booth was at the top right of the hall and we were opposite the Business Briefing theatres, in which free of charge lectures were given by various experts. Often, when the lectures finished, the entire group of people turned their attention onto us and we faced a stampede!
Despite being busy, I would say that this year’s show was lower-key compared to previous events. Once upon a time the big corporate names would have had laser light shows, music, beautiful models handing out leaflets etc.
This time around it was as if the theme was “getting on with the job‿. It felt to me as if there was no need to shout any longer. Thus the Novell booth was occupied giving impressive live demos of its Enterprise Linux products, although there were still a few entertaining events, such as a some Maori people from New Zealand employed to give live demos of Haka dancing.
The Org Village was were most of the action was. It occupied about a third of the exhibition space, and consisted of small booths inhabited by various open source projects. I hate to use the word, but the Org Village was like a bazaar – many, many people milling about in a relatively very small space. Kudos goes to UKLinux.net, a UK-based ISP, which pays for most of the exhibition space dedicated to the Org Village.
Of particular interest were the Hula, Drupal, Joomla!, MythTV (including the excellent KnoppMyth distro) and emdebian booths, although the whole place had a great vibe. UK-based Canonical was present with no less than two booths, both full of people ready to talk about Ubuntu.
During lunchtimes I was able to attend the Great Linux Debates, a free-to-attend group discussion located in the hall outside the cafeteria. The topic of the first debate was “Virtualization – Who Needs It?‿. The debaters managed to make virtualization sound pretty exciting and I learned some things that had passed me by, such as the usefulness of virtualization when debugging. Members of the panel included representatives from Xen and VMWare, as well as IBM and HP. The second debate was entitled “How Many GPLs Do We Need?” and proved equally fascinating.
But, before I knew it, the two days had passed and the show was over. Several burly men dismantled the Apress booth in the space of 60 seconds. There’s never enough time to see everything and I hope next year that the conference organizers can stretch to three days, rather than two, because there’s clearly enough interest.
