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Note: throughout this article, I've scattered links to various pictures that I took while at the show; the entire directory of photos is accessible here.
Linuxworld 2000 in San Jose turned out to be an interesting show. I was there with the BSDi crew, who had their Black Monolith booth again. In addition, BSDi had paid for the ad space on the back of the attendee badges, which were in clear badgeholders, and placed their logo there. So whenever the single-point-of-attachment badgeholders flipped around backwards, which was quite often, people were walking around at the Linux show with the daemon and the BSDi logo on their chests. In addition to all that, the red daemon horns were given out again. Overall, BSD made quite a splash.
Although Linuxworld is both a conference and exposition, the emphasis is very strongly on the expo portion. The show floor is gigantic, with large, expensive booths throughout (with size dependent on level of venture capital funding, of course). It's hard to capture the scale of the whole thing, but this image, taken during setup, shows less than one tenth of the area.
The show went smoothly overall, with tens of thousands of attendees milling around, asking questions, picking up all the vendor schwag, and generally having a good time. There were some special attractions, like the User Friendly animations, and also some celebrity guests :), and fun was had by all.
The BSD Birds-of-a-Feather meeting, held the second night of the show, was huge! There were speakers from NetBSD, BSDi, FreeBSD, and Apple, in addition to snacks and the obligatory beer.
The BoF was an excellent warm-up for the Slashdot/OSDN party, which featured free beer, NetTwerk and others spinning, and a male-to-female ration of about 100:1. Well, not everything's perfect. People still had a good time.
If you didn't attend, well, Linuxworld may not be focussed on BSD, but many more people than ever before knew what BSD was, were interested in trying it, or had tried it, and in general, were very open and welcoming toward the BSD representatives. It was an excellent show. Hope to see you there next time!
