LinuxWorld: Tux redux?

I made it up to LinuxWorld, just barely, after being sick earlier in the week. Mostly I was incognito and even old friends didn’t recognize me. (Or maybe they owe me money and are avoiding me, who knows?)

While there was some news (VMWare joins Linux Foundation, Alfresco V3 Supporting Microsoft standards, Ubunto on the Desktop ) and good focus on mobile Linux, LinuxWorld is a smaller show than it used to be.

I specifically remember the 2003 conference, because I was in discussions with MySQL at the time. That wasn’t the peak for LinuxWorld, but there was a level of excitment at the show you could feel. Open source was starting to break into mainstream IT and the LAMP stack was emerging as a serious platform.

So I roamed the trade show floor that year to assess whether MySQL had business potential or not. At that time, LinuxWorld really was the conference for the business of open source. I was able to learn of many IT organizations and software ISVs that were starting to adopt MySQL for business-critical applications. MySQL was a small startup at that time, but there were enough early proof points that that led me to believe it could really disrupt the traditional DBMS market.

Five years later, LinuxWorld is a smaller and less vital conference than it used to be. But it’s not because Linux isn’t popular; it’s exactly the opposite. Linux and open source are now so much a part of the main IT fabric there are now more specialized conferences, ranging from the venerable OSCON that keeps getting larger every year, to dedicated user conferences for MySQL, Red Hat, Zend, SugarCRM and business conferences like OSBC. LinuxWorld still has a place, but its now more of a regional show. And speaking to some of the exhibitors, it doesn’t seem like there’s the quantity of leads from previous years. (MySQL pulled out of LinuxWorld a couple of years ago, as did Red Hat and Novell, seeing a gradual decline in ROI.)

So there’s still some good sessions and keynotes but not quite as much excitement and buzz as in the past. For me, the highlight was getting my picture taken with Tux and Larry Augustin. Kudos to Stacey from Hyperic for taking the picture and to Lonn Johnson at PageOne PR for having Tux at the LinuxFoundation party. That guy’s a friggin’ open source PR genius!