LWCE conference report
Here's the report of my experience at the conference.
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Duncan and I got to see a little bit of the setup phase. I was impressed by the lack of security associated with registration for badges: to get a speaker badge, I just had to give my name (and no other information); to get an exhibitor badge, I just had to mention an exhibitor (and no other information). It's probably just as well, because I didn't have any photo ID.
That was an issue earlier in the day Monday, when I went to the Hall of Justice and was told that I couldn't get an amplified sound permit without having government-issued photo ID. I have none -- so I couldn't get an amplified sound permit.
(I wonder if you have to be a U.S. citizen/permanent resident to apply for those permits. This gets back to the nature of non-citizens' free speech rights, which has seemed to me to be an embarrassingly weak corner of U.S. civil liberties legal history. I think Gwen has been looking into this recently.)
The LWCE speakers' room had good food, all the time, for speakers; I hear the press room had the same, for the press. We also saw some people there, like Chris DiBona.
I sent Jonathan Corbet a couple of advance copies of the LNX-BBC 1.618, and so LWN did a really nice review of our BBC on Tuesday morning. (They mistakenly said that Linuxcare was not continuing its own bootable CD project, so I wrote in to correct them.)
Duncan and I were a little late getting to the conference, because we had to go down to the Hall of Justice to apply for an amplified sound permit from the Permits Section. (Duncan, you see, has government-issued photo ID.)
We were told to come to a hearing Wednesday, so we went in to the show, and spent some time in the EFF booth collecting donations and talking to people about the LNX-BBC system and EFF's work (especially on the DMCA). We were giving out LNX-BBCs in the booth -- with a request for a $5 donation to EFF -- as Duncan had received a few thousand of them from Hong Kong Monday morning. (Our duplicator is Wing Shing Optical, and we are very happy with them.)
Duncan and I gave a conference talk about bootable Linux CDs, with a special emphasis on the LNX-BBC project. There was a mixture of history, discussion of LNX-BBC features, and general overviews of technology (boot loaders, El Torito, initrd, our init script, cloop, and so on, as well as other alternatives to handle compression). We did enjoy bragging about some of the neat stuff which is available on our CD-ROM. We were a little disorganized, but we had a nice time and the audience seemed pretty impressed (and grateful for all the free CDs we passed out).
We did have plugs for EFF and for the Free Dmitry events during our talk, and we also did a live demonstration of some of the BBC's features, including downloadable packages (but unfortunately not sound, because Duncan's demo machine is an IBM ThinkPad 600E). Duncan said that some members of the audience had been confused, or alienated, or something, at one point during my talk.
"What, when I mentioned the kernel not being able to use real-mode BIOS calls to read the CD-ROM in an El Torito no-emulation mode boot, once the kernel jumps into protected mode?"
"No, they were fine with that part. It was the math."
You see, the version number of our release (1.618), is a math joke -- it's phi, the Golden Ratio. So I'd taken the opportunity to explain this and I had a whole slide discussing some of the properties of the Golden Ratio. It was that slide which Duncan said the audience liked least. Alas! Where have all the math geeks gone?
After our talk, an FBI agent who'd been in the audience came up and introduced himself to us. (We spotted the Fed! Oops, wrong conference...)
This reminds me that one person who came by the EFF booth on Tuesday afternoon was a military intelligence officer who works on computer crime -- I'm not eager to identify his service, because perhaps his superiors wouldn't be thrilled that he was talking to EFF. But he looked at our literature about Dmitry Sklyarov and said that it was a shame that Dmitry had been arrested, and that he hoped Dmitry would be freed soon. It was nice to hear that.
EFF gave out a large number of flyers for the Free Dmitry party and the Free Dmitry protest march; I also got the Free software Foundation, Debian Project, and Usenix to distribute those flyers. The Debian booth was selling "debian/rules" shirts (which is a good joke if you have ever compiled a Debian package). Some people have speculated that Debian created a rules file so that Debian would get a good Sucks-Rules-O-Meter score.
A group of people who were either from the Debian project or fans went out to dinner at Buca di Beppo, my very-well-received recommendation. It was really fun.
During the day, we kept on passing out BBCs, and Linuxcare kept on passing out LBTs. We received a steady stream of comments about how cool the BBC system was, and EFF got a fair number of donations in exchange for CDs.
Duncan and I were again back at the Hall of Justice (my fourth such trip in three days) for a hearing before the Permits Section. We sat in the back of the hearing room, and when the officer in charge began the meeting, I was surprised to hear him call
Katina Bishop, itinerant show, loudspeaker, non-commercial, Golden Gate Park.
And sure enough, Katina Bishop herself stood up from her seat in the front of the room, walked up to the hearing committee's desk, and began talking to the committee members.
Katina is my co-worker at EFF, and I hadn't expected to see her at all; it so happened that she had applied for an amplified sound permit for the EFF Share-In concert, and her hearing came up the same day that our Free Dmitry march permit hearing did. So there we were in the very same hearing; it was a funny co-incidence.
Duncan was called up a little later (the process was alphabetical by last name), and so we had time in between to remark on how funny it had been to run into Katina in such a place. And then Duncan and I went up to the front and Duncan was asked "Are you Duncan MacKinnon?" and that was all that the Permits Section wanted to know.
Katina's permit, and our permit, were granted (this link won't work right away).
In the afternoon, Duncan and I dropped by the Linux Journal hospitality suite to check in with Don and make sure that BBCs were being passed around.
I spoke with the folks from the EtherBoot and LTSP projects about netbooting. They've both done impressive work that we might be able to benefit from in some way.
I also stopped by the Scyld booth to give out BBCs. People now or previously at Scyld are responsible for a lot of good things on the BBC -- Ethernet drivers and diagnostics, two-kernel monte, and now some forensics tools. They had a nice Beowulf demo with a rack-mountable array of servers running a simulation. Donald Becker showed up at one point, and I gave him some BBCs; apparently he liked them, because he stopped by the EFF booth later on to talk to Duncan for quite a while.
I ran into Kieran at the GNOME booth, and I talked to him about math for a while.
Alex Katalov and Dmitry Sklyarov of Elcomsoft attended the conference together. I didn't see either of them on the show floor, but other people did. One man who came by the EFF booth had a very special present which he asked me to pass on to Dmitry: a 1960 U.S. silver half-dollar, with an engraving of the Liberty Bell on the back. (I gave it to Alex later that evening.)
There was a Debian dinner (with some folks from Amsterdam and otherwise far away) at an Indian restaurant called New Delhi (on Ellis). I'd eaten there before; it was very good, although the main reason we chose it today was that it's physically the closest Indian restaurant to Moscone Center, according to Yahoo!.
As a result of going to dinner, we were a little bit late to the Allseer party.
The party was excellent. I met Raph Levien, maintainer of Ghostscript, creator of Advogato, and the person responsible for lots of other neat things, like the original remailer list.
Dmitry Sklyarov attended the party -- but he wasn't allowed to say much, or stay long. Lawrence Lessig gave a speech in which he talked about a death penalty case he encountered while working for Justice Scalia; he condemned the DMCA (as you might expect), and called on us to help in a long battle. Richard Stallman spoke next, and hit various points, ending in a call for campaign finance reform. (The following day, a free-sklyarov subscriber noted that Ernest Hollings receives a lot of money from lawyers and copyright industries -- more than from any other group.) Sometime I should write something about campaign finance.
Cindy Cohn, from EFF, gave the last speech; one audience member told Duncan that the speech was so inspiring that it made him want to cry. (That's your answer, Cindy, if you were wondering how you did.)
I also found two people at the party whom I'd met at the EFF booth and who were from Western Massachusetts! They were affiliated with schools in the Five College Consortium, and one of them actually had Prof. David Kelly as her advisor. (He's the director of the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, which I attended in 1993.) That woman was the one who danced with ribbons during the parade on Thursday.
It's great to meet people from back where I grew up! These two drove across the country together and are headed back at some point. I hope they'll say hi to Kelly for me.
I tried to paint "svobodu Dime" on the big banner which had been hung on the wall, but I got called away in the middle, and somebody else completed it, thinking I'd meant to write "svobodu Sklyarovu". Fair enough.
I stayed at the party for several hours and ran into a number of people from EFF, the Debian project, and local LUGs.
I checked Advogato before going to sleep, and noticed an article about LWCE's admissions policies, written by a 13-year-old programmer named Zach Lipton, who was denied admission to the show on Wednesday because of his age.
I immediately wrote the following message to Kathy Moran of IDG:
Hi Kathy,I had a very nice time in my conference session today, and I'm also enjoying working in the EFF booth. Thanks for the opportunity to be a part of LWCE again.
I wanted to let you know about something I noticed on Advogato, a community web site run by Raph Levien of UC Berkeley:
http://www.advogato.org/article/331.html
This article, by open source programmer Zach Lipton, describes how he was turned away from LWCE today because he is 13 years old, even though he came to the show accompanied by an adult. I find this troubling.
Today, I'm 21, have worked full-time in the technology world for three years, have presented at three LWCE shows, and have been interviewed about technology issues by national media.
I remember my first trade show experience -- at the age of 15, I attended a non-IDG networking show on the East Coast. I attended with friends aged 15, 16, and 30, two of whom were working as computer consultants. Many of the engineers present had substantive and valuable technical discussions with us, about firewalls, routers, and cryptography. Unfortunately, some vendors treated us disrespectfully because of our age. I found this counterintuitive -- I was already working on IT infrastructure projects at my high school, and expected to be working with computers professionally within the next two to three years. (And, as it turned out, that prediction was accurate.) Why should those vendors want to alienate their future customers?
After all, some enthusiastic technologists are very young, and many young people are already doing significant technical work before they enter high school or college. This is especially true in the open source/free software community. A number of accomplished developers I know are teenagers, who often got started working with Linux when they were 12 or 13. (I started at 15; a major contributor to the LNX-BBC project, which was the subject of my talk on Tuesday, is 16 at the moment, and does superb technical work.)
One result of LWCE's age policies seems to be that properly-registered programmers who contribute to major open source/free software projects aren't able to attend the show and discuss their work with their colleagues. According to Mr. Lipton's web site, he works as a programmer on the Mozilla web browser.
I understand that IDG is concerned that young people could be disruptive to the show, and that exhibitors may not be particularly excited about speaking with attendees who are not yet computer professionals. On the other hand, my experience suggests that young people who are interested in attending trade shows are very likely to become computer professionals, often within the next few years. After all, there's a reason that these people are trying to get into your show!
The free software/open source world is full of enthusiastic and talented young people who are taking the opportunity to make connections and contributions they're likely to continue through their academic and professional lives. I would urge IDG to try to find a way to let these people participate in LWCE.
(Zach was subsequently admitted to the show; I think the issue still remains, and I'm glad to hear that IDG will be considering it.)
We held a protest march from the Moscone Center to the Burton Federal Building, with a pretty sizable police escort (I'd guess about 15 or 20 officers involved at some point). I think we peaked at 100 people, which was fewer than I'd hoped for, but we were certainly still an impressive sight.
We marched from Moscone along Howard, up 4th, along Market, up Golden Gate, and stoppied and rallied and chanted at the Federal Building. The folks from Berkeley showed up with the signs midway through, so we had a nice collection, and I held a "Svobodu Dime" for a while, and later held my big "Free Dmitry" sign.
We did give out over 1,000 flyers at the conference and then another 1,000 or more along the parade route. It was fun. Richard Stallman was a special guest at the rally, and he urged people to boycott movies that they didn't think were good, as opposed to all movies. (But, he added, it was probably almost the same thing.)
Thanks to Don, Tabinda, and Duncan, as well as everyone else who marched.
On return to the conference, I attended Bill Schoolcraft's talk on the Unix filesystem. He spoke a bit about differences between various flavors of Unix (wow, the device names for disks on some Unixes are really scary!), and he told his personal story of how he came to Linux, starting as a steelworker and finding himself impressed with computers. Bill is a friend of mine from the old CABAL days, and I remember when he first came as a novice to user group meetings. He and I were hired at Linuxcare on the same day, and he's still working there (so he's been there well over two years).
I think the crowd was very appreciative of his story and his sense of humor; he was an inspiration for some of the novice users in the crowd, and he gave some advice on how to do tech support without alienating or frightening people (which is actually quite difficult sometimes!).
Coming back to the EFF booth, I talked to a number of EFF supporters, collected some more donations, and poked my head around the corner to talk at the FSF booth for a while with the new FSF VP, Bradley Kuhn. I see that the FSF is still pushing pretty hard on the ideological front! I'm afraid that they're always looking to see what's wrong with things: for example, at a previous show, Duncan gave Richard a BBC, and Richard immediately said "This doesn't say GNU/Linux!" -- so we went back and made our LNX-BBC say "GNU/Linux", and when Duncan gave Richard the new version at the party (and Dmitry Sklyarov was also a recipient), Richard said "This doesn't say GNU/Linux!".
"Yes, it does, Richard." said Duncan.
"Oh. Thanks!" said Richard.
At the booth, I gave some to Bradley; he worried about the suitability of the source code availability offer. I pointed out that the FSF's own stickers, which were supposed to be "free as in speech" (and under a license which allowed duplication), did not have bear any copyright notice at all!
But anyway, the good folks from the FSF are extremely skeptical and extremely critical. And I think we need that, and it's a benefit -- but as many people have noted, it can't be helping their public outreach.
I bought a nice shirt from Bradley ("FSF: Welcome to the GNU age!"), and then a programmer from Microsoft came by, and Bradley immediately started talking about how bad Microsoft was. Well, yes, we don't expect the FSF to be fond of Microsoft; are they bad enough that this is all we have to talk about with Microsoft staff?
I asked the Microsoft guy whether he'd like a BBC, and he said yes, so I got him to come around the corner to the EFF booth, where I gave him three, and he said he'd heard about the BBC and that his boss was actually hoping to get one. We talked about how to use the BBC to rescue Windows machines (like Gwen's laptop!), and about why there was no good current NTFS support in the Linux kernel.
Then the Microsoft guy told me that lots of engineers at Microsoft supported the EFF. That was really nice to hear. I'd just heard that lots of technical people in the military support the EFF. So there was a strong suggestion that technical people all over the place care about what we're doing; the question is, how about the general public? People who buy consumer electronics, people who have a small personal web site or zine, people who go to school or use a public library?
Given that the EFF does not have a position like the FSF's that software inherently ought to be free (although we share many positions and concerns with FSF), our reaction to Microsoft is naturally a bit different. But Microsoft is doing things that concern us, like the Secure Audio Path, Microsoft's eBook software, and other DRM work. (I have had a bit of a DRM focus so far. This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of Microsoft initatives that can attract EFF attention.) So I'm hopeful that the people at Microsoft who like what EFF does can have a positive influence, and that we can talk to them about things like DRM and the DMCA. Microsoft -- like the armed forces, as I once said to a friend who was about to enter USNA -- clearly has a lot of power which it could use for good or ill.
In other situations, having employees with a concern for civil liberties is one of many checks on an organization's behavior. For example, Adobe employees' support for Dmitry Sklyarov was one of several incentives for Adobe not to continue to press for his prosecution.
Technical talks were strong, and community spirit was strong. Perhaps the view was different in the .Org Pavilion; it was the first time I spent almost an entire LinuxWorld show in the section reserved for non-profit organizations, and didn't represent any company.
Most large vendors told me that turnout was pretty good; a few complained that they hadn't been getting enough foot traffic or enough sales leads.
I saw a lot of people I knew!
The BBC had a strong reputation and all sorts of people were interested in it. It was really nice to see how many people actually sought us out to receive copies.
EFF is immensely popular among engineers, even at companies which the Linux community may not be very fond of.
The Free Dmitry movement has talented and influential people behind it.
So I was optimistic about this show, and I had a great time.
At the beginning of the month, Don Marti wrote an extremely worthwhile explanation of the difference between the use of cryptography for privacy (confidentiality) and the use of cryptography for copy protection. It's worth taking a look.
Contact: Seth David Schoen