LinuxWorld
I was at LWCE briefly on Wednesday and for a while on Thursday.
LinuxWorld is still less fun than it was when it got started. I still remember the first LWCE very fondly. "We haven't had that spirit here since 1999." But it's interesting and still pretty well-attended by people I know.
The mix of companies exhibiting is changing. Some of the early exhibitors are out of business or in a different line of business. The processor vendors were out in force, as were some of the old-line IT companies. Perhaps it's just another trade show for them.
I saw the famous Microsoft booth and spent a little while looking at an implementation of Unix for the Windows NT kernel. It was pretty faithful, and far ahead of both MKS and Cygwin. You could write ksh scripts and you could run all the traditional Unix programs with their traditional options.
I fired up vi and typed
int main(void){
printf("Hello, Microsoft world!\n");
}
and then ran gcc to compile my program. It worked fine, of course.
Notably absent from the distribution were GNU programs other than gcc. The exhibitor who was showing me the system said it was BSD-based (in fact, running strings on several of the binaries showed the string "OpenBSD" with some frequency) and that "We were trying to minimize the number of GPL components". So no seq (from GNU sh-utils) and no modern GNUish stuff like rsync. As Larry Augustin explains in Revolution OS (which I watched part of on Thursday), people who set up proprietary Unixes in the past would typically spend a lot of time downloading and compiling GNU tools. It would have added a bit to this particular proprietary Unix.
The Microsoft representatives weren't very interested in talking about free software. At one point I was told that the product I was looking at cost only $100. (Subsequently I got a time-limited demo disk which contained software of which the use was purportedly subject to a EULA.) "I make software which is a bit cheaper than that", I said.
"Well ... you don't get 24-hour support."
Anyway, it was funny to be reminded that the Unix world has split up into a free software component and a non-free component. Microsoft, of course, was long the world's leading PC Unix vendor! But, as Jim Dennis says, "Linux is the mainstream Unix now".
On another day, I walked back into the booth to ask about Palladium. (I didn't want them to see my name, because supposedly "The best technical description [of Palladium] is the summary of a meeting with Microsoft engineers by Seth Schoen of the EFF", and being Seth Schoen is therefore inconvenient when you want to ask basic and uninformed questions about Palladium.) I was told that nobody qualified to talk about Palladium had come along to LWCE, and I suggested that they should bring such qualified people to futher LWCEs, since the free software world was extremely interested in the subject.
The nice folks at Bradford Learning decided to pay for the printing of another batch of copies of LNX-BBC 1.618 (the version from one year ago, which is still the most recently released version). So we had copies in the EFF booth, and there are lots of other copies floating around. Some of them were branded as "Bradford Learning" BBCs -- with credit given to LNX-BBC for development -- and others were printed with the traditional LNX-BBC cover art. All of them, as far as I know, had identical contents.
On Wednesday, I had dinner at the 21st Amendment with Kragen, Danny, Yoz Grahame, and Lisa Rein.
On Thursday, we had a party here, which was well-attended and made me especially glad I'd managed to clean up over the weekend. I had food from Shiki (on Third Street, where I used to live) and from Zante's Indian Pizza. I'm nostalgic, but to be properly nostalgic, as I said, you have to have other people around.
