February 12, 2007

The Southern California Linux Exposition 2007 (SCALE 5x)

Filed under: News Stories — @ 7:23 pm

The Southern California Linux Exposition’s fifth year has been its best yet, with record attendance, vendor participation, and excellent presentations and talks. There were few new things to announce or showcase at the event, but if you wanted to measure the pulse of the open source software community, this was undeniably the place to be this past weekend.

More of an event, less of a show

SCALE 5x was held in the Westin LAX hotel in Los Angeles over three days. The first comprised two mini-conferences on open source software in health care and women in the open source software community. There were far fewer attendees than one might find at a LinuxWorld Conference and Exposition, but SCALE is not so much a “show” with fancy displays and contests and such; it’s really more of a community event with industry sponsorship. There were few flashy presentations, even the big vendors had small booth spaces, and both the community projects and the commercial vendors shared the same area of the floor.

The exhibitors

There were more than 70 exhibitors at SCALE 5x. I didn’t get around to all of them, but they all looked interesting and appeared to be staffed by knowledgeable project or company representatives. Below are some highlights from the booths that I did get a chance to stop and take notes on. Nothing personal against the companies I don’t mention here — it’s solely a matter of time and space.

Above all, it can truly be said that SCALE is about the open source software community. Linux user groups (LUGs) from around southern California and even an actual Unix user’s association had booths, as did Haiku, ReactOS, Gentoo, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and the Free Software Foundation. The nice thing about these booths was that, unlike LinuxWorld, they were not in Siberia — they were integrated perfectly among commercial vendors large and small.

Dell and Red Hat teamed up in one booth to show off Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Dell blade servers. Right now it’s RHEL version 4, but Red Hat expects its next major release sometime in mid-March. Dell plans to offer the new version on its servers sometime in May, after the proper test procedures have been completed.

Though he wasn’t there himself, Gael Duval’s Ulteo project had a nice demonstration of its Connected Desktop product, and had free CDs of the Ulteo operating system to give out.

Network monitoring frameworks battled for attention at SCALE 5x. GroundWork, OpenNMS, and Zenoss all had their products on display and/or available to demonstrate. Of the three, I most look forward to testing and reviewing OpenNMS for several reasons: It’s incredibly scalable and configurable,it’s fully open source, and has the best chance of working properly on my server.

The KnoppMyth project had an impressive demo of the operating system on a large LCD television. The menu system looked great, all the hardware seemed to work perfectly, and I felt certain that the time to revisit my unintentionally long-term digital video recorder (DVR) project was nigh.

IBM had its usual “shock and awe” display of high-end hardware ala the Blue Gene and a rack full of blade servers. Of greater interest was its outline of the large number of applications and services it offers for GNU/Linux — too many to list here.

TrollTech showed off its fancy prototype cellular “green” phone running Qtopia. They told me I could buy one for $700 and that it was primarily aimed at developers. Considering the competition in the smart phone market is first of all not that much cheaper, and secondly appears to be of a lower quality of manufacture, I actually thought $700 for the engineering sample phone was somewhat reasonable. Qt 4.2 was also being showcased; it offers an improved graphics view framework and better OpenGL rendering.

Google gave away free female-oriented T-shirts

KDE 4.0 — which I was surprised to learn is aimed primarily at highly technical users who enjoy cutting-edge features — looks like it has a lot of innovation planned. The most meaningful feature is actually a document that will form the project’s strategy on human-computer interfaces (HCI). According to one of the KDE Project’s usability specialists, the document’s goal is to connect designers and developers on the issue of interface usability.

The Ingres relational database took advantage of its SCALE booth to tell attendees about Project Icebreaker, a combination of a GNU/Linux-based operating system and its enterprise-grade database product in one single solution.

Centrify had a really cool client-based identity management product on display that allows Unix, GNU/Linux, and OS X computers to authenticate to a Windows Active Directory server. It seemed a little backwards to me to have GNU/Linux desktops authenticating to a Windows server; on the other hand, it totally frees up any limitations on desktop operating systems if you’ve already standardized on Active Directory.

If SCALE had vendor awards, TicketMaster would have won in the “wow, I didn’t know you had anything to do with open source software” category. As it turns out, not only does TicketMaster run the most important parts of its worldwide infrastructure on GNU/Linux (some 2400+ servers in more than 20 countries) and other free or open source software, but it also contributes code and money back to projects such as the mod_perl Apache module.

Transitive, the company responsible for the well-known Rosetta PowerPC translation framework on OS X, was showcasing its QuickTransit Solaris/SPARC-to-Linux/x86 migration tools at SCALE 5x. This in itself is interesting, but the fact that the Transitive booth was within spitball distance of Sun Microsystems’ makes it somewhat comical as well.

If I gave them out, Starnet would get my award for the most impressive software application at SCALE 5x. Its XWin32 product is an X11 server that runs remote X sessions from GNU/Linux machines on a Windows system over a network. In other words, you can use a fully functional, 3D graphics accelerated, safely contained X session on your Windows machine. Functionally this is much like a VNC session except unspeakably faster. It can be installed to the Windows machine or run from a USB key. I’ll be reviewing the USB key edition in a few weeks.

The Robert Half technology staffing company had a booth where the attendees could gauge the appropriateness of their salary. If you’re underpaid, the company might just have your next job lined up for you.

Linspire had a Freespire booth where company representatives were telling people all about Click N Run, the new Ubuntu partnership, Linspire’s aspiration to gain more OEM deals, and giving away Freespire 1.0 CDs. Official word on Freespire 2.0 is that it’ll be out shortly after the next Ubuntu release. As decent as version 1.0 was, I predict that if it’s done correctly, 2.0 will leave free-of-charge desktop GNU/Linux distros (Ubuntu included) in the dust.

Part of the exhibitor floor at SCALE 5x

Verio really put on its war face for SCALE 5x. They had a LinuxWorld-style booth with demonstrations, a giveaway of a remote surveillance device, and offered individual press briefings. They also hired a small video crew with a cute blonde hostess to go around the show floor and do some quick interviews with attendees. Their actual product — Web and other Internet hosting ala shared, virtual, and dedicated servers — looks and sounds like a dream come true for Web publishers and technology-heavy online businesses. I wish I’d known about it years ago before I went through hosting hell with The Jem Report.

iX Systems CTO Matt Olander was hanging around the FreeBSD booth along with a steady crowd of others involved with the FreeBSD operating system, the FreeBSD foundation, and those curious about any of the above. iX Systems sells rackmount servers designed to run FreeBSD or GNU/Linux, but it’s been in the news more prominently as the company that bought the rights to the PC-BSD desktop operating system. The company’s put some money into developing expanded PC-BSD (and FreeBSD by association, since PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD) desktop hardware support.

The presentations

Aside from the mini-conference on women in the open source community, I attended few presentations. Since I covered Haiku’s WalterCon 2006 conference and still have much interest in the project, I decided to sit in on the Haiku “birds of a feather” presentation on Saturday evening. Haiku project leader Michael Phipps never ceases to amaze me with his uncanny ability to present Haiku as a superior approach to desktop computing and desktop operating system development, especially at a conference where a large number of people were GNU/Linux and BSD users. The presentation primarily served as an introduction to Haiku, complete with a brief demo through Parallels on someone’s Apple computer.

The laptops of SCALE 5x

Speaking of Apple computers, there were a huge number of them in use by presenters, vendors, and attendees of SCALE 5x. Windows laptop systems were also out in force, and as usual, GNU/Linux was in the minority. As far as distribution preference was concerned, Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux appeared to be the most popular choices.

I found the large number of Apple systems disappointing, to say the least. It seems that those who are not technically competent enough to install and configure desktop GNU/Linux distributions, or Google-savvy enough to read up on solutions to their problems, or friendly enough to ask an expert for help now prefer the proprietary lock-in of Apple instead of Microsoft.

Another success

Conference and sponsorship chair Ilan Rabinovitch and press coordinator Orv Beach took a few minutes to talk to me about the show and its history. They told me that everyone who works on SCALE’s staff is a volunteer, and that they expected record turnout this year. Unofficial numbers were in the vicinity of 1250 people with SCALE badges — attendees, speakers, press, and vendors included. It seemed like a lot more than that when I was out on the show floor, but badges don’t lie.

Not only did the conference get so many papers in the CFP announcement that they had to turn many away, but they also had to turn vendors away due to a lack of space. As it was, some vendors had to set up their tables out in the hallway. “We will give a free booth to any organization that can teach people something meaningful about open source,” Beach told me.

What about next year — will there be a SCALE 6x, and will vendors and attendees sign up? Indeed there were plans for 6x, but Rabinovitch hadn’t decided what the best course of action was. Should he follow the growth by reserving a larger venue, or continue on this course to make sure that costs and other variables don’t get out of control? One way or the other, the show will grow as the open source software community grows. Each year, it shows significant growth.