LinuxWorld UK - Day 2

Written by Ric Shreves

Oct 26, 2006 at 10:23 PM

LinuxWorld UK: Day 2

Day Two dawns beautiful and clear. Great day as we walk to the conference around 9:00. Doors open at 9:30 and things get off to a slow start. We spend part of the day roaming the conference and checking out the other attendees. The SpikeSource Team is here and we wind up spending a bit of time with them. The DotOrg village is doing good traffic and seems be be drawing a lot of the younger developers. The business people and the IT staffers seem to be spending more fo their time looking at enterprise opportunities. Novell, IBM, HP and Oracle are all doing good traffic today.

Things start to pick up around noon. Next door is a Mac conference and they are getting a ton of traffic. We see some spillover, but not a lot. Sure looks like iPods are hotter than Penguins this season. Next door to us are two of the speaker areas. Tony Wasserman from Carnegie Mellon is scheduled to speak. He's one of the pioneers of the whole Open Source phenomenon. I corner him for a bit after the show and we talk Mambo, Open Source and community in general. Seems a great guy and has some good information / resources for us.

Team Mambo in action

John "Mad Dog" Hall is also spotted bopping around. We have a bit of a chat while queueing in the canteen downstairs (no comment on the food...). He seems to make all these events and is a tireless advocate of Open Source in general and Linux in particular. Also appearing for brief interludes are the Free Software group, the Open Source Consortium, the National Computing Center and a couple of local Open Source promotions groups. All these people are great connections for the community and present excellent opportunities for us to network within the industry and to assist in the promotion of not just Mambo but of Open Source as a whole.

Neil has to bail out early on us a little early today (his wife is pregnant - congrats Neil!). Nalisa & I shut it all down and pack up. We're clear of the hall by 4:30 in the afternoon.

All-in-all, a good show. Got to meet some people, make some connections and of course got to show a large number of people what Mambo is all about and how they can use it for themselves and their clients. What did we learn? Several things: First, it seems that a lot of people who were scared off by some of the things that happened a year ago are now drifting back and are curious to see what is happening with us and where the project is today.

the end!

Second, there is a lot of interest in the entire Open Source CMS sector. Third, business users are very much attuned to release issues and stability issues; they are very concerned about business continuity and they are not interested in seeing a new release being thrown out there every month or so. They want a predictable release schedule, compatibility and a clear upgrade path which won't cause them excessive maintenance overhead.

So, we close this LinuxWorld UK with a special thanks to the organizers who helped sponsor us at this show and we hope that next year we'll be back for another great show. Everybody Mambo!