LinuxWorld Postmortem

I survived. I really did. I didn't think I would, but I did. Yes, LinuxWorld was that tiring. I was at the show all day on Tuesday, a lot of Wednesday, and all Thursday afternoon. Thankfully, the show was lively and had grown substantially since the last time I was there a couple of years ago. People were everywhere, talking open source and what it could do for you. The conference sessions were well attended. This all bodes well for both the overall IT economy and open-source in particular.

The Vyatta Open Arcade Classic went off perfectly. Tuesday at noontime, I wasn't so sure how things were going to work out. When the company that rented us the classic video games arrived to drop them off at the Thirsty Bear, Defender wouldn't power up. That was going to be a big problem because Larry Augustin was almost maniacal that he wanted to play Defender. The company apologized and said they'd go back to the warehouse and get a Galaga game. That seemed like a reasonable compromise. Later in the afternoon, they returned with both a Galaga game and a replacement circuit board that they thought might fix the Defender game. Fortunately, it worked and both games were up and running for the party--bonus!

The party was very well attended. We had a lot of people tell us it was the best party at LinuxWorld. People loved the both the theme and the location. The loft of the Thirsty Bear was packed, but not such that people couldn't move. There was the right amount of chit-chatting and hardcore game playing. I met many people I had previously only interacted with online--it was nice to put names with faces. We cautiously called this the "inaugural" LinuxWorld Vyatta party, but I'm pretty confident this has become the "first annual" LinuxWorld Vyatta party.

My favorite line of the party happened early in the evening. Jeremy Allison was just starting to play his first game of Asteroids. Jeremy dropped in the token, hit the Play button, and addressed the screen. As soon as his ship appeared on the first level, Jeremy mutters "Hmmmm... there are a lot more rocks than I remember..." Indeed. Ain't that always the case.

Thanks to everybody who attended. We were grateful for all the new friends and old friends who dropped by. We're particularly grateful to our open-source "luminaries:" Jeremy Allison, Larry Augustin, Simon Crosby, Mike Schroepfer, and Jacob Taylor. You guys were great. The final high-scores for the night were as follows. Over $5000 total will be donated to the list of projects and organizations listed on behalf of the high score holders, the open-source luminaries, and Vyatta.

GAME	PROJECT	WINNER	HIGH SCORE
PAC MAN	SQLite	Kevin Weiss	28510
Defender	Samba	Larry Augustin	35575
Asteroids	Free Software Foundation	Jerry DelRio	16860
Donkey Kong	Ext	Peder Ulander	18500
Centipede	Linux Foundation	JC Utter	38018

On Thursday afternoon, I presented a conference session titled The State of Open Source Networking: Where It's At, and Where It's Going. The session was during the last timeslot of the conference and I was a bit worried that nobody would show up. It's pretty common for everybody to leave the show early on the last day and being "tail-end Charlie" typically means you're talking to a crowd of one or two attendees. Surprisingly, that was not the case. Many attendees showed up and seemed to both understand and receive the message I was preaching.

So, chalk up another successful event.