From: Ian Kluft <ikluft@cisco.com> Subject: [svlug] Impressions of "Future of Linux" panel (long) To: svlug@svlug.org (Silicon Valley Linux Users Group) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 17:09:34 -0700 (PDT) For those who couldn't make it, I'm going to try to record some of my experiences at the "Future of Linux" event. Sneaking in bits at a time since last night, this has taken a while to write up. Setup Frenzy ------------ I arrived early (5PM) to help with setup. After looking around the Santa Clara Convention Center, I found it. Taos Mountain, VA Research, MicroCenter, and the convention center crew had apparently already been there for hours already. The place was starting to take shape. As a member of SVLUG's executive group, I was one of several trying to make sure everything came together. We had so many people's plans coming together at once that I was among several of us who just went around finding the most critical problems and getting them solved. I started out by helping move the boxes of give-away T-shirts to the table where they would be distributed. Then a convention center staffer came with a cart full of heavy boxes and he wanted to know where to put them. The tag said they were for SSC, so I figured they were full of either CDs or magazines. We took them to the SSC table inside (as a guess) and I signed for the shipment. I found Phil Hughes of SSC (Editor of Linux Journal and moderator of the panel) and he helped us get them to the right place. At this point, Linus walked by and observed the setup efforts and said hello to Phil. I asked him, "So, are you ready?" He replied, "Of course not," but then clarified that you couldn't really prepare much for something like this. At some point people started saying, "Have you seen the line out there?" After hearing that a few times, I went to check. It went around the corner... When I went to see how far, it went around the next corner. It went clear across the convention center! The thought crossed my mind that at the rate it was moving, some of those people would never get in. I asked the people at Taos' registration table to try to speed it up. Marc Merlin (who is both with Taos and on the SVLUG executive group) saw the same problem and went looking for Mike Masterson, Taos' coordinator for this event. We eventually found him in a conference room where the panelists were being informed of the format. Mike made what I think was a good decison, with only 10 minutes left before starting time and no way to register everyone for hours, to give up on the registrations and let everyone in. What had been a stopped line became a flowing crowd. Everyone got in and there were even a few seats to spare. Taos said they arranged for another partitioned section of the convention center to be added to enlarge the room, and apparently it was just enough. I heard that registrations had been around 880 on Monday. The crowd was huge but at least the expansion avoided the standing-room-only nightmare that we thought was possible. The hundreds of Linux T-shirts were all given away before the event began. The Main Event -------------- I want to start by saying I really appreciate the participation of everyone on the panel. Well done! Thank you! Introductions and welcomes were made by Mike Masterson of Taos and Ben Spade of SVLUG. Mike went over the schedule and the format of the event. Ben introduced SVLUG and got across the point that SVLUG has no membership dues with an amusing approach... Ben: "How many of you are SVLUG members?" [it looked like more than half of the group raised their hands.] Ben: "How many of you are not SVLUG members?" [a little less than half raised their hands] Ben: Now while you've got your hands up, repeat after me: "I am a member." [laughter] When the panel began, each of the panelists talked for 5 minutes on their view of how far Linux has come and where it's going. Then it opened for questions from the audience. The panelists then each made another 5-minute talk on where they think Linux will be in the next 2-3 years. Phil Hughes of Linux Journal asked the panel some questions, stating ahead of time that he's not doing his job unless he makes them squirm a little. Then there were more questions before it closed. Robert Hart of Red Hat seemed to strike a point that recurred during the event. He said that Linux is making a lot of progress but it's still not yet to the point that he'd put it on his mother's computer. Jeremy Allison agreed but said Linux is going there real soon now after his last long-distance call to England to talk his brother through reloading the computer after Windows crashed and trashed the disk. Later in a question from the audience, Graham Cole, a Georgia Tech student and new SVLUG member, got applause when he started his question with a comment that his mother's computer does run Linux. This very quickly became the benchmark by which the participants measured Linux's entry to the mainstream... when will it be ready for Mom's computer? The consensus seems to be no later then 1999, based on progress and momentum in the KDE and GNOME projects to make a simpler user interface. I noticed very strong words of support from Intel. Intel's Sunil Saxena said that Linux has the best device drivers of any operating system on the Intel platform. He also said that Linux will run on the upcoming Merced processor. He also pointed out the impressive achievement that VA Research was demonstrating in the back of the room a 4-processor Intel Pentium II Xeon system running Linux. The Xeon chip has just been released so this is surprisingly early to see multiprocessor demos on any operating system. Larry Augustin said that one of VA Research's engineers changed 12 lines of code in the Linux kernel to port Linux including symmetric multiprocessor support to the Xeon for the demo which was in progress in the back. I've seen one report in the press that described this as a pep rally for Linux. It's not inaccurate, considering most of the room was either Linux supporters or media reporters. (BTW, even the media in general got some kudos since we've been seeing much more good, accurate reporting recently. Their strong presence here was a sign that they're catching on to the significance of Linux.) In the final questions, Phil Hughes pressed the panelists for where Linux will be in 2-3 years. Intel's Saxena (reasonably) declined to make an estimate since Intel has to show support for other operating systems too. The others all seemed to be confident that Linux will continue to at least double each of the next several years, resulting in numbers ranging from 20-40 million installations to 25% of PCs. The event was over two hours long so I can't write it all up. But I hope this overview helps for those who couldn't make it. After the event was over, the press seemed to crowd around the front table and were questioning Linus for a long time. This obviously got out too late to get into this morning's papers. It's already showing up on the web and hopefully we'll see it in the print and broadcast news tonight and tomorrow. Long after the event was over, SVLUG and BALUG split the remaining copies of Linux Journal that had not been given away. We'll each bring them to our upcoming Installfests in San Jose (for SVLUG) and San Francisco (for BALUG.)