[CLUE-Talk] My thoughts on ITEC.

[David Anselmi]

Here's a trip report.

Jeff Cann gave a presentation, "Tux in a Suit: Linux Means Business" at 
the Denver ITEC trade show yesterday.  He had a nicely done presentation 
(in Star Office) that included a cool picture of Tux in a baby blue suit 
and a chameleon in sun glasses.

Other CLUEbies that were there to heckle and do the wave were Keith 
Hellman, Mike Benavides, Jed Baer, and Bob Harper.  I guess Todd 
Williams was there too but I didn't recognize him.  There were also 4-6 
other people in the audience (or maybe just looking for a place to sit 
down ;-)

Jeff's talk was well done.  He covered some of the history and 
philosophy behind Linux and four reasons businesses are switching to 
Linux.  For each reason he gave an example from case studies on Amazon, 
Burlington Coat Factory, IBM, Reuters.  The reasons were (roughly) low 
TCO, quality/stability, ubiquity (runs on anything), and flexibility 
(Jeff can post the slides if I'm too far off).

After the talk, Jed, Bob, and I joined Jeff for a panel discussion of 
Linux myths.  From the list at 
http://www.eruditum.org/linux/myths/myth-dispeller.html#toc8 we picked:

  + Windows Doesn't Work with Linux.
  + Linux is hard to network
  + Linux is a nightmare to install.
  + Writing Linux software requires you to release your trade secrets
  + Linux is insecure.
  + There is no office software, or software at all for Linux.
  + Linux is written by college students

Jeff had some interesting numbers from the FLOSS survey 
(http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/), both in his talk and for the panel. 
The (small) audience seemed to be reasonably interested in the 
discussion and we managed to attract a fair number of passers-by (MS 
salespeople stopping to snicker?).  Keith asked some stimulating 
questions and I think we all had a pretty good time.

I was disappointed that there was no unified schedule to see what was 
happening when, and the only advertising Jeff's talk got was the link on 
the CLUE page and one line on the schedule board at the entrance.  I 
guess that's what free gets you.  Hopefully we'll have a chance to 
attend another and get a better turnout.

Dave