Linux for Business Fall 99 COMDEX – Las Vegas Report

Viva Las Vegas.

Overwhelming, mega, humungous, extraordinary. Hmm, can you really describe Fall 99 Comdex in Las Vegas? I don't think so. The heady combination of Southern Nevada ambience and computer industry heavyweights leads to an extravagant display of corporate American Culture. Linux is rising, Linus was talking, and the growth of our industry looks more promising than ever. For the consumer it means ease of use, for the corporate world it means stability and opportunity. Boy was that fun!

Where to begin? With three two huge halls at the LV Convention Center and a separate Linux Business Expo at the Hilton, there was a lot of ground to cover. Even taking in 3 good days I probably saw about 80% of it, and had time to investigate about 25% of that. You could spend two weeks, but you would find dead exhibitors littering the aisles by the end. The law of diminishing returns applies here, as overload, tired feet, and challenging bus, and taxi transport makes even super geeks into mush. But what happy mush! Lots of good things to talk about as Linux becomes recognized as a viable alternative to other operating systems.

The Suite 101 Media Pass allowed me to see Linus Torvalds' Key note speech from the 5th row. He spoke about the business concept of open source software. By allowing several growths of an idea the law of evolution will apply. This means that growth is organic, and the best solution will prevail by virtue of its popularity based on functionality. Torvalds explained that programmers write for Linux because they are allowed to attach their names to the source code file that gives them a reputation in the nerdsworld. The more pieces of software with your name, the greater your reputation, which ultimately leads to paid work on custom projects. Free as in Free as a Bird, not as in Free Beer (R.Stallman-GNU Foundation).

So, the Linux space is expanding with more software, and some new Linux compatible hardware. There are Linux support companies, and new distributions from name brands such as Corel. In the Conference Track there were a good variety of tools and topics, such as : "Linux on the Desktop : Gnome, Leveraging Linux in the Enterprise, Evaluating the Performance of Linux, and Working Commercial Models for the Linux world". In response to Windows NT, there were discussions typified by the conference "Linux versus Windows Solutions, Can you make or save real money?" Here the discussion centered on making a business case for savings and costs. For instance if you take licensing costs into account, that is a saving. The extra cost to implement the more exacting Linux is an initial cost. The benefit of say 10 minutes less downtime a day across your company, per month can equal thousands of previously lost labor hour costs if Linux crashes less frequently. That is a sizable enough saving that many large companies now run their servers with Linux. Heck, even the Queen of England's' website runs on Linux (and Apache).

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