London Linux Expo

Yesterday I went to my second London Linux Expo at the Olympia in London. The show is an annual event held to promote Linux to the industry; there are stalls for a number of companies with an interest in the operating system, as well as the various volunteer projects which develop its best-known software. There was also a "great Linux debate" in which a number of representatives of companies and projects field questions from an audience, as well as two amusingly named "FUDcon" seminars for Fedora Linux users and developers.

I have two big bugbears about how this year's event was organised. First, and perhaps this never occurred to them, it was held in the first days of Ramadan when those involved will be just getting adjusted to their fasting routine. They might well not feel up to going at all. To be honest I'm not sure how many Muslims are involved in open-source development, but I didn't see many at yesterday's expo. Next year's is to be held in mid-October, which by my reckoning puts it in mid to late Ramadan, which perhaps isn't so bad. The second was the re-arrangements for the GLD, which was held in a makeshift "theatre" which provided much less space than was available last year. There were fewer seats available, particularly for ordinary visitors, and the lighting was not at all good.

The GLD itself featured representatives from Sun, Digium, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Linux Format magazine, Novell and OpenForum Europe, and its topic was whether Linux would become a mainstream OS or remain the province of the expert. For my part, Mac OS X shows that a Unix-type OS can indeed find a home on the ordinary user's desktop, although it's an atypical Unix which has a radically different user interface. This was the first question asked, and it was immediately pointed out that Linux does already have a place on the desktop – just not in Europe and the USA, but in Asia and South America. (Actually, I've personally seen Linux in use on desktop PC's in the showrooms of a well-known tool hire company in England.) The Oracle representative told us that Linux was now his companies number-two platform (after Windows, which surprised me somewhat) and its deployments with Oracle now outstripped all the other Unix-type systems combined.

I next asked the question of why GTK/GNOME applications have gained so much ground in the last couple of years given what I considered the more intuitive nature of Qt, which should logically lead to better programs since the gentler learning curve leaves more time for writing, and perfecting, programs. The first response (from a GTK fan on the panel) was that it was "our fault" as Qt developers for not develping said better programs, and that he preferred GTK because he hated C++ which he saw as an easy option for programmers who couldn't implement object oriented programming in C, as GTK attempts to. Another panellist said that two years ago all the energy was in KDE (which is based on Qt) and it's likely that things would swing back the other way in the next couple of years or so. One possible reason for Linux's failure to gain ground wasn't discussed during the whole session, namely its continual attempts to ape Windows – a recent example being the Sun Java Desktop System. Mind you, it's easily possible to make Linux not look like Windows – I always found KDE and GNOME's toolbars vastly more flexible than Windows' for example.

Also brought up at the GLD was the infamous "Palladium" concept, whereby computers are sold with chips inside which prevent copyright violations (and probably other things the user might not want) taking place, with the operating system working with it – its proponents call it "trusted computing", while the open-source community call it "treacherous computing". Notably Nick McGrath of Microsoft didn't have an answer on this issue, but as I understand it the "Fritz chip" is no longer on the agenda anyway. Another panellist thought people wouldn't buy computers which were designed to do other than what they wanted.

I went into the FUDcon seminar halfway through, and the topic of it was security. I found the name amusing, since FUD is used in the industry to mean "fear, uncertainty and doubt", a tactic commonly used by major IT companies to dissuade their customers from going to the competition. Anyway, Mark Cox's seminar was about Red Hat's and Fedora's record in security and relatively simple ways to combat common problems. He also attacked the policy of certain companies of "talking up" security risks, in one case rating flaws on a scale in which all levels included the word "critical", which leads to a "cry wolf" mentality. Quite a few of the applications which had major flaws were desktop internet apps – Mozilla and Gaim for example – which would simply not be present if the machine (as in the case of a lot of systems running Linux) is a dedicated web server. I'd be pretty annoyed if my host were poncing around in Mozilla on the machine used to run my blogs.

The biggest disappointment at the event, however, was the launch of SUSE Linux 10 coupled with the lack of boxes to sell. I mean, that's not exactly good organisation, is it? I spoke to one of Novell's staff who told me that Holborn Books is their distribution partner in this country, and for some reason they had not participated in this year's expo. Well, why not? Why did Novell not force or facilitate Holborn's participation? I was able to snatch a look at SL10 on a laptop which was available (just one!) and it feels pretty snappy. I didn't notice any of the problems I've complained about with some of SUSE's packages in the past – noticeable lags between clicking a menu heading and the menu appearing, for example – although the machine is a Pentium M, not my 450Mhz and 600Mhz Pentium 3s. The default browser, even in KDE, is Firefox. As I've mentioned here before, a major factor holding Linux back in the west is presentation, and specifically fonts, and they seem adequate in this version.

Other major participants included Sun, Red Hat (who allowed me to post two items to A Qt Blog from their internet-connected demo machines) and Dell; there were also stalls for Oracle, Thawte (online security), Opened Hand (which develops embedded Linux devices, such as a Nokia internet tablet due for release later this year), O'Reilly, and all the major UK Linux magazines. The ".org Village" featured KDE, Ubuntu, both the London and Greater London Linux User Groups, Drupal, OpenBSD and PostgreSQL. My complaints about it are that it's too cramped and that the stalls are too small for the products to be adequately demonstrated. It gives the distinct impression that the people who have the bright ideas for Linux are the least welcome at the expo. Mandriva and Trolltech were conspicuously absent – the latter particularly odd given that they've just done a major upgrade. Not just their loss, possibly the community's.

But of course, from what I know, I can't blame the conference organisers for the failure of major Linux-involved companies to turn up. But the space set aside for organisations feels inadequate, which may mean the event has outgrown Olympia 2; perhaps the organsations should establish a separate get-together of their own.