SAN FRANCISCO -- In the past, LinuxWorld has had a refreshing lightheartedness to it. Since the open-source people who usually flock to Linux events are more carefree than the marketing types who clog other Internet events, the conferences have been, at the very least, tolerable.
This year the marketers have attacked. Now, it's virtually impossible to walk around LinuxWorld without hearing pitches from company reps extolling the benefits of Linux for "mission-critical applications in the enterprise," or some such drivel.
Everyone's saying that it's time for Linux to grow up -- that it's no longer a hacker OS, that it's moved beyond serving geeky programmers and hermetic server admins and that Linux now belongs smack in the middle of world commerce.
A case in point was Tuesday's keynote presentation -- which some in the audience called an "infomercial" -- by Shane Robison, Compaq's chief technology officer.
Robison's thesis was that although the open-source operating system has been a boon to the computing world, it still has a long way to go before it could be finally used by "enterprises."
What's the holdup? Oh, basically everything that makes Linux unique: It isn't centralized, it's available in too many versions and on and on. He also said that few companies provide adequate support for the OS.
But fear not, Robison said, for his company had figured out how to solve all these problems by "pushing" for standards in the Linux world and assembling a team to support the Linux platforms it sells. Thank goodness for Compaq, in other words.
Perhaps such solicitations are the inevitable result of all the giants who have recently entered the Linux game -- which, in the end, said one of the developers here, is a good thing for the OS.
Still, it makes the whole affair a bit dry, and for that reason it's nice to see some open-source innovators here trying to make themselves known amid the big guys.
The best example of these is Ximian, the company that "productizes the Gnome desktop," in the words of Miguel de Icaza, its co-founder and chief technologist. What he means by that is that Ximian sells packaged versions of the Gnome desktop, an open-source graphical user interface for Linux.
Ximian's booth here is by far the most fun. While the big companies seemed to have been competing over who had the biggest inflatable Tux the Penguin, Ximian's is spiffed up in a kitschy jungle theme.
But the company also has some great technology on display here, stuff that doesn't need a slew of marketers to make it look good. In addition to its version of the Gnome GUI, Ximian is showing off the beta version of Evolution, a "personal information manager" for Linux.
PIMs -- which in the Windows world are exemplified by Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes -- weren't easy to find in the open-source world, according to Nat Friedman, Ximian's vice president of product development.
Evolution looks a lot like Outlook, which is by design. "We didn't want a migration problem," de Icaza said. "We want people to use something that they feel comfortable with."
It's still in a beta phase, but it works well enough now that people who were putting off switching to Linux because it had a bad calendar program will now have to look for another excuse.
What's great about de Icaza and Friedman is that, although they can easily use words like "productize" and "enterprise" when talking about some aspects of their company, they're intimately knowledgeable about the technology they're building. They are coders at heart, and you can see their enthusiasm for their code when they demonstrate it -- which is more than can be said about a lot of the firms here.
That's why it's possible to see why Ximian's business strategy could make the company very successful in the open-source world, while bigger ventures are already floundering. Friedman says that Ximian aims to do nothing less than eliminate the "two-desktop problem" which plagues many Linux users today -- this is the situation that requires them to use Windows for some purposes (like their calendar or e-mail) that Linux didn't as well.
Ximian's software goes far in doing that now, and it will only get better in the future. The company is spearheading the Mono Project, which aims to be an open-source version of Microsoft's .Net development platform. When Mono is complete, de Icaza said, programs like Evolution will be much easier to code for Linux.
And perhaps when all that's done, people will stop calling for the OS to grow up.
