IT360 show planning meeting.

Evan Leibovitch evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org
Mon Apr 2 15:13:23 UTC 2007


John Van Ostrand wrote:
>> The people who in past years have done the Linux World
>> Canada show have been expanding beyond just Linux, and
>> are now doing a show with Linux, Voice over IP,
>> Smalltalk, etc.. With that has come a name change,
>> with Linux World Canada being part of the IT360 show.
>> It will all be one big show with different area
>> dedicated to different topics.
>>     
>
> I think this dilution has caused the massive drop off of exhibitors this
> year. It's almost half of what it used to be, 74 from 147.
>   
Note that worldwide, the Linux conference market has also shrunken
dramatically. The annual winter LinuxWorld show that once filled a
number of halls in NYC's massive Javitz Centre, quietly moved to Boston
two years ago then died. The remaining LW show in SF is smaller than it
used to be. Some countries' LW shows just stopped happening (It wasn't
that long ago that Montréal and Vancouver had their own LinuxWorlds too).

There are a number of possible reasons. Some involve changing travel
budgets and the Internet's ability to dispense increasingly elaborate
brochureware. Some involves multinationals increasing perception of
Canada as a regional sales territory of the US. Me, I like to think that
at least some of this comes from the fact that Linux is now more
mainstream, and no longer a novelty. So if a buyer wants to see Linux in
action, (s)he just goes to an IT show and not just one absorbed in
Linux-in-a-vacuum. Nobody thinks of IBM, HP, AMD and Oracle as Linux
companies, yet Linux now plays great roles in their business. A show
limiting itself to just Linux vendors, or just Linux offerings of
broader vendors, may simply be too restrictive in the current tradeshow
environment -- this speaks more to the maturity of Linux and its vendors
than anything else.

I'm happy to be involved with the show this year, and think that the
approach of introducing emerging open source technologies -- this year,
Asterisk and open source VOIP -- is a good one.

- Evan
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