I had a chance to attend the LinuxWorld Summit in NYC last week and I met some nice people there, but also learned about the infighting that goes on within the Open Source community. It’s human nature for a group to come together and then split-up into factions, this happens often within the Open Source community.
Admittedly I’m the outsider, but I've seen this all before. Look at RSS 2.0 vs RSS .92 then RSS 2.0 vs RSS 1.0 or how about RSS 2.0 vs Adam 0.3 and soon the RSS 2.0 vs Adam 1.0 brouhaha, it’s oh so typical of what’s going on within the Open Source community.
Most projects are the work of rugged individualists who enlist support from the community and corporations, but they need a Scobleizer to mention them everyday in his blog and to link to everyone else who does so as to give the appearance they are becoming accepted.
At the The X Window System: Backbone of the Open Desktop talk, Leon Shiman was appealing for community support; his biggest problem thus far has been convincing vendors to create drivers. He's extremely dedicated and knowledgeable, a true geek who would do anything to help you. Then a young man mentioned NoMachine, Leon smiled and said it was a good technology from Italy, but it was as if he had been stabbed in the back; NoMachine competes with X.org on the desktop.
Surprisingly there was little animosity towards Microsoft; the word proprietary was mentioned often with evil connotations. Nokia, one of the main sponsors of the event did receive some jibes and there was a Nokia employee from Finland at every talk I attended to answer any and all charges. It’s the carriers fault was their ubiquitous excuse.
Most of the laptops there were running Windows XP and at the Alternatives to MS Exchange on Linux talk the conclusion was that there isn’t. CCMail didn’t scale and earlier versions of Exchange had issues, but a guy in the audience said that the US Army is deploying Exchange proving it scales very well.
Chris Wright from OSDL gave a talk on Securing Linux in the Enterprise, I was hoping that Linus himself would make an appearance in NYC as he too works for OSDL now. Why hasn’t Linus appeared in public for years? Which religious war is he avoiding within the Open Source community?