Yesterday I spent about five hours at the LinuxWorld in San Francisco and had a blast. It was refreshing to see so many commercial companies devoted and supporting Linux in the applications. I found a lot of the booths could be classified into one of four groups:

1. Large ‘Enterprise’ Software Companies – Think Novell or IBM; these were the big boys of the expo who were showing off ‘Enterprise’ software.
2. Server Management and Hardware – These companies were all about managing your 100-10,000 unit data center with some easy to use tools (and some really powerful and pretty ones also). Also there was a lot of vendors touting 10gigabit network equipment, I would be happy with 1gigabit myself.
3. Smaller focused companies – These were trying to take a niche of the Linux IT market, and I felt they were more than happy to give presentations and information to anyone who had an interest
4. .ORG – The best of the best, the Open Source or non-profits of the Expo. Surprisingly there was only about 23 booths for these, but they included some of the best FLOSS has; Ubuntu, Debian, EFF, FSF, and maybe other brand name .ORGs.

Also as an aside I bought my first Linux CD, a PPC Debian Etch Net-install for my Mac Mini. I just don’t feel Ubuntu is giving me everything I want and I really wanted to support the Debian group and all of their hard work. I can’t wait until next year, when LinuxWorld comes back around.

Eric Davis