[nycbug-talk] Fwd: Great experiences at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE)

[pete wright]

sorry for the re-post those who are on netbsd-advocacy but kevin is a 
great guy and thought this may be of interest as well...

-p

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Kevin Lahey <kml at patheticgeek.net>
> Date: February 14, 2005 1:10:51 PM PST
> To: netbsd-advocacy at netbsd.org
> Subject: Great experiences at the Southern California Linux Expo 
> (SCALE)
>
> Executive summary:
>
> I had a great time working the NetBSD booth at the Southern California
> Linux Expo (SCALE).  We spent two full days evangelizing NetBSD,
> checking out the other exhibits, and meeting new people.
>
> The whole story:
>
> I only comparatively recently moved to the Los Angeles area, so I was
> amazed and delighted at the size of the open source community out here.
> The exhibition itself had something like 30 or 40 booths, including
> vendors like IBM and Novell, and open source projects including
> flightgear.org (a really cool flight simulator), FreeBSD, the FSF,
> Gnome, and the Wikipedia folks.  I don't think I saw as many open 
> source
> projects at the nation Linux shows I've done!  For more info:
>
> 	http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/
>
> The all-volunteer group that put on SCALE was completely professional
> and totally organized.  The booths were beautifully laid out, with 
> power
> and networking (and wireless networking).  All I had to do was show up
> and set up.  My thanks to Gareth Greenaway (who was my point of 
> contact)
> and all the rest of the folks from SCALE who made this fun and easy.
>
> Our booth worked out great.  Jan Schaumann rush-mailed me a whole box
> full of NetBSD t-shirts and flyers, which got me started on the right
> foot.  I brought down my NetBSD-running Thinkpad as an example of 
> recent
> hardware, and a Cobalt Raq2 and Qube to show off a little
> retro-computing action.
>
> I was proud of my Qube, but then fellow developer John Klos showed up
> with the real big guns -- a VAXstation that kept pulling in our fellow
> old-timers, an SGI Indy, and an Amiga.  He also brought out a 32-inch 
> HD
> TV/monitor that attracted lots of folks to the booth, and allowed us to
> show that our desktop looked pretty much just like any other UNIX (a 
> big
> deal from some of the folks there who were new to open-source OSes).
>
> John may have missed his calling as a brilliant marketing guy -- 
> Sunday,
> he brought out a bowl of candy and his awesome G3-based Tonka truck (an
> old iMac motherboard wedged into a Tonka dumptruck) which which had
> plenty of folks stopping by the booth.
>
> The *BSD community of Los Angeles was really helpful, no matter
> which of the several BSD varients they usually use.  I was blown
> away by the generosity of Pete Wright and Michael Dickerson, who came
> out Saturday and talked up NetBSD all day!
>
> I had a great time, and was delighted to find so many open-minded and
> enthusiastic fellow open source folks.  Any number of folks seemed
> interested in learning one more system, and figuring out the BSD thing.
> They wanted to know where they could slide it into their all-Linux
> organizations, what we were planning for the future, and where they
> could get more info.
>
> Our fellow exhibitors were just as friendly.  The FreeBSD guys spent
> plenty of time hanging out with us, as did Linux folks from all over.
> The Linux Astronomy (http://www.linuxastronomy.org) folks were
> particularly fun and helpful.
>
> If you get a chance to do a similar booth elsewhere, I whole-heartedly
> encourage you to go for it!
>
> [Sorry for making this so long, but I wanted to make sure I thanked
> everybody, and, heck, it was fun and exciting and I'm still pumped up
> about it!]
>
> Kevin
> kml at patheticgeek.net
>
~o0OO0o~
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
www.nomadlogic.org
freenode.net: nomadlogic_