Before I went to Linux Solutions 2007 I knew almost nothing about Linux. I must have installed it 3 times since I started playing with PCs and I never really used it. Always seemed like some sort of weird curiosity to me. I'm sure it's a very good OS but... I don't know. I never found it exciting enough to invest time into it.
That's why I went to this expo: to get an idea of what was happening in the penguin world, see fresh demos and broaden my horizons a little bit.
The expo grouped a lot of companies offering services around Linux or supporting Linux distributions (Mandriva, RedHat, Suse, Novell, Debian,...). There was a lot of hype around the open source concept and the logiciel libre. The word libre was used a little bit everywhere in every punchline of every booth.
It was quite exciting actually. Linux is a world of its own, with its families, its casts, its passions, its dramas, its little stories of treasons and so on (the SCO affair for instance or the recent deal between Novell and Microsoft...). Linux users are similar to Apple users in that they can get really passionate about the OS they use.
I watched a demo of Mono at the (huge) Novell booth. The guy proved you could just take a .NET executable compiled under Windows with Visual Studio and run it with no modification under Linux (in this case Suse Linux Enterprise 10 running the Mono runtime). Really cool. I hadn't realised Mono was that powerfull. And it also works with MacOS and Unix.
Thanks to Mono, you can now tell your manager: "yes, .NET is multi-platform!" Not that it is usefull in practice: as part of my job I do not need .NET to be multi-platform since all desktops at my client's site are equipped with Windows XP. And in practice if you really want to run a Windows app from Linux or Unix, you use something like Citrix.
Anyway... In the big diversified world of Linux you also get the hard-line free software militants: I witnessed a funny scene where a hoard of guys dressed in yellow plastic suits were walking from booth to booth, booing anybody who would appear to compromise the opensource ideal. Listen to the mp3 attached: in this soundbyte they cornered an employee of Novell France who stood firm. They seemed quite angry about an agreement Novell has signed last year with Microsoft. I had no clue what they were all going on about. Somebody from Novell clarified it for me afterwards.
Friday 2 February 2007
Linux Solutions in Paris
Before I went to Linux Solutions 2007 I knew almost nothing about Linux. I must have installed it 3 times since I started playing with PCs and I never really used it. Always seemed like some sort of weird curiosity to me. I'm sure it's a very good OS but... I don't know. I never found it exciting enough to invest time into it.
That's why I went to this expo: to get an idea of what was happening in the penguin world, see fresh demos and broaden my horizons a little bit.
The expo grouped a lot of companies offering services around Linux or supporting Linux distributions (Mandriva, RedHat, Suse, Novell, Debian,...). There was a lot of hype around the open source concept and the logiciel libre. The word libre was used a little bit everywhere in every punchline of every booth.
It was quite exciting actually. Linux is a world of its own, with its families, its casts, its passions, its dramas, its little stories of treasons and so on (the SCO affair for instance or the recent deal between Novell and Microsoft...). Linux users are similar to Apple users in that they can get really passionate about the OS they use.
I watched a demo of Mono at the (huge) Novell booth. The guy proved you could just take a .NET executable compiled under Windows with Visual Studio and run it with no modification under Linux (in this case Suse Linux Enterprise 10 running the Mono runtime). Really cool. I hadn't realised Mono was that powerfull. And it also works with MacOS and Unix.
Thanks to Mono, you can now tell your manager: "yes, .NET is multi-platform!" Not that it is usefull in practice: as part of my job I do not need .NET to be multi-platform since all desktops at my client's site are equipped with Windows XP. And in practice if you really want to run a Windows app from Linux or Unix, you use something like Citrix.
Anyway... In the big diversified world of Linux you also get the hard-line free software militants: I witnessed a funny scene where a hoard of guys dressed in yellow plastic suits were walking from booth to booth, booing anybody who would appear to compromise the opensource ideal. Listen to the mp3 attached: in this soundbyte they cornered an employee of Novell France who stood firm. They seemed quite angry about an agreement Novell has signed last year with Microsoft. I had no clue what they were all going on about. Somebody from Novell clarified it for me afterwards.
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