This week I took the 20-minute BART ride from the East Bay over to Moscone West in San Francisco to visit what was once known as LinuxWorld and is now OpenSource World, Next Generation Data Center, and CloudWorld all rolled into one event. Having been to previous LinuxWorlds, I was curious to see how this re-branding and grouping of events would pan out. LinuxWorld had been getting quite the panning (no pun intended) over the last five years or so, so could the new event cut the mustard and reel back in its once committed group of sightseers?

The combined event certainly offered a lot. Three events and many simultaneous tracks of content across the three sub-events were combined with an exhibition that also combined the three primary interests of the show – open source, data management, and the cloud. The show boasted some strong names within the industry, with such heavyweights as the always excellent Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz and Larry Augustin, Brian Aker, Tarus Balog, Lew Tucker (Figure 1), Brian Gentile, Luke Kanies, Stormy Peters, Bill Weinberg, and Winston Bumpus. I was there to do a panel discussion on "Desktops and Netbooks" and deliver a talk called "The Evolution Of Inclusion."

The value of the talk content at the event was of course dependent on what each attendee was interested in, but I was impressed with the range of topics. The facilities for the talks were good, with few technical and A/V hitches, and everything seemed to run on time. This event was definitely more Buzzword Compliant than other events, largely because of the audience: a heavy attendance of business people, buyers, and analysts. For that demographic of attendees, the content seemed appropriate.

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