The US has about ten dominate cities that set the tone for their regions and influence the national stage: New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Las Vegas, Boston, San Francisco and Valley, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, and Denver. Canada has one - Toronto. And despite having this influence and a large contribution in IT development with the likes of IBM labs, graphics design leaders such as ATI, Alias Wavefront, Houdini plus a whole array of firms such as Open Text, RIM, Corel, Sybase/Watcom - the number of computer shows in town is down to a trickle. LinuxWorld+NetworkWorld present a welcome opportunity to get out at one show see the exhibits, kick the tires, take in a keynote or two or maybe pull in 2-3 quick conference sessions or tutorials.

What makes LinuxWorld particularly welcome is the ZeitGeist in computing. SaaL-Software as a License is in decline while SaaS - Software as a Service and OpenSource is ascendant. And why not ? SaaL has ever more prickly EULA agreements protecting software vendors from providing service except on their own terms and prices; while Open Source and SaaS both put Service and Support upfront as their key competitive advantage. Also major firms such as Adobe, Borland, Microsoft, Oracle, Quicken, and many others find themselves competing as the highest cost producers in an ever wider array of markets. There is a software sea change going on and LinuxWorld is at its epicenter both on the desktop and on the server.

Open Source: True SaaS-Software as a Service and Other Pillars of Service

In the commodity, consolidating and outsourcing world of IT, Open Source takes the idea of service to customers and puts it at he head of the class. In fact, Open Source takes services at least two steps beyond what SaaL-Software as a License vendors can hope to deliver. Open Source does this by providing the original source code which makes self-service and customization not only possible but the reality for many Java,JBoss, Linux, Perl, PHP, Python and other Open Source programs. Indeed as confirmed at LinuxWorld tutorials, seminars and discussion forums (plus interviews with conferences participants underlined this), Open Source code gets used, recompiling going well beyond patches and security fixes. Self Service gets down and dirty into performance tuning and feature enhancement (primarily by VARs and ISVs but also savvy Open Source end users meeting an urgent need)to systems as wide ranging as RedHat Linux through JBoss Application server components to Compriere for ERP and PHPBB for CMS. And because many would like to see these enhancements permanently installed into their Open Source software, many interviewees said they actively particpated in project feedback and enhancements groups including CVS passbacks. So self-service is the first Open Source service pillar.

And this willingness to get into code means Open Systems provides fast response time for bugs and virus attacks while with commercial software, users are at the good will/mercy of the providers. Thus we have seen decidely mixed response from commercial vendors over the past few years. Service from the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Oracle can be "good" like use of the Umlaut in the declension of German nouns: sometimes, sometimes, always, never. Open Source is showing that the mixed record on service and support can be bettered - primarily because these elements are the basis for any Open Source vendor's revenues and therefore a key determinant of Open Source success.

The second Open Source pillar is, of course, this very commitment to service, support and training that most Open Source projects use to derive their key sustaining revenues. For example, support contracts for RedHat and JBoss and MySQL approximate if not match their Microsoft, BEA, and Oracle counterparts. Several Open Source projects have training and certification programs that are comparable to their commercial counterparts. But the difference between Open Source versus SaaL vendors is that these service and support revenues are Open Source's primary revenue stream. So if an Open Source vendor fails to deliver good service and support - then customers can fairly easily move onto another distribution or, indeed a commercial vendor only to happy to fill the gap.

The third pillar of service is the move in some Open Source projects to providing Software as a Service-so called true SaaS. SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com, @task and others are providing hosted and/or Web based services in which they are held to contractual service level agreements. This is starting to appear in some Open Source service contracts as well. This means hard service level measures such as availability or uptime %, MTBF-Mean Time Between Failure reports, and MTTR-Mean Time To Repair levels among others are used to tote up the final bill between customer and Open Source provider.

This Open Source Service orientation simply is not in the EULA protected equation of Microsoft and others IT vendors. They stubbornly stick to the notion that you, customers, use our software at our behest and discretion with no rights or warranties of service implied. If our software does not work as you wanted - ultimately its your tough luck. Find something else and don't bother to sue for anatrocious record of reliability then scalability and now security failures with diminished interoperability throughout.

But the fourth level of service that some Open Source providers are able to deliver is a sense of community. Talking with Microsoft support on Visua Basic or SQL Server problems I always felt outside of the loop. Microsoft's support staff had more power than I. Take our advice because we have the bug and incident reports which you cant see - and we get to talk to the gods who program the source code. In contrast, when I talk with some (but by no means all) Open Source providers, I have the same Bugzilla reports, the same source code, and I more often get the feeling that we are working together to get this problem resolved - or at least know whats involved in getting it resolved. Bottom line - much better sense of community comes out of the openess of having source and transparent reports on it. So lets see how this service orientation was reflected at LinuxWorld.

Flavor of the Show

Although titled LinuxWorld+NetworkWorld, the show had a strong and broad Open Source flavor. This is exemplified in some of the seminars and tutorials:
- Need a Java Development Tool ? Think Eclipse
- The Open Source Security Tool Arena: Part 1
- Windows Server 2003 Free Features You May Have Overlooked
- Cross Platform Development with Mono - Introduction
- What is a Wiki and What Can it do for You
- Whats New in PHP 5 ?
- Why KDE for the Desktop ?
- Demystifying Linux Distributions - A Primer
- Linux Desktop Application Roundup
- An Open Source Network Intrusion Detection System
The last tutorial is typical - this was a talk on some of the Open Source software that, when linked with network sniffer hardware, can produce rapid intrusion detection and isolation. Security in all its desktop and server aspects was the subject of 15 of the conferences 60 tutorials and seminars. As well, more than 2/3rds of the seminars and tutorials emphasized Linux and Open Source server solutions over the desktop side. This observer found that surprising given the huge Desktop Change coming down the pike (see below). Finally, as highlighted in yellow above, Microsoft was a present at the show - not talking about its Linux labs nor Linux development of .NET using Mono (that was Novell) nor its new support for Linux in its Virtual PC emulation and virtualization software. No, Microsoft was primarily here to remind users of the features of Windows Server 2003. It is called hutzpah or panic attack - your choice.

The Server Orientation

The conference definitely had a server orientation. Not just the seminars; but also the exhibitors tended to feature Linux server side solutions. Perhaps this server orientation was most clearly evident in the special media session provided by IBM on Linux and Open Source. Four distinguished scientists and admnistrators who are also Linux users told us a little about how they were using Linux in their operations.

Christian Boutin told how the Bank of Canada moved to a Linux Cluster for its economic research activities. But equally telling, the planning staff was moving away from SGI and Solaris desktop workstations to Windows XP Professional - too many of their colleagues worked in Windows and with Windows econometric and statistical apps, so Bank of Canada staffers felt the need on the desktop to move to where comunity applications reside - Windows. Despite the economies, the desktop is still a Windows domain.

Patrick Lor, executive vice president at iStockphoto in Calgary, described how his company growing at triple digit rates with its web stock photo service used Linux servers to keep up with the the business. The demands came on all systems - CPU power, storage to handle the millions of images, and huge network bandwidth to accomodate online servces. Linux was the only server solution that could provide the price yet also reliability and performance to keep iStockphoto on its growth path - plain and simple. The server solution is LAMP based with sophisticated AJAX/PHP frontend. All other options quickly drove iStockphoto out of their capitalization window. In the past year, iStockphoto was bought by Getty Images for $50MUS.

Dr. Igor Jurisica is a scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute and also assistant professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto. Dr. Jurisca is using sophisticated bio-statistical and knowledge discovery processing to test interactions between proteins, oncological pre-cursors, and biochemical pathways in trying to determine onset conditions for various cancers. here Linux servers again provide price performance unobtainable with either Unix or Windows systems in large scale processing required both for anaysis and display of the results. Large multi-console viewing rooms allow looking at results in various 3D space slices.Here sophisticated server system feed into equally complex data display workstations. Linux not only drives the research by cost effectiveness but also through having programmers familiar with the 3D graphics, discovery and open source statistical sopftware. This is a server driven solution that keys also on Linux sophisticated graphics and 3D workstation processing tools - some of which get used in major render engine processing for the movie making and CAAD- Computer Aided Analytical Design.

Finally, Dr. Ajay Royyoru , of the IBM Computational Biology Center agan described the huge advantage that Linux based grid solutions can have in problems requiring enormous computational processing capabilities. This presentation, again echoed the theme that for large scale grid computing - Linux is simply unmatched for price performance for a growing number of server applications. Google has underlined the value of being able to manage enormous server farms of hundreds of thousands of machines. Distinct competitive advantage is now available to tech firms that can manage such systems effectively.

In sum, these presentations illustrated in no uncertain terms the large opportnities that were being offered on the Exhibit floor with vendors ready to scale up to huge clusters or hp on board the latest embeded and mobile devices. What truly became clear at the show was the vigorous opportunity set Linux presents, particularly in the server arena for those willing to