On the floor

There really was only one way to describe the exhibitor floor, and that is CRAMMED. The area around The Linux Box, Zenoss, Foresight Linux, GNOME and Ubuntu exhibits, and the registration area was a congestion zone. Several folks I spoke to commented that it was a bad idea. The aisle space was pretty small, when folks stopped to chat at the Ubuntu exhibit, at the same time folks flowed out of the Silicon Mechanics and Google Rooms, led to a fairly hard to pass bottleneck. Some exhibits were placed over by the BOF meeting rooms, it probably would have been better to place the .ORG desktop corner over in that area instead.

Noticeably different from last years event, was the number of big interesting exhibits. Silicon Mechanics and Zenoss were really the only two that made an effort. The Vyatta booth was a couple of banner stands and a desk, the rest were desks and banners. IBM did eventually show up, but again, their booth was pretty limited. Most seemed to be pushing hardware and other options. The Sun booth was simple, but fairly informative. Compared to last years event though, the exhibits were much lower key but there was still a fair amount of interest, and people flowing through the exhibit area.

There were plenty of t-shirts going around, Silicon Mechanics and Zenoss were handing out pretty cool t-shirts. The massive amounts of interest in the IBM booth from previous years seemed to be significantly reduced this year. The ORG area and smaller exhibitors seemed to be getting more attention than the bigger exhibits on the other side. Image Stream had their usual booth.

Giveaways seemed to be the big thing this year, Silicon Mechanics were giving away a 1U server, Zenoss were giving away a Nintentdo Wii, Novell gave away various spot prizes at their open source solutions stage talk, and a few other vendors were giving away prizes.