Desktop Linux Summit 2006 Wrap-up
Immediately following their successful appearance at the Linux World show in Boston, Revelation Software stalwarts Mike Ruane and Bob Carten headed to windy San Diego, California to the Desktop Linux Summit held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, on April 24-25.
As one of the Silver sponsors of the show, we were excited about the prospect of this show, which focuses mainly on applications in the Linux world that run on Linux desktops, rather than on servers. The attendees at this show are usually those who will develop, write and use the applications on Linux-based PCs, and these are the type of customers that we were out to meet.
Monday morning started with a bang, with hundreds of attendees moving through the exhibition hall. Many, many stopped by the Revelation booth, and just not for our great giveaways. A number of the attendees were familiar with the MultiValue and Pick world, and specifically with Revelation itself. Not having seen OpenInsight for Linux (OIL) before, they were suitably impressed and asked for more information. In fact, so many people began to request information that we had to ration the evaluation copies we were giving out, as nearly 70% of them had been given away on the first day!
Bob Carten giving an explanation to Peter van der Linden, Linux book author
The second day, Tuesday had many repeat attendees, a number of which had been to our booth the day before. Many of these attendees had reviewed our software and came back with additional questions. In the end, we gave away all our materials and had to direct attendees to the website where they could download the Evaluation version of OIL.
The thing which impressed the attendees the most about OIL is the capability to make an application in either Window or Linux, and then deploy it to either one or both platforms, with no changes. It made them realize what many developers of OpenInsight already know: if you have an application in Windows, you can sell it in the Linux world as well, and vice-versa.
Tuesday was also the day that we were able to announce that OpenInsight for Linux was available for download from Linspire’s Click-N-Run Warehouse. Users of the Linspire version of Linux, which is based on the Debian core and has tens of thousands of installs, can now download and start using the Personal Edition of OpenInsight for Linux (OIL PE) with just a few clicks of their mouse.
All in all it was a tremendous show, with enthusiastic crowds who understood the users of our product and were excited about our technology. We’ll be showing OpenInsight for Linux next at the Futurex and LinuxWorld show in Johannesburg May 15 through 19, and then at Linux World San Francisco on August 15-17, 2006. We hope to see you at one of these shows. If you can’t make it, we invite you to download the OpenInsight for Linux from our website at www.revelation.com.