Just back from SCALE (well, “back” is a relative term — I’m actually at Novell’s Waltham office today, rather than my home office in Florida) and I’ve got to hand it to Ilan Rabinovitch, Orv Beach, Gareth Greenaway, and the rest of the gang involved in organizing SCALE — the show went off without a hitch, and it was a lot of fun as well as a great opportunity to get together with other members of the Linux and open source community.

Ted Gould of Inkscape, and Ilan Rabinovitch of SCALE

Hallway Track

While I find planned sessions fairly valuable, the most interesting part of any conference for me is the so-called “hallway track,” which is when you have a chance to actually meet face to face with other folks in the open source community. No amount of contact via phone, IRC, IM, and/or email can substitute for talking to people face-to-face. (Particularly when you combine face-to-face with the “beer in hand” protocol…)

One good way to meet lots of people in the community is to just hang out at the project booth and help answer questions. I was not, thankfully, alone in the booth this weekend. We had openSUSE evangelist Martin Lasarsch in for SCALE, all the way from Nuremberg, Germany, and Josh Dorfman from the Waltham office to help answer questions and take comments about openSUSE.

Giving out swag doesn’t hurt, either — we gave away a ton (not literally…) of stuffed tuxes, Geekos, openSUSE t-shirts, and openSUSE 10.3 DVDs. We were showing off the openSUSE desktop with Compiz and KDE4, and it seems like Compiz is still new to a lot of folks — judging by the “oohs” and “aahs” we were getting when we’d demo the desktop effects.

Great Talks

I only had the chance to attend a few talks — I went to see my friend Rikki Kite on the Women in Open Source panel on Friday, caught Stormy Peters’ talk on Friday as well as her keynote (”Would you do it again for free”) on Sunday morning. Again, thanks to the SCALE organizers for starting the day at 10 a.m. instead of 9 a.m.!

Women in Open Source panel at SCALE

I also caught Don Marti’s “ifdown -a” talk, about being more productive by being offline when you’re trying to work. Don had some really good ideas and examples, but I’m not quite sure that I’m ready to go into offline mode, excepting when I’m working on a flight…

Ted Haeger was unfortunate in drawing the end-of-conference death slot — that’s the slot when the bulk of attendees have already packed up to catch an early flight home or adjourned to the bar — but still managed to draw a respectable crowd to his talk. Ted talked about Bungee Labs‘ “Bungee Connect,” a way to build online apps through the Web browser. It’s an interesting business model, but also bumps up against some interesting problems in licensing, which he discussed at some length. It should be informative to see how those issues shake out as Bungee grows.

Me and Ted Haeger at SCALE

Unfortunately, I missed Jono Bacon’s keynote on Saturday, which is a drag because Jono never fails to give a good talk.

Summing Up

I really can’t say enough good things about SCALE, as a conference — it’s well-organized, draws an excellent group of open source enthusiasts and contributors, has great talks, it’s inexpensive to attend, and very convenient if you stay in the Westin hotel while at the show (the show is held downstairs). I was glad that they decided to expand the show to three days (two days of tracks plus an extra day at the beginning of mini-conferences and “SCALE University”) as that’s a much better timeframe to settle in and get into the rhythm of the show.

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