[osol-mktg] fisl trip report

[Stephen Lau]

I've blogged most of the gory details, but wanted to summarise briefly 
for the 99% of you who don't subscribe to my RSS feed ;-)

First, photos:
http://grommit.com/gallery/v/stephen/fisl06/

The conference was great.  Brazil has a ton of energy behind the open 
source movement, and OpenSolaris was really really well-received.  A lot 
of the Linux guys (Ubuntu & Slackware specifically) were really friendly 
and dropped by numerous times.  The community seems younger there (in 
terms of exposure to Linux), so is pretty willing to try out new things. 
  I had a lot of people go home and boot the Nexenta CDs, or install the 
SXCR DVDs and come back with questions, or comments.

If you want to read details, see my blog (whacked.net), but I'll list 
some key observations, and things I think we could do for future 
participation that would help even more.

1) More Solaris engineers.  I got absolutely swamped with people wanting 
  demos, or just to talk.  The best way to connect with people is one on 
one, but that means inevitably there is anywhere from 3-5 people 
standing behind that one person feeling left out and walking away.

2) The Nexenta livecds went like hotcakes.  People loved the idea of a 
Ubuntu/Debian based OpenSolaris distro.  We quickly made friends with 
the Ubuntu-BR (Brazil Ubuntu user group) guys, and they gave out a lot 
of Nexenta livecds and referred people over to our area frequently.

3) If we have the budget, we should produce Nexenta install cds as well 
as livecds.  A lot of people expressed interest but didn't have the 
bandwidth to download an ISO.

4) The idea of setting the Sun area up as a rest area, rather than a 
formal booth was brilliant.  We had tables, chairs, free coffee - and it 
was just more relaxed with a lot of people freely going in and out and 
getting drawn to the demos.  I think it helped to connect with people in 
a much more casual atmosphere than a formal booth.

5) Besides Google (who was mainly there to recruit), we were the only 
large corporation there which was surprising.  No Intel, no IBM, no 
Linux distributions.  Strange.

6) If we can get enough Solaris engineers (even just 2), a proper 
InstallFest would be great.  I had a bunch of people take the DVDs home 
and install on their laptops that night and come back the next day to 
show it off or to get help.

7) The BrandZ talk/demo went great.  The room was packed, every seat was 
taken and there were probably 20-30 people standing in the back.  BrandZ 
was one of the most talked about projects, people were really 
incredulous when they saw it running.  And when they saw you could 
DTrace a Linux app, they were really impressed.

I'm sure there are other things that I'm forgetting.  I'll follow-up if 
I recall anything else over the next day or two.  Anyway.. the 
conference was awesome, I hope to go again in the future :)

cheers,
steve
-- 
stephen lau // stevel at sun.com | 650.786.0845 | http://whacked.net
opensolaris // solaris kernel development
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