– By Grant Gross –
Imagine having to give the same corporate spiel eight times a day, for
the better part of a week. If you’re among the throngs of people who’d
despise doing that kind of thing, meet Paul Hatch, who’s been pitching
Caldera Linux to the masses at LinuxWorld this week.

You’ve enjoyed Hatch’s work this week if you’ve been anywhere near the
.org Pavilion at LinuxWorld, or within about five booth-widths in any
direction of Caldera’s booth, for that matter. Hatch and another
pitchman have been giving 10-minute Caldera talks every half hour during the
show. If you’ve been in earshot, you’ve probably heard Hatch say
something like, “My mom has trouble sending email, but she could probably
install Linux using this Lizard installation tool. It’s that easy!”

Hatch’s job was to do the corporate overview presentation eight times a
day, but on the shortened Friday hours at LinuxWorld, he took over the
product presentation as well, meaning he was stepping up to the
microphone 10 times that day.

Hatch is a corporate communications manager at Caldera — no he’s not a
hired trade show actor like those used at many booths. He looks like an actor
you’d hire to play a corporate communications manager: short haircut,
clean-shaven, Caldera polo shirt tucked neatly into his khakis. He swears he
likes the work. “It’s a lot of fun doing this,” he says. “The first day
I was doing it, I hit a wall about 2:30. I had to stop and think about
what I was doing during the presentation.”

With a video display following along behind him, Hatch can cheat if he
gets stuck. But he had the corporate overview memorized early in the
show, and he predicted he’d have the product presentation down after
doing it a couple of times Friday.

The presentations themselves don’t differ greatly each time, but Hatch
chats up the audience as he’s gearing up for each show by asking who’s
a Linux user, where they’re from, small talk like that. Late Friday
morning, the crowd was still sparse, so Hatch would get on the mic and
just start talking to draw a crowd.

About 15 people stopped by for the 11:30 a.m. presentation. Friday was
Beatles day, so Hatch was giving out a Caldera fuzzy vest to the
audience member who could answer a Beatles trivia question, and Hatch chucked
trinkets such as frisbees and mouse pads to people who attempt answers
to his Linux trivia questions.

“How many Linux servers shipped in 1999?” Someone guesses 30,000; Hatch
tosses him a keychain. Fifty thousand? Another key chain goes flying
across the audience. The correct answer: 1 million. “It’s amazing how
it’s growing,” Hatch says of Linux.

After more trivia, Hatch launches into a quick advertisement for
Caldera’s Volution Web-base systems management tool. He emphasizes the
Web-based aspect, saying you can manage your Linux system “whether you’re at
home in the middle of the night watching Gilligan’s Island, or
you’re on the golf course with a PDA.”

The crowds have been about three-quarters corporate, with a few “Linux
junkies” mixed in, Hatch says. Speaking to the pro-Linux crowd, he gets
in a dig at a certain closed-source software maker while explaining
Volution’s health monitoring feature. “If Microsoft had something like
this, they would’nt have had their Web site go down, because they would’ve
known it was coming.”

After the 10-minute show, attendees can get a free T-shirt by getting a
card stamped by Hatch and another Caldera booth worker. Once a day,
Hatch and crew draw for a free Compaq iPaq from the cards turned in.

Supporting Hatch are a handful of engineers, who get the technical
questions he can’t answer, but Hatch says he fielded only three or four
questions Thursday. “Some people just like to come up and talk about their
experiences using Caldera,” he says. “I’m happy to hear them talk about
it.”

Hatch’s enthusiasm stays consistent throughout the day, through pitch
after pitch of the same stuff. “Try me in two years,” he says when asked
if it gets boring. “If I’m still doing it, it may be getting a little
old.”

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page.

TheStandard reports: “Tired of your computer looking for
aliens when you’re not using it? Now
you can tell that big hunk of plastic on
your desk to do work for actual,
for-profit companies when you’re busy
elsewhere, and you won’t get a dime!
That about sums up the approach
Juno Online Services (JWEB) is using
in a virtual supercomputer plan
designed to monetize, as
InternetNews’ Thor Olavsrud put it, its
free subscribers.”

Wired.com reports that online retailer Petopia has cancelled its $100 million IPO, saying it has sold nearly all of its assets and no longer conducts business.

“The pullback scuttled agreements with Petco and NBC. Petco had agreed not to sell pet items online if Petopia didn’t partner with another brick-and-mortar pet store. The
NBC deal was for on-air advertising.”

From LinuxPR: Firedraw is an open source software product
under the GPL licence. It’s an innovative
product that permits administration of a
network’s firewalls through a graphical web
interface.

LWN.net has coverage of Thursday at LinuxWorld. “As a sheer stroke of luck, Liz Coolbaugh ran into Jon ‘maddog’ Hall in the Javitts Center where
he gave her his one extra ticket to the first public showing of the documentary “Revolution OS”,
created by J.T.S. Moore, a filmmaker with roots at Stanford and therefore personal connections
to many of the folks at VA Linux, Penguin Computing and more. Doug Bone first convinced
Moore to consider the Free Software, Linux, Open Source phenomena as a topic for a
documentary. This is his first effort in this arena. Not being a film critic, Liz refrained from
predicting the success of this documentary outside our own community, but personally, she
loved it.”

From BusinessWire: The Free Software Foundation bestowed its third Free
Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software, in Paris.
Richard Stallman presented the award, a one-of-a-kind handmade quilt, to Brian Paul for his ground-breaking
work on the Mesa 3D Graphics Library. The ceremony was sponsored by Aurora, Idealx and VA Linux Systems.
Proceeds of the event went to benefit the Free Software Foundation Europe.

ABC News catches up with the Linux desktop, saying it’s mounting a serious charge to Windows. “Big companies like Dell and Sun, and smaller ones such as
Eazel, CodeWeavers and Ximian, are putting their muscle
behind this year’s edition of the free, open-source operating
system’s attempt to unseat Microsoft Windows’ rule over office
and home end-user systems.”

At LWN.net: A problem exists in all versions of CUPS prior to 1.1.5 with the
httpGets() function. It could go into an infinite loop if a line
longer than the input buffer size was sent by a client. This could be
used as a DoS attack. As well, all occurances of sprintf() calls were
changed to snprintf(), and all occurances of strcpy() calls were
changed to strncpy() calls, both of which protect against buffer
overflows. Finally, CUPS now defaults to not broadcasting the printer
information anymore by default, and by default access is only allowed
from the local machine.

ZDNet reports that Microsoft is in bed with the music labels and movie studios, as the software giant “captures a leading spot in the content-protection business.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
The Applied Data Systems booth at the LinuxWorld Expo is a bit spare. Especially considering the recent press releases heralding ADS’s new sleep mode for StrongARM platforms, one would expect to see some hands on demonstrations of this eagerly awaited advance in open embedded systems.

Sarah Pick, the director of marketing communications for ADS, clues us in. “Our booth is lost,” says Pick. “All our demos and set ups are on a loading dock somewhere.” The few displays of single-board systems and the GUI that ADS is known for were hurriedly sent in by train on Tuesday.

Developers and others who had been following ADS’s news noted the absence of sleep mode demos at the booth, and there was evidently some kind of furor about it among the handheld developers community, according to Pick, who assured us that they did indeed have the power management features ready for demo at the show. ADS also says that it will release the sleep mode code as Open Source.

That’s good, but some developers and users at handhelds.org’s IRC channel on the openprojects network have issues. First, they don’t necessarily believe that it was a simple case of misdelivery that has ADS’s booth demo-less. There is some speculation that, although ADS has got the sleep mode working, the company doesn’t quite have the wakeup part operating smoothly — a detail that certainly would prevent full release.

“Oh, Christ no,” says Bob Olsen, CEO of Applied Data Systems. He maintains that the technology only needs further testings with drivers before being released. “We developed this first in Windows CE,” and while he admits that CE is not the most efficient power management platform, Olsen says ADS simply cloned CE’s functionality in bringing the capabilities to Linux.

Another thing that bothers the developers is ADS’s refusal to open up development of the power management features to the community. Pick says that the plan is to release the fully developed code as Open Source. But sources at handhelds.org say they would have preferred to have been included from the beginning. During an IRC conversation today, chatter “niko”‘ said, “It would have been better if they had developed [the power management capabilities] openly, IMHO.”

Chatter “BBrox” added, “Yeah, that sucks for Familiar.” Familiar, a Debian-based OS for use on Compaq handhelds, lists sleep mode as one of its higher priorities on a todo list. Some Familiar developers think ADS’s keeping its power management closed may be detrimental to Familiar’s progress as a fully developed project, although if ADS does release the source code, Familiar developers will be free to adapt it to their needs.

Olsen says that ADS opened the project up to all comers but had extremely limited response. Apparently it was Pick’s assignment to investigate the possibilities of offering the project up to the community, and she worked on it for three months before ADS decided to take it in house.

Olsen says not to worry, the source will be released just as soon as testing is done. Exactly when is still up in the air. “I haven’t even asked anyone,” he says.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.