As an employee of BSDi, I often get to go to various trade shows and conferences to work the booth, or simply talk to people about FreeBSD. This month, last week as a matter of fact, I was in San Jose, California for LinuxWorld. What follows is a report from the show. Enjoy.

Day 1

The first day of the show was Tuesday, August 15th. I spent most of the day in the booth, clutching a stack of 4.1-RELEASE CDs, talking to various people about FreeBSD, and giving away a shiny, new copy of 4.1-RELEASE's disck one to those who asked for 4.1 (we didn't have a whole lot of 4.1 CDs, but plenty of 4.0 sets, so we were giving those away to people who weren't specifically asking for 4.1). I talked to a huge amount of people that day, most of whom were happy that we actually had 4.1 CDs (we got them back from the replicator's the day before). By the end of the day, I decided I was pretty exhausted, so I skipped out on the MandrakeSoft party and went to bed.

Day 2

The next day was a lot busier than the first. I spent most of the day walking around talking to vendors and anyone else who'd take the time to listen. Greg Sutter (of Daemon News fame), was with me and we were armed with huge stacks of free stuff, most of which we unloaded without any problem. I was kind of surprised by the amount of people at the show who use FreeBSD -- I'm not sure why I expected anything less, but since it was LinuxWorld, I guess I expected more people swearing by Linux. Even more surprising (and somewhat amusing) are the companies offering to share their "Linux Expertise". Most were running FreeBSD on all of their servers and development systems -- more proof that companies are starting to consider Linux to be nothing more than a buzz word.

While I wasn't out dispensing goodies and talking to people, I was at the booth talking to people. There are some pretty "interesting" people at these shows, most of which I'm not sure should be allowed out of their house or hospital room without supervision, but nonetheless, they were there.

After the show, we had the BSD BoF (Birds of a Feather). There was quite a turnout, and I think most of it was due to the fact that Murray (Stokely, a co-worker) and I walked around handing out the announcements/invites to just about everyone. Most of the conversation went like this:

Us: "Hey do you like free beer?"
Them: "Hell yeah, where?"
Us: "Right down the hall. 6:00. There's free food too. See ya there."
Them: "Definitely."

This isn't quite as bad as it sounds -- we did actually have free beer and food, we just neglected to tell them about the technical discussion part (even though it was on the invites). What happened with a few people that I noticed from handing flyers to was something like this:

1. They walk in.

2. They notice there are chairs and five guys up on a stage sitting behind a table talking.

3. They find the free beer.

4. They find the free food.

5. They leave after grabbing some of each.

Not exactly the best thing to have happen, but at least they're going to remember BSDi, which is kind of the point.

After the BoF was over, I headed back to the hotel to shower, the off to the VA Linux/Slashdot/Andover party, which was fun. If any of you guys are reading this, thanks for the party :-)

Day 3

The third day was somewhat of a blur. The previous two days, the show ended at 6pm. The third day, it was over at 4pm. This was a good thing. I spent about an equal chunk of the day in the booth and walking around. I talked to the guys from themes.org for a while (and also gave them 4.1 CD sets). If Greg Sanders (ElCoronel) happens to be reading this, let me know how the install goes ;-) I also took a bunch of pictures which are available on my web site. At about 2:30pm, I headed over to the Userfriendly booth for the animation premier of their comic strip (which, I must say, was pretty good). After the animation, I headed out again with as much stuff as my pockets could carry -- handing it out, talking to people, harassing the Linux "experts" that were really running FreeBSD, etc. until the show closed.

Conclusion

All in all, it was a decent show. Our booth is huge (which is good) and draws a lot of attention (which is better), and it doesn't hurt that it's really nice as well. Between myself, Greg, and Murray, we handed out a ton of stuff -- stickers, horns, case-plate logos, bumper stickers, CDs, tattoos, screwdrivers -- you name it, we had it (well, except t-shirts, which everyone seemed to want). We don't go to these shows to sell things -- the main point of us being there is to get the word out about FreeBSD, our hardware, and the company in general, and at that, I think we did a hell of a job.

- jim

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