I work right across the street from both Intel and AMD (why they have buildings that stare at each other is beyond me). AMD is expanding their building, which I would think indicates more planned growth, at least in this area. AMD really needs to keep it together and keep the competition up, because I love the better processors that come around because of the competition. AMD would be wise not to count on anything positive from their Intel law suit, mostly because suing people isn’t a good business model.

O’Reilly, the publishing company who sponsors OSCON, also had a much smaller presence then they have had previous years.

I did get a reasonable number of t-shirts, pens, and other free stuff. In particular, I picked up a little book about operating systems according to OpenSolaris which I of course find interesting because I’m taking an operating systems class right now.

Another thing that disturbed me was how many perl programming jobs there were on the job board. I think people should move away from perl for enterprise because of its difficulty to maintain. I guess this is just a side note.

I actually thought that Sun had one of the best booths around, because they had a lot to talk about as far as open source goes, although I’m not sure how much of it I found interesting. I did not see that they had any presentations about OpenOffice.org, which I think was disappointing at best, and worrisome at worst.

Another thing that I thought was interesting was who wasn’t there. Some of the places that made kind of a splash last year like MindTouch/OpenGarden and OpenLaszlo didn’t even bother to show up. Other big open source names such as the Apache Foundation and the Kernel developers I’m sure had people there, they just didn’t have a booth, which is too bad.