Debian again hat a booth at the "Systems" fair in Munich. This is mostly a B2B fair, and the focus is on "ready to use" products. So there are few new product announcements happening here, and not this big audience as of IFA or CeBIT. Still it is an important fair for the medium and small sized businesses. Noone expects a PSP to be introduced there...

I staffed the booth on tuesday morning, and I intended to staff it on Friday morning, too (but was unable to do so). We were rather few people this year; also the organizational contribution of Jens (who died this summer) was missed a lot. Thanks to Michael Banck for organizing most things, and to all the other contributors such as Michael Ablassmeier and Simon Richter. See Michael Bancks blog posting for a complete list. Thanks also to e.g. the wikipedia staff, who managed to staff our booth for a few minutes while I went to the entrance to give Simon a free pass.

Tuesday morning was rather quiet, few people coming by, most of which are either already happy Debian users or at least know of it. Few donations, albeit the few LinuxTag DVDs left were gone (for a donation of at least 2 Euro) by noon. While I remember people asking all the time about the pretty posters with Ayo's artwork last year, and we had a bigger stock of them this time, noone asked while I was there. So on overall, I don't think it paid off for the project. :-(

A couple of people had technical questions which I was usually able to give the relevant pointers for solving them. The recurring question "when is sarge going to be released" was obviously not an issue any more; one guy asked when etch was going to be released and I was able to quickly pull out the announcement by the release team with the end-of-2006 schedule.

I was rather disappointed with the few people coming by, but probably tuesday morning was a rather unrepresentative time. The only two "important" conversations I had there was with someone from a PHP magazine who are interested in including a Sarge+PHP5+MySQL5 CD with an upcoming issue (I can't do that, I hope they'll find someone else to prepare the CD for them!) and with the people from LiMux (the upcoming linux switch of the city of munich) which sounded (to me) much like the current delay of the project is mostly due to management issues than due to Debian/GNU/Linux lacking some features. They couldn't really tell me what the Debian project could do to support LiMux.

Debian being used for LiMux is something I'm really looking forward to, and I would have loved to see a demo of it at the Systems, but apparently the project isn't that far yet. :-(

I didn't see much of the Systems otherwise - I had to hurry back to the university when I left the booth, so I didn't visit any other booth. The last few times it wasn't too interesting for me anyway, since none of the products (except the OSS projects) is targeted at my audience obviously. And I'm not the type to walk around to collect as many free CDs and ball pens as possible. I remember that last year you could have your face "imprinted" in a block of transparent resin with small bubbles or so; no idea if that was free or at a low charge, though. You used to get popcorn and such stuff at a couple of booths etc. - and a lot more of such stuff back in DotCom times - but it never interested me too much. And last year I think a conference hotel had the booth opposite of us and gave away free beer... anyway, I didn't even check if the LiMux booth maybe had one of these nice munich-penguin pins...

I had considered to walk around and ask for sponsorship at a coupld of places for some projects I'm invovled in, but I don't think I'm good at that anyway...

So my feelings are rather mixed. I really hope we'll have more people for the booth next year, because I'll not be available then: I'll hopefully be in finishing my diploma thesis by then.

So there is another example on bad software patents out. A company now claimed to own patents on the basics of XML (oh, and what about HTML, SGML etc.?).

This is just another example on how bad software patents can be.

It's outright ridiculous on what patents are filed nowadays.

The US really need to get rid of them, and the EU should avoid introducing them over another backdoor initiative...

I'd point out the British Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacutres and Commerces "Adelphi charter", which is pretty clear on patents on computer code and abstract ideas...

Google is expanding it's empire. In fact it's becoming a threat with this big of an influence on public opinion just by being able to effectively "censor" information if they would want to. We need more diversity, IMHO.

With the latest rumors - Google Base - it seems that Google will be attacking new markets soon. Google Base could be a big threat to Craigslist and EBay, actually... (from what I've seen of Google Base, I find the phrase "Google wants to host your Databases" overstretches it a bit though...)

So what is Google up to? When is Google starting to sell books?

Google Talk isn't really big. It seems to be a nice product, but very few people are using it. I've never seen Google advertise it, so it's no wonder most people stick to their established IM/Voice services. But what's the point of it, when they don't adequately promote it? And whats behind that VPN service on their planned WiFi network in SF?

Is it about beta testing, maybe?

Google obviously wants to run company intranets. Company intranet search engines are a well-known product, and they for sure would like to expand that offer - offer email service, IM/voice, ...

From what I've read about their WiFi service, they would be allowed to run e.g. deep packet inspection stuff on it. Combined with Google indexing tech they could test e.g. filtering out pr0n sites. Or test a virus filter. And then offer that product to companies. So is a google firewall coming?

More obvious missing products in Googles portfolio are a document management and a customer relations management solution. Or a combination of both.

Google base might actually be part of an upcoming document management product by Google, I guess. And, I mean, wouldn't it be obvious for Google to offer a document management (and storage) solution to companies? As for CRM - a google CRM solution combined with their document management and indexing applications would beat any other product: add a user to the CRM and have the related files appear automatically due to google indexing, have the email correspondence added from the company gmail accounts...

With all the hype that was around it, I got myself a GMail account some time ago, when they were rather "rare". While the UI is still very good for a webmail, it has also a lot of things I do not like.

I don't use it heavily - not for personal emails, but only to recieve some mailing lists I don't want to clutter my regular mail (and there are no privacy issues there... Google will index them in the list archives anyway), and to recieve some off-site notifications by some servers (it's always better to get warning emails etc. off-site so you can still access them when the site is down... oh, and if you have an email relay, try to setup a direct transport for your email, so it works if there is something wrong with your email relay, too!)

My top issues with gmail are:

• Functions moving their location in the menus. E.g. when I empty my spam folder I always try to pick "delete" from the dropdown. But while the "delete" function is there in every other, it's not there in the Trash and Spam folders (instead it's a big button where the "Archive" button usually is).
• "Delete" is hidden away. GMail assumes that you don't want to delete any mail. But I do. There are so many mails not worth keeping at all! Especially with the logcheck mails I get - sometimes one every hour - I really want to delete them permanently. It's just of no use to keep them, all I want to review is that they do not contain important information (e.g. suggesting a hack attack, software or hardware fault) and then get rid of them.
• There is no keyboard shortcut for "delete" either
• GMail diverts my browsers /-shortcut for in-page searching to in-mailbox searching

I used gmails feedback function before, but didn't get any reply.