SCALE 6X -- An interview with publicity chairman Orv Beach

By Steven Rosenberg on February 1, 2008 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

We all know that Linux is a kernel, an operating system, maybe even a socio-political movement (it depends on whom you ask), but in a sense, Linux is about people -- those who create, use and promote it.

One of those people is Orv Beach, publicity chairman for SCALE 6X -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- being held Feb. 8-10 in Los Angeles. Since I'm covering the convention for Click, I took the opportunity to interview Orv after hearing from him about getting press credentials for the event, which I wouldn't miss, by the way. And if you do plan on attending, Orv told me that using the promo code CAST when registering for SCALE can get you 40 percent off of admission.

Orv, where do you live, how old are you, and what do you do for a living?
I live in Simi Valley, California, with my wife Beth. I'm 58, and I have four grown kids and four wonderful grandkids. Professionally, I'm the IT director at Simi Valley Hospital.

How did you first discover open-source software, and what part does it play in your work and home life today?
I've been interested in technology all my life. I got my amateur radio license when I was 17, and enjoyed building radio equipment as much as operating.

I got my first computer in about 1979, and when amateur packet radio was authorized by the FCC, it was a natural to use a computer with it. A popular packet radio program at the time was TNOS, written by Brian Lantz. It ran under DOS, and was a communications program & BBS. Brian had an active users group and was happy to add features to TNOS. As it grew in size, the C compiler he was using had more and more difficulties compiling it (It was Borland Turbo C, I think). So he moved TNOS over to Linux to use GCC as the compiler, and a large percentage of his users followed him.

I got Linux from a programmer at work. At that time it was 16 floppies, and that minimal version didn't include X Windows. I ran it on a 40 MHz 386 with 8 Megs of RAM. I've been using Linux steadily ever since and moved my desktop computer over to it full time about six years ago, and my wife's about four years ago.

At work, while Adventist Health isn't a full-blown user of open-source software, they're edging that way. The web programmers at our corporate office seem to have fallen in love with Plone. Some of the programming groups are moving to Project.Net for project management, too. Locally, I use Nagios to monitor over a hundred devices on our hospital network, and we use ZoneMinder to monitor some video cameras.

Now that SCALE is in its sixth year, how big was the convention the first time around, and what kind of growth has it seen? How many exhibitors, speakers and attendees do you expect this year?
SCALE is an offshoot of the "LUGFests" that SCLUG (the Simi-Conejo Linux Users Group - http://sclug.org) held every 6 months where they met at the Nortel building in Simi Valley. They were miniconferences, with people demonstrating open source software and even a few commercial vendors. Even as limited as they were, they drew Linux users from all over Southern California. SCLUG held 4 of them before Nortel closed down that building. (There's an article on LUGFest III here).

The last LUGFest, LUGFest IV, drew 400 people over two days. Based on the response to the LUGFests, we knew we were filling a need for information and education on open-source software.

So after a hiatus of a year or so, SCLUG, UCLALUG and USCLUG jointly started SCALE. The first was held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC. It was one day, with two session tracks. We had 11 speakers spots and a panel, and it was a struggle to fill them. That first Linux Expo drew 400 attendees.

Contrast that with SCALE 6X, which will be held in February, five years later: The main Expo is now on Saturday and Sunday, has 32 speaker slots and two keynotes spread over four session tracks per day. You'd think that number of topics and speakers would be impossible to come up with. Yet we received over 105 submissions to our call for papers! Whittling them down was difficult, and it was painful, as we had to turn down lots of good proposals. We expect to have about 1,500 attendees for SCALE 6X. The Westin hotel will be bursting at the seams.

How did you arrive at the major topics of this year's convention -- women in open source, open source in education, and open source in medicine?
We started the Friday mini-conferences several years ago in an effort to address more specialized areas of open-source software, what the commercial vendors call "vertical applications." They've been fairly successful so far. We have a pool of ideas for future specialty sessions, and some of those may happen in the near future. The intent and hope is that if any of the Friday sessions grow significantly, they could be spun off as a specialty conference on their own. We'll see ...

Who are the biggest-name speakers at this year's show?
Jono Bacon of Canonical, who's giving the Saturday keynote talk, on "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Coming of the Linux Desktop"; The "Reverend" Ted Haeger, formerly of Novell, now with Bungee Labs who will speak on "Inside a Linux-powered, On-Demand Startup."

What's it like out on the exhibition floor for an attendee? What can we learn from meeting the people staffing the booths?
Unlike LinuxWorld, SCALE has always had a focus on the end-user of Linux and the education of that end-user, whether they're in IT or not. We try to fill the booths with people who have stories to tell about free and open-source software and who are eager to show attendees cool stuff.

That's not only commercial vendors, but also our "dotORGs," the nonprofit community groups. And we purposely intermix them on the show floor to give every booth good exposure to everyone crusing the aisles. Someone, I think it was Scott Ruecker of LXer.com, called that SCALE's "secret sauce".

Because the show is held on the weekend, the vast majority of the attendees are there because they WANT to be, rather than because they were told to attend by their employer. So the interest and excitement on the expo floor is palpable. It's a FUN show and is a great place to come for both the experience computer user and the newcomer to open-source software.

Is the show geared to hobbyists, sysadmins and coders, CIO types, or am I missing a group or groups of people who will be at SCALE?
All of the above, plus students. We offer deep discounts on admission to many groups, but especially students, and we encourage them to attend. They're the ones who are going to be the IT decision makers of the future. The smart vendors know that and are willing to invest the time to engage them now with the hope of doing business with them in the future. We'd also like to find a way to entice more current Windows-only users to attend but haven't found the key to doing that yet.

What do you think is the biggest story in open-source software since the last SCALE convention, and what do you think the biggest story will be in the year ahead?
This year it looked like GPLv3 might be, but so far it's been pretty much a non-event. The next biggest thing is the collapse of the SCO lawsuit. It's become apparent to most of use who followed the case closely (Thanks, Groklaw!) that the case was fading steadily. But having SCO ruled against for the majority of the issues is a clear sign to businesses that using open source in general (and Linux in particular) is not a risk to your operations. That will encourage more businesses to experiment with FOSS (although most have started to already).

Next year, the improved availability of Linux to non-technical consumers will be talked about more and more frequently. Dell selling Linux on PCs, the ASUS eeePC, cheap Linux PCs at Wal-Mart and the Everex Cloudbook (announced but not shipping) are all examples of this phenomenon. It isn't really about technology change but understanding the concept that a computer isn't necessarily always a Windows machine. As the consumer realizes Windows isn't the only choice, Linux and open-source software will grow in popularity.

What Linux distributions do you run, and could you tell us why you've chosen them?
I currently run Fedora Linux on two desktops (mine and my wife Beth's), and on my server, although I'm going to move the server to CentOS soon. I run Fedora because I used to run Red Hat Linux. It was an easy migration when Red Hat stopped supporting desktop Linux commercially and the free version (Fedora) came out. My firewall runs ClarkConnect, which is a nice server/firewall specialized Linux distribution. I like Kubuntu a lot and might move to it eventually for my desktops. It's what I recommend to new users (to be honest, Ubuntu would work fine, too. But I'm a KDE bigot :-D )

What's your favorite open-source application?
Well, there's no single favorite -- the ones I use the most are OpenOffice (word processing, etc.), Firefox for browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail, Konversation for IRC, Pidgin for instant messaging. I also use XMMS whenever I'm at my desktop, listening to BellyUp4Blues, the greatest blues station on the Internet. I like Amarok a lot too, but it's overkill for just streaming audio.

The one I like using the most: GRAMPS, for genealogy documentation. It's become an excellent application. It's got a growing, active user community and a group of developers who listen to their users. I've watched it evolve over the last few years, and it's a great example of a successful open-source project.

----------------------------

If you want to know more about SCALE 6X, go to the Web site, and follow the SCALE blog for the latest about the show.

I'll be at the show getting all the information I can, writing a bunch from the show and hopefully much more afterward. And it's not just Linux -- there will be booths for every major BSD project (OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD), as well as representatives from KDE, GNOME and much more.

And I really do hope to see you there.

New ways to sign in to comment: I just added the ability for prospective commenters on this blog to sign in using their AOL, Yahoo! and Wordpress.com accounts (for the past 200 posts anyway ... more than that will take an extensive, middle-of-the-night rebuild). That's in addition to the other sign-in choices, which include starting a Movable Type account on this blog, Typekey, OpenID, Live Journal and Vox. If you have trouble getting your Movable Type account verified, or any of the other sign-in options are not working properly, please e-mail me. With these added ways of signing in, there's more reason than ever for you to make a comment (or several!).