I went to the LINUX WORLD Philippines conference at the Dusit Hotel in Makati and have some uhmmn non-sense comments.

While having an opensource event is great, its pretty ironic that the participation fee is quite expensive! At P3.5k (students), P5.5k (government/NGO/academe) and P6.5k (Corporate/Individuals) it doesn't exactly fit into the idea of opensource as a less costly alternative to the propriety solutions from redmond. To make matters worse, the registration process was a mess. If I had known they wouldn't be strict on ID's, we should have registered as students and shaved off P2k on the registration fee. Also, all the sessions seems to be open to the public? My gulay! Better yet, we should have walked-in, and just have lunch at nearby food stalls. Generally they should have lowered the participation fee or even have it for free to entice more participants. The organizers also failed to provide conference kits and would not even hand you out the topic listings if you don't ask for one. The opensource company exhibitors also suck in a way that they don't even hand out sample cd's. I mean it wouldn't hurt if at least redhat, sun and novell/suse would have something to give to potential users.

On the other hand, some interesting topics on day one: FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) for debian. The LTSP front end management tool by the good folks at ASTI's bayanihan linux (Although, I am curious why it has to be QT dependent. It would be nice if it would be cross distro and cross platform perhaps). IPTraf and PAM were also discussed.

It was also nice to see the faces of some people on the now defunct pinoy tech scene (which I asked migs for the opml, which he gladly gave, so I can revive it when my schedule eases up a bit, hopefully this weekend again, and this time I want talking heads). Shook hands with clair ching and zak elep. Also seen some familiar local opensource figures there like Jijo, and Dom. Throw in a bunch of ph-freebsd guys like jimmy and barry. I didn't get a chance to say hi as my introvert alter ego kicked in. Aside from the fact that i'm nowadays a promiscuous opensource unix lover/user, so that probably was a factor too.

The good thing is I didn't feel too akward being the only(?) Mac toting user there, not because Mac OS X is unix underneath (a variant of unix resulting from the of Mach and FreeBSD), but because... microsoft was there, giving away an xbox and with a bunch of testosterone inducing representatives to try to win you over to the dark side of the force. Although in scenarios like this, it makes you wonder why opensource choose to have penguins and cute little daemons instead? hmmmmnn... At least were getting there, I remember the Redhat booth having a big banner with a slogan like "fsck me?" (should have taken a picture). But then again that might send a wrong message to potential redhat users... does it need fsck lovin?

Wonder what tomorrow brings?