Last Wednesday and Thursday a delegation of KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu folks attended the OpenExpo event in Zurich, Switzerland. There I manned (womaned?) the KDE booth together with Alexandra Leisse, Claudia Rauch (KDE e.V. secretary), Eckhart Woerner, and Luca Gugelmann.
Here you can see a photo, showing Claudia and me behind our (rather small) KDE booth:
(That's actually two tables combined; our original booth consisted of one table. But oh well;)
We had a pretty good time presenting KDE4, networking with other projects, and generally enjoying the great catering. You don't want to miss out on the tasty Asian style food that they generally seem to serve at this event. Alex gave a talk about KOffice 2, which was really well visited; Certainly there is a lot of interest in the new KOffice release, and in KDE4 in general. A video of the talk should come online soonish on the OpenExpo website. And then I also helped out a bit at the Kubuntu booth, mostly by providing coffee and making sure that Kubuntu CDs were always ordered in front of the Ubuntu ones.
What makes the OpenExpo event unique is that it's actually two events in one, at the same location: For one there is
Topsoft, a commercial business style expo (featuring suits), and then
OpenExpo, a FOSS event (featuring us long haired hippies). It's funny to see these two worlds meet, but also interesting to observe the cultural differences.
So basically you have one big exhibition hall, and on the left side there are the FOSS guys, and on the right side the business guys. Interestingly it seemed to me that the FOSS side has grown bigger since my last visit (moving the division line a little further to the right), and now included some companies that you would not usually expect there, including Sun, and even Microsoft (no kidding).
OpenExpo/Topsoft isn't really targeted so much at end users (although there certainly are some), but more so at networking between industry members. This also becomes evident by the scheduling: it takes place in the middle of the week, when most end users have to work and can't easily attend.
Another interesting observation was that Gnome once again didn't show up. Is it just me, or are they increasingly rare to find at expos?