Well, technically it was Day Two, but with the launch of the new OpenNMS Group website, our Meridian product, and actually trying to finish up my slides for my SCaLE presentation, it was the first day I actually made it to the show.

I love this show. It was the first real grassroots open source conference I ever attended (at Scale 5x back in 2007) and it was amazing. I haven’t been able to make as many of them as I would have liked (they scheduled one on Valentine’s Day once) but I always welcome the opportunity. This year they can accommodate 3000 attendees and while they haven’t released actual numbers, that is a lot of geeks.

I spent almost all of the day in the expo hall. We introduced the new Horizon/Meridian booth:

which I think turned out well. I also got to wander around and talk with a few of the other projects that are here. One was the Kodi team:

and having used it for several weeks now I think it is an amazing piece of software. I also got to talk briefly with Jeremy Sands, one of the organizers of the SouthEast LinuxFest:

and I should point out that the dates have been set for the conference this year (12-14 June) and the RFP is now open.

My talk at SCaLE is about the changing nature of open source, and it has never been a better time to be involved if you want a job. At most shows I see signs like this:

and there is even a career booth hosted by Disney, of all companies:

We had a nice amount of booth traffic. The OpenNMS shirts went in the first hour (should have brought more) and in honor of MC Frontalot performing on Saturday night, we are giving away signed sets of all six of his CDs.

The Friday winner was Ganeshbaba who registered at the very last minute, but we still have two more sets to give away.

Anyway, if you are at the show be sure to stop by and if you aren’t, well, why the heck aren’t you here?