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August 5, 2008 1:07 PM PDT

LinuxWorld showing its true colors?

Posted by Matt Asay
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I had to laugh when this error came up today when accessing LinuxWorld's website:

www.LinuxWorldExpo.com:
Microsoft JScript runtime error '800a138f'
'brandGlobalXML.selectSingleNode(...)' is null or not an object
/live/template1.asp, line 42

To be fair, it's just a conference company that organizes a wide range of conferences, not all of them focused on open source. Indeed, IDG also runs (or ran) the website for OSBC and ran it on a Windows infrastructure, too.

In both cases, it's still mildly ironic to see IDG making money with open source...but paying money to Microsoft.

Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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Add a Comment (Log in or register) 4 comments
by cocopuffz August 5, 2008 2:05 PM PDT
That is pretty amusing, although I wonder how many windows or mac related sites run on LAMP. =) That might be interesting to find out.
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by Zen-Masta August 5, 2008 2:06 PM PDT
hehe, that is funny, nice catch.
Reply to this comment
by kennonk August 5, 2008 8:10 PM PDT
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.linuxworldexpo.com

Level3 lusers :(
Reply to this comment
by walter_v August 6, 2008 12:30 AM PDT
I occasionally revisit IDG events/websites, but in general, they seem so uninspired compared to the increasingly wide variety of alternatives out there. For Linux, OSCON's quality of both content and prospective customers is so much higher than LinuxWorld.
This year I skipped LinuxWorld altogether, and will go to a couple new events I haven't tried yet.
On the web, IDG websites really try to squeeze every past page view with extra ads ands breaks. Plus their writers just don't seem to be really interested or involved in the material.
I think in a post-internet world, only the passionate survive, with so much content and event stuff to choose from. You can see IDG (and their peers, don't mean to pick only on them) wither away a bit more each year.
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About The Open Road

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to the Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

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