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Report from W2000 gathering



15:21

I am sitting outside a bank next to the Cinerama here in Tel-Aviv,
typing on my GoType keyboard on my palm pilot, and am waiting for some
more Linux enthusiasts to arrive. Next to me at the Cinerama, the
preparations of Microsoft for the launch is in full preparation. I
decided that this time, I will do my contribution to the community and
help in the Linux explanations that are being conducted in parallell
to the Windows happening here next to me. But so far, nothing has
started.

Friday morning.

After a short while after I wrote the above lines, the organizers of
the event arrived. I'm quite bad with names and as I only met these
people the first time, I cannot say who was there besides Ira and
Marc. But alltogether we were about 20 people. We got the Linux
explanation page that contained a short description of what Linux is
all about and CD Roms that contained Mandrake 7.0. We started
approaching people standing in line to enter the Cinerama. More and
more poeple kept arriving and it was more and more crowded on the
small sidewalk outside the Cinerama.

The reaction of people approached was on a scale between indifference
(give me that page so that you can stop bothering me) to real interest
what Linux and open software is all about. Several people expressed
that they were about to start developing for Linux. I had several
interesting discussions about the difference between closed source and
open source, and what difference it makes to an organization.

The Microsoft people were behaving very civil and some even asked some
questions: do you support Hebrew Word? Who payed you to come here?
They had this disbelief when I explained that I had no commercial
interest in the success of Linux.

The CD-Rom were snatched extremely fast. We handed out a thousand
CD-Roms and these were literally taken out of our hands. It was quite
enjoyable seeing the long line of people to the Microsoft happening
yelling at us when we passed by asking if the new batch of CD's had
arrived yet.

Microsoft had the people wait outside the building for a very long
time but eventualy they were let in. And that was the end of it as far
as the Linux crowd was concerned.

In summary, it was a very interesting and fun experience, and if only
10% of the people who begged us for and got their CD-Roms actually
install them, it was well worth it.

Dov Grobgeld

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