thebazaar.org opens the gates

Steve Blood, whom Nate and I have been talking to for quite some time now has officially opened the gate to thebazaar.org. New York City. Javits Hall. Many cool people (check out the list). March. Everyone must come. He also asked anyone who is interested in contributing, speaking, or just dropping a line to send some thing over here. This will be an interesting conference because it shows a different emphasis and new directions for Linux. update! Steve Blood has sent a response to the some of the comments below.

I apologize for the delay in responding to some of the concerns raised yesterday (we are busy trying to get ready to go to the Atlanta Showcase). Also, if you sent email, please be patient, it'll probably take us a couple days to catch up with the deluge.

The Bazaar was conceived as an event to promote free software and increase its visibility in the public eye. It is a nonprofit event and the proceeds will benefit a number of free software projects.

It was not planned in a vacuum. I've corresponded with a number of people including Greg Hankins (ALS organizer), Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman all of whom have been very helpful and have warned me of the cost and difficulty, and helped me narrow down the objectives of the conference, which we decided would be primarily to increase the visibility and credibility of free software in the business world.

The dates were chosen specifically to not conflict with LINC or LinuxExpo. Unfortunately, they ended up coinciding closely to LinuxWorld's dates. We don't have the reputation of IDG, nor the financial resources, which would allow us to announce a show and then say that we'll tell you more on November 1. We tried to change the dates after we found out, but the only other opening at the Javits Center is in September.

The fact that they are so close is a concern, but that depends mostly on how IDG handles it. The Bazaar doesn't need to make money, but it would be good if we didn't lose any. I don't consider LinuxWorld a competitor and I think having two big conferences on either side of the country will generate even more press than a single one.

Furthermore, we don't want this to be just a "Linux" show. It will be a free software show including as many free software projects as possible.

Two weeks ago I announced our plans to members of as many of the free software projects as I could find. I got a very positive response from many of them and corresponded personally with developers from KDE, NetBSD, Gnome, the FSF, Stampede, and Apache. All of them were excited about the idea and wanted to come if we could arrange a booth for them.

The cost is definitely a concern. It took us a while to decide what to charge people. We made our decisions based on a number of factors. First and foremost is our costs. The Bazaar will cost somewhere between $150K and $200K. We received a $75K grant from a private foundation to get started. Without the benefit of a market research department, we need to keep a worst case scenario in mind. With any luck, it'll be far more popular than we imagine and we'll be able to give a lot of money to the free software projects. If not, then we'll let Mecklermedia do the next free software show in NYC.

Some comparison with other conferences such as Apachecon ($1295 for less than 2.5 days), Comdex ($895 for two days), etc. will show you that our prices are not outrageous.

One last thing about price. We didn't solicit any corporations to be the general sponsor of this show (such as C2Net and IBM for Apachecon and Redhat, Caldera and Linux-HW for LinuxExpo). We don't really want people to automatically associate free software with one particular company. As a result, this extra cost will be born by the attendees instead.

The venue was chosen because we are located in the New York area and the Javits center is a big league exhibition space. In addition, New York is a world business center and, in our minds, the best place to get free software in the eye of the public and the business world.

One of our goals is to do the groundwork to put a conference on and then find a motivated group or individual in another city (or country) to take our work and apply it elsewhere. If the first Bazaar is successful, we'd like to take to the road, at which point we'll need a lot more help.

(And no the Javits Center has not listed us on their website yet, but does that really surprise any of you? If you want to call them and ask about us, please do. Their number is on their website.)

As for the web design. My primary business is web design. None of the 100+ hours of design time for thebazaar.org were billed to in Limine. Most of them were done after hours and on Sundays. We put a lot of effort into it, but there are still some rough edges. And I apologize for the frames, I didn't realize it would be such an issue -- we're currently making a non-framed, non-javascripted version for all the lynx users out there.

Please feel free to respond to these issues, and if you want to correspond with me send mail to [e-mail]