On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 11:35:16PM +1100, Peter Moulder wrote:
I doubt I can attend, and I'm not familiar with LinuxWorld (i.e. who attends and what they'd be interested in from Inkscape, or how Inkscape can benefit from people who attend).
I didn't go to it last year, but I've been to two or three of them. LinuxWorld is a lot more "booth" oriented than other conferences; this is because you can get in to see the booths for a LOT less than it costs to go to the talks.
The show floor is mostly set aside for companies, but there is also a "dot org pavillion" in the back for all the open source projects. Actually the dot org ghetto is much more interesting than the company booths.
At the San Francisco LWE, the audiences for the booths tended to be pretty heavily just technical users, with a slightly higher mix of biz folks than at other conferences, so my guess is that the same types of things that worked well at SCALE would work well at LWE.
One thing we might be able to offer the business
SVG for small devices (mobile phones, PDAs). We currently don't have particularly good support for SVG Tiny, but maybe some business at LinuxWorld might want to sponsor improvement in this area as the cheapest path to getting an editor for SVG Tiny.
Shared whiteboard collaboration.
From what I've heard from people I've talked to at other conferences,
this above item is probably going to be the most popular.
Creation of business documents that are more googlable (or accessible from whatever desktop search technology) than many alternatives.
Perhaps the important point here (from a money-making perspective) is that SVG might be googlable (not sure), whereas I believe flash is not googlable. (This belief based partly on flash's secretive nature, and partly on one flash-only web-site that I couldn't find matches for in google; though I'm not certain that the site was in google at all.) It doesn't matter whether SVG has reached Flash's market penetration yet or not: SVG can be just one alternative in a cascade.
Conceivably just as general illustration program or flowcharting / diagramming tool. But what's the benefit of inkscape over OOo Draw or Visio etc. ? SVG support is the main thing that stands out from http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/OpenDraw. (Plus the graph layout stuff, though I'd guess that Dia or Visio are still better than Inkscape for most graph drawing; though I think both can export to SVG.)
I'm definitely biased, but I've never really liked working in OpenDraw. It's got all the features, sure, but getting a nice looking drawing is a real chore compared with Inkscape.
I think the biggest advantage Inkscape has over OpenDraw is that we're much more active - drawing is the *only* thing we focus on, whereas with the OpenOffice developers, drawing is more of a secondary feature. But I've never actually talked with an OO Draw developer so who knows...
Bryce