Feedback from OSCON, Exhibit Day 1

What a day!

I just returned to my hotel after a long day at the OSCON exhibit hall. Bob Thomas and I spent most of the day at the EOSJ booth, shaking hands, handing out the inaugural issue of EOSJ, and talking to advertisers and writers regarding upcoming issues. We're on track to run out of magazines by the end of tomorrow. This is especially impressive considering that all attendees received a copy of EOSJ in their OSCON backpacks. It seems that a lot of people are picking up extra copies to take back to their colleagues and managers. This reinforces our belief that EOSJ has the opportunity to play an important role in the advocacy of open source in the enterprise. Not only that, but EOSJ includes content that is of interest to the general open source community. Over 50% of the OSCON attendees are developers.

The morning began with a fortuitous event. Andrew Morton, the lead Linux Kernel maintainer, held up a copy of EOSJ during his OSCON keynote and read excerpts from two of the articles. This was unexpected and highly encouraging. I won't put this in the same category as a product endorsement, but it was more than we could have ever hoped for at our first exhibiting conference.

In the afternoon, I had the opportunity to speak with Kim Polese, the CEO of SpikeSource, and personally deliver the magazine to her. Kim had heard of the magazine from Ray Lane, the Chairman of SpikeSource and a general partner with the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Encouraging feedback from the lead Linux developer and one of the founders of Java on the same day! Can you get any better than that?!

Today was a day of confirmation for EOSJ. It's one thing to believe in your work, it's entirely something else to get positive feedback from the full spectrum of the open source community, from individual users to visionaries.

Yes, this is preaching to the choir, but at least the choir is all singing the same tune. The open source community is standing behind EOSJ, and with this, our mission to reach out to the enterprise and advocate open source has been strengthened.