Last Saturday, Dru Lavigne and Josh Smith attended the FOSSCON Conference hosted in Philadelphia and staffed a FreeBSD booth stocked with swag. Dru Lavigne also gave a talk on FreeNAS 9.1 which covered the new Volume Manager, the new plugin system, and an overview of the features. Afterwards, Josh was kind enough to take the time and give us a brief review of the conference in his own words.
We were very well-received, and our booth always had 2-3 people hovering around it when talks were not in session. I did not get an exact number, but if I had to guesstimate how many people came by our booth, I’d say it was easily over a hundred. I believe we had about three or four people donate to the FreeBSD Foundation. One gentlemen took the BSD certification exam and another purchased the course materials.
We had a lot of interest in boot environments and the ZFS file system itself. It seemed like 90% of the people were talking about this feature. I was asked several times why Linux hasn’t come out with a stable answer to ZFS yet. Many users of FreeNAS came over and expressed how much they liked the product. We also had several Linux admins that seemed interested in trying TrueOS for its bash shell functionality in tandem with PC-BSD. We did not have a ton of brand recognition for PC-BSD, but I set up a live demo and several people watched the demonstration at the booth.
AppCafe was a big hit, and we had many comments about how much easier it looks compared to FreeBSD. Several admins told us: “Yeah, I tried FreeBSD years ago and it was very difficult to set up,” so it was pretty easy to sell them on TrueOS and PC-BSD. Overall, attendance was very good. The conference was well-organized– the coordinators did a great job keeping things flowing. We gave away a lot of marketing materials and the horns were a big hit, as always. We almost ran out of PC-BSD disks but barely had enough. The booths were busy all day long especially when talks were not in session.
We’d like to thank the staff at FOSSCON for another successful show, and to Josh for taking the time to share his experience. The team already looks forward to next year’s event!
Annie Zhang & Lisa Liang
Marketing Assistants
