[opensuse-marketing] Debriefing from RMLL 2010

14 Jul 2010

      Greetings!

We had a safe journey from Paris to Bordeaux some 592 Kms away 41°C
but we have an old French say in France “La pluie du matin n'arrête
pas le pélerin” meaning “the morning rain does not refrain the pilgrim
to start his/her journey” J

The hotel is quite recommendable, especially excellent breakfast as we
needed energy.

Got to the venue and to our great surprise, there was chaos and the
situation meant that there was not enough room for all of the
exhibitors. They kind of put openSUSE, Mandriva, ubuntu and Debian on
one table of 3M X 1M. Well, with the heat under the marquees already
33°C I figured out that it was going to be *hot* with “them” and us.

I kept negotiating with the organizers even helping in unloading their
lorry. It paid off and we got half a table. Later on, we got one table
just for us. Then we starting setting up and the network became a
major issue. We had 5 laptops and could not get enough IP addresses
while wi-fi was unreliable…. Anyway when we sort of get used to the
logistics challenges we got down to why we came down there for.

My Secretary-General despite living in Bordeaux was declared AWOL and
I am currently getting the paperwork ready to get him replaced ASAP. I
understand that our other members could not afford the trip or were
not free to come for other reasons…

Thanks to Jean-Luc, Julien, Vincent and Laurence, otherwise, it would
have been impossible to greet all the visitors. Visitors started to
arrive and the temperature as well. I realized that openSUSE seems to
be known to a *very* small number of people and faced questioning
(again) about Novell/Microsoft agreement from many people who knew
about openSUSE. Anyway, we had *very* nice memorable souvenirs as
follows:

1.       A representative from O’Reilly spent not less that 45 minutes
on NUI’s stand willing to know more J

2.       A representative from a LUG from Italy came round and we are
now invited to visit and evangelize over there J

3.       A guy from the Canaries wants to set up a LUG there, so I
shared what I could with him on Sunday evening, all left overs went
straight in his bag.

4.       A guy from Argentina knew about openSUSE and he gave the RC2
of openSUSE 11.3 a try and *demanded* a dvd of openSUSE 11.2

5.       Many Spanish people were there and I could “see” why they all
came to us. Laurence speaks Spanish and Geoffray from KDE for some
reason was sending the lot to us. He even picked some dvds from our
stand to distribute on the KDE stand. He deserves a medal !!!!

6.       Maryse and a few others from *Guadeloupe* are promoting FOSS
in April 2011 and came to ask us to come over to set up and help.

7.       Many Novell veterans came round and wanted more information.
I *had* to talk about EOS, SLES, so sorry J

8.       The President of the District Council came over and I
presented him openSUSE and gave him a couple of DVDs. He is interested
in FOSS.

9.       Antoine who actually works for the SNCF (French railway) came
all the way from Paris to visit, an old friend now J He visited us in
Rouen a couple of years ago.

10.   A guy arrived on a bicycle and wanted openSUSE installed,
yesterday, we gave him instructions and showed some pics and gave him
our emails/telephone number.

11.   I was interviewed for an Educational site, I need to find the
link? The idea was that they wanted kids to find out all the
animals/logos of FOSS, hence openSUSE.

12.   The organizers took loads of openSUSE DVDs and put them in bags
with magazines etc. and gave to visitors and *hold on*, even
distributed these bags on the market some hundreds of yards away.
Meaning, people buying cabbage, carrots etc, will have more
ingredients for afters, openSUSE just not to name it.

13.    Not to say that all the other exhibitors came round as well and
obviously managed to convince them to try openSUSE. I had one *NO* and
did not even attempt to recoup this lost sheep. This is becoming a
pain to have to endure these insults that are not generated by us.

14.   Other distributions are quite busy with education, I told them
about opensuse-edu

15.   I visited the other exhibitors as well by courtesy, and had a lot of fun!

I must have missed a lot of stories, but the heat was up!

Overall, nice RMLL, made plenty of new openSUSE adepts and friends,
enjoyed the two days and look forward f returning next year in
Strasburg this time.

Next step, Software Freedom Day in September, before that people are
into Summer vacations.

Best wishes,

Jimmy

PS I work in a bank and cannot do IRC, but I bought a iPhone 4
yesterday, so if some of you use IRC on iPhone, I’ll glad to share
experience for D-Day to-morrow.
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Jimmy PIERRE

Andreas Jaeger

Ricardo Chung

Jimmy Pierre

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