Had some fun at the Linux Expo, though I missed lilo, who I'd intended on catching up with. I read his diary entry. All I gotta say is, "Dude, and you thought *I* was being harsh sometimes." Not that I'm complaining. :) I noticed that, while most of the Linuxcare people I talked to were friendly, at least one marketing person avoided looking at me. But then, some of my slashdot comments hit pretty hard, didn't they?
Lilo's comments on large Linux companies I think reflect the fact that Linuxcare was a services company. I think large companies centered around Linux can work as long as the revenue model isn't reliant strictly upon open source.
Which brings me to TiVo. Shipping a box that is an embedded Linux system with some custom utilities is cool. I talked to a lot of people who didn't know that a TiVo was an embedded Linux box. It's not like we don't have our kernel patches up.
Even more amusing is the comments from Linuxcare folk about the TiVo. Not surprisingly, Andrew Tridgell has ported rsync to his.
I love it there. The only other company I've enjoyed working for as much (at least in recent memory) is Be. At TiVo, they'd rather have you in a different group than lose you, and people can and do move between groups. At my final days at Linuxcare, I offered to move groups and was refused. Another person also made the same request almost two months earlier and was refused. Linuxcare bled people and money, neither of which it could afford.
TiVo's being out of the mainstream of Linux though (at least culturally) has posed some problems for finding people. We are always looking; if you want to work there, email me. We're not looking for remote employees though. And please don't ask if I can get you a TiVo. I got quite enough of that at the show. We don't make money off the boxes, we make it off the service.
It's funny, but when I handed out TiVo business cards (which have, unlike Linuxcare, Your Choice Of Job Title on them), even people working for "cool" Linux companies all wanted them. I got a few resumes; I was being low-key, but I really did have my boss' explicit permission to go on a geek finding mission. And I suspect that TiVo's involvement in Linux events will be more official in the future.
_Deirdre