The Great Linux Revolt of '98

as it later came to be known

(Here are the press clippings.)

This comes from John Beale. John had these pages up at best.com, but the massive traffic overwhelmed the limits they set for user traffic; they ended up first at Rodger Donaldson's site in New Zealand (http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~rodgerd/svlug/), then Roman Mitz's (http://olympus.cfa.cmu.edu/~rmitz/linux-revolt), The Doctor's What's ( http://linux.gerf.org/linux-revolt/), Eric Clark's ( http://head.hoser.com/linux-revolt/), Craig McLaughlin's ( http://www.bitbucket.com/linux-revolt/index.html), Penguin Computing's http://www. penguincomputing.com/svlug-rally.html, and here.

(See also Chris di Bona's article.)

Everything on these pages is John's work, please direct queries to him.

Rick Moen (guy in the middle of photo #2 looking away ;-)

(RM remarks: I hadn't heard about the other mirrors when I copied Rodger's.

(Note: All pictures from Kodak DC120 digital camera, reduced to 640x480 for Web. I'm writing this at 4:00 am local time, for some reason, so I may have gotten some stuff wrong.)

I got to the Sunnyvale Fry's about 10 'til midnight. There were a good eighty people there probably "in the movement" (as opposed to customers buying obsolete software :-); I didn't try to estimate accurately. Here are some example t-shirts....

The red sign says "Free the Intel 32-bit USE the SOURCE, LUKE! LINUX". I brought some signs with color versions of Tux that I printed out on my inkjet printer and some inspirational text like, "Linux... did we mention that it's FREE?" Another reads "Linux, Because there *is* a better way."

Lest anyone claim we were being anti-commercial, we did mention that Fry's sells Linux. In fact I bought ApplixWare from the Palo Alto Fry's just two weeks ago. It's functional, although some things felt clunky user-interface-wise. Fry's turned out their front lights at about midnight. Surely it didn't have anything to do with us... (?)

More of the crowd in front of Fry's. The CDs had arrived about this time, and we were handing them out.

Around 12:10, the police, which Fry's somewhat bemused management had called, asked us to leave the parking lot (owned by Fry's). We relocated to two of the entrances to the parking lot. Yes, the sign on the right did have something to do with software. I think.

More signs at the edge of the parking lot: "Free Source Now", "DON'T pay the MS 98 TAX".


Around 12:20, it was decided there wasn't enough action at Fry's, and we moved on to another retailer down the street. Click here to continue....