The opening of this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo drove home for me what we’ve all known for a while, that Linux is now a mainstream technology.

I haven’t seen anything on the show floor on Day One that made me say “gee whiz, how cool!” Instead I saw an increasing number of companies and technologies designed to help enterprises do their day-to-day business. This is a healthy sign of a technology emerging from the hobbyist/techie phase and moving into a general acceptance phase. I saw the same thing happening with InternetWorld 7 or 8 years ago, when it stopped being an eye-candy show. This is A Good Thing for Linux.

There are lots of announcements about partnering agreements coming out this week, and about participation by vendors in open standards and open source organizations. Hopefully this will lead to more tightly integrated products and the availability of some highly anticipated technologies. RealNetworks is touting their Helix initiative to bring the RealPlayer streaming media technology to Linux. I find the idea of a large successful company turning to the open source community to help them port their products to Linux both exciting and a model for other companies to follow.

The news started to trickle in mid-day that SCO is proposing a $699/cpu binary-only license for Linux. The general impression from the folks Ihave been talking to at the show is “What brand of crack are these people smoking and where can I get some?” At $100, SCO probably could have suckered some gullible or cautious corporations into paying the fee strictly to cover their butts. At nearly $700 a pop, there’s no way they’ll be collecting much in the way of fees.

One trend I’m seeing is a push to make Linux a friendly install and usage experience. Both Xandros and Lindows.com are touting their ease of use and installation as major selling points, and it’s going to raise the bar for companies like Red Hat and SuSE. There’s also a general acceptance of the fact that Windows-based software is going to be a necessary part of the Linux experience for a while, and that products like Wine and Win4Lin are key parts of a Microsoft to Linux transition strategy.

Had a talk with Michael Roberts, CEO of Lindows.com and our cover-boy, if you will, for the launch issue of LinuxWorld Magazine. In addition to the Microsoft patent infringement case, another fun one that starts up next month is Microsoft’s suit against Lindows.com for alleged infringement of the Windows trademark. Check out the SYS-CON radio site to hear the interview, in which he discusses the suit and what it’s like to battle a company with 600 internal lawyers.

Last night, Veritas was nice enough to invite some press to their Skybox at PacBell Park to watch the Pirates play the Giants. Good hotdogs, a fun game (even if Barry Bonds didn’t hit a dinger.)

Today we’ll be unveiling the first issue of LinuxWorld Magazine at a press conference. Ought to be a lot of fun. Also, more interviews for SYS-CON radio, although hopefully no more from IBM or Xandros. Nothing I have against those companies, but after talking to 4 Xandros representatives and 5 IBM reps, I’m running out of new and interesting questions for them. I joked with the last IBM interviewee yesterday that I was going to ask the next guy from Armonk who showed up at the booth to sing the IBM song.

• Live From the Show Floor at LinuxWorld
• Could a New Type of Legal Entity Help Underground Open Source Development?

• Listen to the Lindows Interview