Re: It's not over, but it's over commercially
As a consultant who sells and supports OS/2 (among other OSes), I can say that there is just as much revenue to be made supporting OS/2 as any other OS, as long as your practice consists of more than "break and fix." I'm a NetWare consultant. If I had to make a living fixing broken NetWare installations, vs upgrading and expanding NetWare shops, I'd be hungry. Only M$-only guys can make a living literally running around like chickens without heads plugging leaks and applying security patches...
No, we did not have a huge vendor turnout at Warpstock Hershey, but we had more than last year, and perhaps more than we had in San Francisco in 2003; I take that as a good sign. We had a bigger crowd this year than last (and perhaps 2003, as well; I haven't looked at an exact tally as yet).
I was in Atlanta in 1999, and that was significantly larger than Austin, SF, or Denver; that doesn't mean that 2002, 2003, or 2004 weren't also excellent events. I don't judge Warpstock by the vendor participation (alone). We had 12 half day classes and 23 presentations (IIRC), and over the entire 4-day period, I did not hear one peep about there being sparse content or that people did not get a good value for the dollar.
2006 will be better than 2005, of this I am convinced. I really believe we turned a corner this year, and as M$ continues to give lip service to becoming "security conscious," eCS gains more and more opportunities to compete. As Linux gains ground against Win32, so also, do we, as odd as that may sound. Many enterprises are migrating from the Windows desktop to the KDE or Gnome environment, mainly to gain security and stability. However, often they face the harsh reality that neither of those are particularly adaptable or truly object oriented, as is the WPS.
I am not trying to make a case for the desktop wars. I'm only stating that as long as eCS (OS/2, under it all) offers a compelling alternative, and as long as such an alternative is needed by the global user community, Warpstock will continue to offer itself as an annual resource. Only when there is no need for such alternatives (and I, frankly, cannot see that time coming in the next decade) will there be debate as to the viability of Warpstock and similar events. (BTW, there have been three OS/2 events so far this year, and yet another one coming...remember when there were none?)
