According to a report today on the march supporting the Digital Software Security Act, which would make state agencies in California use open-source software, there was a low turnout and little attention paid to the event from people in San Francisco.
The chief technology officer of Red Hat led the march and he expected 20-100 people to attend, but the number of attendees was on the low end of this estimate according to ZDNet. While numbers were low enthusiasm was apparently high but people barely acknowledged the march.
Michael Tiemann, who led the group, talked about the hypocrisy being practiced by the state to the gathered advocates of open source: "While they"re spending money suing the monopolist, they"re also feeding the monopolist with the other hand,". The crowd chanted "Balance the budget. Switch to Linux." a few times and marched along the main streets of San Francisco to the city hall.
Attendees complained that the 10:30 start was too early and that the march moved too fast, as some had to jog to keep the pace. The small turnout was quite surprising as the LinuxWorld conference was being held nearby. Open source advocate Bruce Perens claimed "It"s obvious only a tiny bit of people from (LinuxWorld) turned out, and that presents a problem,... Either they don"t understand the issues or they have a business partnership that doesn"t allow them to talk about it".