It's no secret that COMDEX, once the mother and father of all computer conferences, has lost some of its luster over the last few years.

Once a powerhouse garnering nearly a quarter of a million attendees, it's now down to a (still respectable) hundred thousand. Part of this can be attributed to the dot-com downturn, but the downturn also has its roots in the nature of COMDEX, which has traditionally been dominated by OEM vendors hawking off-shore CD-R drives and line printers for resale. What software presence there has been has tended to be Microsoft.

Realizing that it was time to reinvent COMDEX for the new millennium, the folks at MediaLive (who purchased COMDEX from bankrupt Key3Media this year) have refocused the show with much more of a software emphasis. Part of this has been to incorporate Open Source as one of the seven main themes of the show this year.

This reflects in several areas of the conference. Firstly, the Open Source & Linux session track has more than doubled in size, with close to 20 panels covering everything from Open Source 101 to Developing Applications in PHP. The caliber of the speakers is up too, featuring Open Source luminaries like Tim O'Reilly, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Ken Coar.

On the show floor, 2500 square feet are being devoted to an Open Source Innovations Center. This area will host clinics where attendees can learn 1-on-1 how to adopt Open Source in their business, hourly talks centered around the business case for Open Source, install parties where MySQL or Debian can be installed on laptops, and a village with more than a dozen Open Source organizations available to chat.

Since ApacheCon is being held the same week in the same place (Las Vegas), a membership exchange program has been agreed on. COMDEX members can get access to the ApacheCon expo floor and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions. ApacheCon members get access to the COMDEX show floor and the Open Source keynote speeches.

Truth in journalism disclaimer: I'm co-chair of the Open Source track at COMDEX this year. But it's still a cool thing that the "real world" is embracing Open Source more aggressively.