Notes from CentraLUG, 2-Feb-2009: Open Source Business Models

[Ted Roche]

Fourteen people attended the February meeting of the Central New
Hampshire Linux User Group[1], a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire
Linux User Group[2]. We held our meeting at the usual place and time:
the first Monday of the month at the New Hampshire Technical Institute
Library[3], Room 146. Formal meeting starts at 7 PM. Gathering and
networking often starts a half-hour earlier.

A few of us met at Panera Bread in Concord before the meeting for dinner
and geek talk. We'll try to make this a regular thing, if people want to.

Before the main meeting, maddog showed off a video he had created,
inspired by some recent demonstrations of Open Source software he had
seen. Using nothing buy Open Source software, including Inkscape[4] and
Kino[5]. maddog emphasized that he's not an experienced cinematographer,
nor had he much experience with the other packages, but that making the
video was simple and straight-forward. And the results quite amusing.
Look forward to a future post with a link to the video!

We were fortunate to have a variety of attendees to discuss the topic of
"Open Source Business Models." After a brief introduction of what the
LUG was about and where to learn more, I opened the floor to the
attendees for discussions, and discuss they did!

We talked about the Brazilian music scene, Microsoft EULAs, the
difference between Free Software[7] and Open Source[6] software, some
great Open Source success stories, like the Project.Net[8] software.
There were questions on the fine points of licensing, comments on the
openness of the Java Development Kit and runtimes, and much good discussion.

At the end of the evening, two lucky attendees got to pick from the
assortment of books we'd been provided by generous publishers. Using the
formula of:

(14*rand()).to_int

in interactive ruby and counting off around the room (I started with
zero and we went clockwise around the room, a surprisingly difficult
process with cats). Mark and Bill each won a book, congratulations!

The next CentraLUG meeting will be the 2nd of March. Stay tuned for an
announcement of details.

Thanks all for attending and vigorously participating. Thanks to Bill
for bringing the projector, though we didn't need it.


[1] http://www.centralug.org
[2] http://www.gnhlug.org
[3] http://www.inkscape.org/
[4] http://www.inkscape.org/
[5] http://www.kinodv.org/
[6] http://opensource.org/
[7] http://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
[8] http://project.net/

-- 

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com