Rock! Thats a fantastic review Errol. I try to make sure the meeting
is a community based salon (live action slashdot?) and its good
validation to hear that you enjoy it. Hope you can make the next
meeting and let me know if you would like anything specific demoed or
discussed. Maybe we can get Raymond to bring in his tiny gumstix linux
box. Also I wondered if I should start scheduling field trips to User
Group meetings and conferences that happen in town.


 Keep the feedback coming

Matt

On 6/14/07, Errol <[address removed]> wrote:
>
>  Matthew Jording wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who attended our June Linux meetup. The group always is
> diverse and everybody participates and this was no exception. Although I'll
> try my best to share the meeting notes with those who didn't or couldn't
> attend, the good contacts, demonstrations and giveaways cannot be shared
> unless you make the time to stop by.
>
>  We had a few new faces show up. Including Jeff Rose from the University of
> Lugano in Switzerland. Strangely enough we demo'd an application that Jeff
> had contributed some code to: Tomboy. Paul went home with a copy of K&R's
> classic C book, and I gave Jeff a GWIN tux mascot to represent us in Ticino.
>
>  As always a new Distro version was demo'd. This time Fedora 7. As usual
> Fedora looked nice had a very easy install and fairly complete for
> programming, office, and graphics tools. Even so Fedora still doesn't
> include wifi drivers, or full featured media clients. Everyone shared their
> favorite media clients. mplayer has been my favorite video player, though it
> is terminal centric and requires a memorization of the various command line
> flags, options etc. Otherwise VLC has recently become the consensus best of
> breed cross platform video player. For music there was far more diversity
> and Songbird was given a thumbs up by a couple of users. Songbird is an
> itunes clone for linux that is gaining alot of momentum.
>
>  Our discussion on open source licensing was dominated by the GPLv3 debate.
> The new license is a reaction against the commercial uses of GNU and other
> Free Software. Although it has been reworked and redrafted several times the
> arguments for GPLv3 are primarily driven by the current Microsoft strategy
> of selling licenses for Linux technology that Microsoft claims to have
> intellectual property claims to. Speculation as to Novells role in the
> unearned protection money scheme was tossed about. Today Linspire has agreed
> to pay Microsoft for the right to sell free software as reported by
> Slashdot:
>
>  GPLv3 is a hot topic with those who have taken a position for or against
> commercial uses o f Open Source and Free Software. The third draft of GPLv3
> seems to have conceded to Apache compatibility Linus Torvolds concerns
> around the legal definition of User and Consumer product and strengthen the
> position against the type of agreement Microsoft and Novell have wrangled
> which profits from Linux without contributing to the community.
>
>  Sun Microsystems has been discussing adapting GPLv3 to release their
> OpenSolaris operating system. This has been met with skepticism from the
> Linux community. Although Linus has gone so far as to say that if Sun did
> migrate to GPLv3 and opened ZFS he would go through the effort of
> relicensing the Kernel.
>
>  We discussed some of the new Desktop managers for sexy effects. Group
> members report that Beryl works smoothly even on low end graphics cards.
> Beryl also has a robust plug in system for role your own effects.
>
>  The linux Mono implementation of Silverlight was chewed on including a good
> overview of the new scripted Rich Client offerings by several vendors. Adobe
> Flex, Silverlight, Java FX and Mozilla XUL were all discussed with a
> highlight on the SVG rendering in Firefox. Jeff showed off a 3D graph viewer
> for visualization in SVG he had rolled. At our previous meeting Michael
> Bales showed a similar project for visualization of medical data.
>
>  Some regular discussion on entry level development tools and languages with
> Ruby and Python being strongly represented. Raymond mentioned that Google
> hosts regular Ruby meetings and sent me these links.
>  https://xpnyc.org/...­ and
>  https://nycruby.or...­
>
>  The meeting lasted till late and we covered way more then I was able to
> type up.
>
>  Hope to see you all in July for our OS Independence day.
>
>
>
>
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>  Meetup.com Customer Service: [address removed]
>  632 Broadway New York NY 10012 USA Hi Matthew,
>  I just want to thank you for having me at the meeting. I must admit that I
> was a little apprehensive about attending since I am a bit of a newbie, but
> I felt very comfortable once the meeting started. The meeting was not just
> all tech talk but included topics such as VLC media, MPlayer, and beryl,
> which even us newbies can relate to. I found the meeting to be casual and
> informative. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Linux regardless
> of their experience with it.
>
>  Thank you,
>  Errol
>
>
>
>
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>  Please Note: If you hit "REPLY", your message will be sent to everyone on
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>
>  Meetup.com Customer Service: [address removed]
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