Tonight SLUG hosted the talk from Martin Gregory - MS Australia's Platform Strategy Manager. He wasn't comfortable with recording the proceedings, so unfortunately there is no video footage available.
There was some interesting discussion, but I don't think I really learnt anything new. I hope other people got some more insight from it, or (even better) if Martin got more insight into what our attendees don't like about MS. A pity that he wasn't able to provide official comment on the issues that I really wanted to hear about, like MS, Mono and patents assertion. In the end, I think I've walked away feeling like MS and Open Source people really don't connect on a fundamental level that makes genuine attempts at communication go awry. Martin's presentation included of a bunch of information from the 'get the facts' campaign, which a few people in the audience hadn't seen. I (and others) tried to convey that for us, those numbers are irrelevant - we don't pick Linux for the financial reasons, it's about the Freedom. I was really hoping for a more meaningful conversation than an MS sales pitch, and I think we got some of that by way of questions from the floor, which was good. Wandered over Shared Source, monopolies, standards of behaviour for market dominating companies, commercialisation of Open Source, interoperability and other stuff in the course of the dialogue. If people have other questions about the event, let me know. I'm off to bed. *yawn* J. -- Jan Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] If Darl McBride had his way, he would have banned marriage too, because it obviously is against the remunerative interests of prostitutes - Bruce Perens -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
