Re: [Hampshire] Meeting with John Denham

Cross posted to Surrey and Hampshire - please be carefull when replying!

Roger Munford wrote:
> Last Friday I went to a meeting about climate change with John Denham
> the Southampton MP and also Minister for "Innovation, Universities and
> Skills".
> I had the chance to talk to him for a couple of minutes after the
> meeting and brought up Open source Software. He is genuinely interested
> and would like an invitation to a LUG meeting.

> What do people think?

As long as no one does a "MS bad M'kay" it should be good :-)

I would suggest a bunch of short five minute talks.

Perhaps people involved in open source companies in the area could
explain how it has worked for them and what problems they have had - for
instance how companies have funded open source projects and if they
applied for grants, did they suceed and how did the grant help?

I would also ask companies who "add value" to open source such as
support companies and consultancies as well as small development
houses who use open source even if they eventual 'glue' may not
initially be open source itself.

An example: I write a *lot* of Postgres and perl code that hides behind
NDA's. however both Postgres and Perl are both OS apps.

As with many small businesses we provide first level support for
everything we use from Postgres to the Linux distro. When we find/fix
a problem we *always* feed the test/fix back to the community.

Jacqui