created on Thu, 2005-05-12 22:39

I gave a talk tonight to the Vancouver Software Developers Network. Thanks to Djun Kim for inviting me and Guy Lancaster for organizing the gathering, and of course, thanks to the VanDEV crew for attending.

I talked about a lot of web sources for more information as well as some current events. The links and a PDF copy of my presentation are in the full entry, plus what turned into a kind of rant about Meetup.com.

Background Definitions

• Open Source Software definition from Wikipedia
• Definition of the term "open source" from Wikipedia
• The GNU GPL at Wikipedia
• The Open Source Initiative (OSI) website, which maintains a list of open source compatible licenses and maintains/promotes the definition of what it means to be open source

JasperSoft Acquires Jasper Reports

JasperSoft is the commercial entity that acquired the Jasper Reports open source project.

• Audio interview with JasperSoft's Paul Doscher at ZDNet
• Message from JasperReports main developer and founder
• JasperSoft definition of what being commercial open source means

IBM buys Gluecode

• Tim Bray points to the fact that IBM revenue consists of $46B in consulting out of a total of $96B; there's money in consulting/services!
• IBM's announcement of their purchase of Gluecode, including a diagram of how it fits into their line up next to their proprietary WebSphere product

Other open source models

• SpikeSource, which does certification/bundling/support of popular open source components; Roland talked about them a while back and explained how they differ from Bryght
• Plain Black, makers of the WebGUI CMS, offer subscription-based access to documentation
• Microsoft-focused discussion on ROI vs. open source (there are lots of these on both sides, this one just happened to be recent; don't forget to read the comments, which are interesting/excellent)
• I forgot to mention Laszlo in my presentation. They were proprietary and then made their main codebase, a toolkit and server for building rich internet applications, open source. This was partly in response to Macromedia coming out with a similar product, but they also changed their business model to build/license re-usable rich internet components and applications that developers could assemble for advanced functionality.

Aside from my presentation, there was also a brief discussion on the Meetup.com issue of them charging money now. There were perhaps 25 people who attended the meeting, including lots of businesses and even a person from a recruiting company. So money is not an issue. In fact, the eBusiness Apps guys already proposed to sponsor the cost of the Meetup.com charges.

People were pretty much unanimous in not wanting to use YahooGroups -- cookies, ads, and an annoying interface were cited. I mentioned an issue with overlapping with other group meetings. It seems like there are half a dozen or more software/development/technology meetings or user groups in Vancouver, none of which bother to try and not overlap (I'm so sad I missed the Moodle and remote XUL presentations at the Vancouver PHP Users group tonight).

And Meetup.com, which has all these different groups, doesn't even seem to have a way to show all these events for the Vancouver area (or, god forbid, try and schedule events so they don't all overlap). Yes, there is this groups near Vancouver listing, but it doesn't show me a big calendar with all possible events in it. Am I missing something?! Where's the calendar?!

But I had a bit of an ah-ha! moment. It's always an option to go off and get a website and run/form a community around it (and yes, Bryght/Drupal is excellent for this), but this is certainly no cheaper than using Meetup.com. So what is the point of using Meetup.com? I mean, you can't easily sell sponsorships or banner advertising for your group. There is no branding, no personalization to be done to show that this is a true community.

So all those groups have to ask themselves, is Meetup.com the best way to build and promote community? No, of course not.

I guess Meetup.com is where you run your group before you've decided what it wants to be when it grows up.