TANSTAAFL, it was dinner...
The Sydney Linux User Group was on Friday night and Sarah, Amit, Rosemary and myself were there to answer questions on OpenXML and interoperability with microsoft products in general.
Some general observations:
The Linux community has matured from my university days. A lot of people I spoke to were java or mac guys and a lot worked for companies that made proprietary software running on the open source stack (small companies - I didn't get a chance to chat to anyone from IBM, Oracle or Google etc- maybe they were hiding from the blue monster). When I was at school java and mac were regarded as pseudo-free lesser evil platforms and proprietary code was selling out. It seems like the linux community has a much more sensible, pragmatic approach now ( or maybe sandstone-university-computer-lab-linux-politics was always a little disconnected to reality).
One guy was explaining his development environment - java, Ant, junit, hibernate, SVN. I told him that the average .NET developers toolkit was C#, NAnt, NUnit, NHibernate and SVN.
Somebody mentioned "Office Vista"... lucky we had no marketing people there. note to marketing, need bigger Office 2007 billboards
The questions asked were a little easier than the ones at Tech.Ed or a MSDN/.NET/SharePoint User Group. We were generally working at a philosophical/architectural level, whereas at Tech.Ed - chances are someone has a very specific, well researched problem.
Geeks are geeks, no matter what OS they use. I think this often gets lost in the religious divides and flamewars. All that geek-anger would be much more useful targeting lawyers and investment bankers.
There was some interest in PowerShell and all the cool interoperability stuff with Windows Server 2008 (hypervisor linux optimisation, PHP on IIS7 etc)
Many people hadn't heard of all the patent sharing, open specification promise and open source stuff Microsoft had been doing.
The crowd was pretty friendly and they took us out to a Chinese restaurant afterwards. In an interesting act of irony, the FLOSS community paid for our dinner.
Sridhar Dhanapalan, the organiser has posted his thoughts on his own blog.
