LugRadio is now finished for another year. I met lots of really interesting new people at LugRadio Live and caught up with some old friends.
I had quite a long chat with Aaron Seigo from the KDE project about Software as a Service (he's not a fan). I realised that we're interested in solving the same problems, but have very different views on how to solve them. I commented that I'd love to see him have a discussion with Chris DiBona from Google about it (he was also at the event). I then wandered into the cafe and spotted Chris sitting in the corner on his laptop so I stopped to say hello. I mentioned my conversation with Aaron, and Chris said to invite him in for a chat. I went and fetched Aaron, bought them both a drink and then tried to keep quiet while they discussed the issue amongst themselves.
It was really quite interesting to see two people, both from the open source community but with differing views have a productive conversation. I actually thought this little encounter was a microcosm for the whole weekend. A diverse community of people with common goals but differing views all together in one building, having informal, intelligent debates about the issues they consider to be important in the software community.
There were representatives from lots of companies like Canonical, Google, Neuros and the BBC and particularly brave attendees from Novell and Microsoft. There were also people from community projects, notably the youthful Bongo Project and MythTV.
On Sunday I had lunch with Elliot from OpenAdvantage (and his friend whose name I've forgotten but would like to keep in touch with) and we must have been having interesting conversations because an hour seemed to vanish in a blink
Also, I think I found a hosting company for Krellian, the Linux friendly Bytemark Hosting.
So well done to the LugRadio team and the event crew who pulled off another great event.
Oh, and hi to all the Wolves LUG people who I had a few drinks with on Saturday night, they were a very friendly bunch!