Informal Get-Togethers

These are "known locations at a known time" where people can meet. An example is to meet at a particular restaurant for breakfast or lunch to discuss whatever the people who show up want. Another would be meeting to discuss a particular topic.

Open Discussion Lunch

Wednesday, July 20, 2005, 12 noon - 1:30 pm

(Happened)

We had an informal lunch get together on July 20, 2005. The consensus is that it went well. The attendees were: Dan Bricklin, Ralph Katz (consultant), Peter Moldave (lawyer, Gesmer Updegrove), Scott Peterson (corporate counsel, Hewlett-Packard), and David Rickerby (lawyer, Choate Hall & Stewart).

We discussed lots of legal and business model stuff about the GPL. What came out of it (as suggested by Scott Peterson) was a desire to help developers add the "Here's how I define the unclear areas of the GPL with regards to MY product" side-language to their product's licensing information. This could be noting the areas where there may be questions (e.g., how are the plug-ins to THIS product treated with regards to the GPL reciprocal licensing) and sample wordings for different answers to the questions. This isn't trying to "weasel out" of the GPL. Scott: "We want to do what you want us to do. Just tell me what it is!" The problem is that it is often too unclear and that is holding back adoption of Open Source software. David Rickerby volunteered to start as the point person on moving ahead with this (drickerby at choate dot com).

The meeting was at the Sabra Restaurant, 45 Union Street, Newton Center. (On the corner of Union Street and Langley Road, very near the Riverside Green-line "T" stop, and around the corner from the parking lot at Beacon Street and Centre Streets in Newton.) They have an "all you can eat" lunch buffet of middle eastern food, including many vegetarian dishes. At these meetings we plan to each buy our own lunch (unless someone decides their company is going to be generous enough to pick up the tab, which does happen some times).

Next Meeting: August sometime TBA