dinner

I ran into Sam Ruby as he was arriving to the hotel today.

Later that night we went to have dinner organized by Dare Osbanjo (you might know him for his Java and C# comparission document). He got a group of really interesting people together: Joshua Allen, Paul Johns (Dr Gui) and Omri. I invited Lee Fisher.

We had a great evening. The dinner discussion was really interesting (specially the licensing and open source discussion), because we had some really smart people on the table. The fascinating part of this discussion is that we were passionate about what we believed in on both sides of the table, but both sides exposed some very interesting points. For example, there is the matter of forcing people to release their IP, which bothers people.

And just like it bothers me to not have source code, and not being able to change it, I could feel that we connected in terms of the fact that *forcing* you to release the code could bother other people on the same level. I still love the GPL, but I *can* understand much better the feeling if you watch it from the other side.

Sam has some great thoughts on the subject as well: he goes into a bit of depth on the topic of communities and the various "protections" in them.

Later on we explored a bit more of the archeology of .NET. In general, I have found that I do enjoy a lot the *history* of software projects and .NET is one of my favorite projects.