Monday night Michael and I headed to the Montco chapter‘s new meeting location in at Unisys Blue Bell. Linking the Montgomery County LUG with PLUG has been fantastic for the group, I’m very happy to have both the access to people who offer meeting locations and the publicity that posting meeting announcements to the PLUG list.
We arrived around 6:30, our host quickly showed up with the pizzas and sodas Unisys provided (nice!). People came in throughout the first hour and ended up totaling 13 – a record for Montco! And surprising because LUGs are usually slow in the summer. A couple people new to the LUG showed up and we had some good discussions. Our host, Rob Wilkinson, spent a few minutes explaining the role of Unisys in Free/Open Source Software, which was really interesting, aside from their heavy Xen development, they’re now shipping servers bundled with Linux (Suse and Redhat) and other F/OSS, including support for things like Postgres on the enterprise level. He then alluded to a few state governments that are putting millions in the F/OSS solutions they’re selling, but wouldn’t elaborate because press releases haven’t gone out yet. Call me sold, but I’m impressed with the steps Unisys has been taking in the F/OSS arena these past couple years.
Michael did his updated talk on Cross-Platform Digital Audio Streaming from 8-9 and I think it went quite well, it was his second time giving it but the format of Montco meetings really lends itself to a more discussion type talk than the last time he gave it. We headed home around 9:30.
A success I’d say! I’ll be adding a permanent directions page to the PLUG website when I have some time, it was a great location and the security considerations weren’t as bad as I was worried they would be – members need to be escorted in by an employee from the guard station but it’s not all that far from the conference room. Thanks again to them for hosting!