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27th April 2002, University of Exeter.
This was an Open Source Day organised mainly by the Devon and Cornwall and
University of Exeter Student LUGs.
Unfortunately, we have no pictures of this event.
The day began by everyone navigating through the table full of freebies;
there were contributions by Mandrake, Redhat and the FSF.
There were also network connections organised by the Exeter University Student
LUG.
The first talk was "An Introduction to Open Source Software" by Simon Waters
(Eighth Layer Ltd. and D&C LUG) followed by "A Brief History of Open
Source" by Tony Atkin (Dept. of Geog. College St. Mark & St. John). Both
of these talks were very interesting and also looked at the differences between
"free" software and "open source" software as well as at the roots of the
movement(s).
The next talk was by Theo Zourzouvills (Notnet Consultancy) on "The Open
ISP". This focused on the operations of Notnet and how Open Source is an
advantage to the business.
Then came a talk by Stuart Henshall (Westcountry Publications) on PostgreSQL.
This went completely beyond me, but those who did understand appeared interested
- it kept people talking all through lunch.
After lunch came a talk by Dr. Alasadair Allan (Astrophysics Group, Dept.
of Physics, University of Exeter) on "Perl: It's Not Just for System Administrators".
This discussed the advantages over using Perl over other languages (not everyone
agreed!) and it's many different uses, one main advantage being the ability to wrap other languages
(presentation available in HTML or OpenOffice/StarOffice
Presenter format.
Dr. Adrian Midgley then did a talk on "Open Source in Health - a Review of
Some Current Developments" which discussed how Open Source is gradually working
it's way into health-care and the NHS and what is currently standing in the
way.
The final talk of the day was on "The Two-Year-Old Open Source Office" (StarOffice)
by Simon Waters.
Most of the group then moved to a nearby bar where I imagine the topics discussed
continued for several hours (I unfortunately couldn't go myself).
Thanks to the University of Exeter for the venue.
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