I never expected 35 (!) people bringing together after this very short-term announcement, I was really surprised! Obviously, most attendees did not even see the direct announcement but heard it somehow as a rumor from their friends: “Did you hear about that Open Source Meeting? I cannot go but you ought to… “. And this is how it actually shall work. Hey, Leipzig was over the Munich line of “Attendees of the first OSS meeting”!

Although the aim of this kind of meetings is to bring users together with the “makers” of open source, of course, mostly the enthusiasts took part this (first) time. Another aim is the comprehensive exchange of experiences over the different projects. Interestingly, there was no convention like this before. However, we happily welcomed Linux users, system administrators, guys attending the Open Street Map (OSM) project, a hand full of freelancers and developers of the zope project.

The talks were pretty interesting and full of requests: Carsten spoke about the Mozilla project, Kai about working with DTP applications on Linux, Florian about OpenOffice.org (told us some secrets ) and Volkmar about the OSM project. Of course, in conventions like that the requests go like: What is your business model?, Where do you get your salary from?, What does the project do with your committed data? Interesting enough, isn’t it? The atmosphere thankfully was very laid back.

We thank Jan from GET AG for attending and sponsoring the rides of the long-distance attendees, also MaFi for the canvas an Henrik (yasni.com) for the projector. Not to forget Karsten (SPIZZ) for the location, the Internet connection and the nearby bar.

As we agreed, the next Open Source Meeting Leipzig will take place in about quarter a year (Feb?). And yes, you are allowed to bring your proprietary friends then

See more pictures of the event here:
http://picasaweb.google.de/floeff/OpenSourceTreffenAm23November2009InLeipzig
http://picasaweb.google.com/carstenbook/OpensourcetreffenLeipzig231109?feat=directlink#