• Hey folks, this Friday is Geek Lunch time!  The theme this month is ‘Indian food’ so come enjoy your ‘Chicken Tikka Masala, or Lamb Saag, Naan and a Mango Lassi

    Here’s the Details

    Meet at the nearest location to you at 12:30pm this Friday, January 29, 2010.  If you have never been, look for the group with this logo at their table.  Geek Lunch is organized by the Utah Open Source Foundation, but you must pay for your meal.  We look forward to seeing all of you there.

    Date: Friday, January 29, 2010
    Time: 12:30pm

    Salt Lake County

    India House
    8660 South State Street
    Sandy, UT 84070
    (801) 569-0550 (map)

    Weber / Davis Counties

    Taste of India
    1664 N Woodland Park Dr
    Layton, UT 84041
    (801) 614-0107 (map)

    Utah County

    India Palace
    98 West Center Street
    Provo, UT‎ 84601
    (801) 373-7200‎ (map)

    Posted on January 26, 2010 to:

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  • This weekend, I spent some time getting the UTOSC 2009 audio content ready to be released and realized that because we are now using wordpress-mu for our blogging structure, it would be a good time to make our new media site.  Our old site, podcast.utos.org while nice, doesn’t provide the flexibility that wordpress can.

    I’ve added the new Utah Open Source Media blog at http://media.utos.org and will be slowly porting over the audio and video from our blog and podcast site to this site..

    The benefits for doing this are going to be very nice when we get the design for utos.org (work is ongoing) complete.  The main benefit will be that we can directly pull in posts from media.utos.org to utos.org and display the latest audio and video from a UTOS sponsored event. There are other benefits too, like podPress, which makes it easy to publish audio or video from a remote site in one place, has an easy rss feed and provides iTunes support (should we ever decide to use that feature).

    I hope you all enjoy it and the developments that will make the UTOS sites a better experience for everyone.

    Cheers,

    Clint

    Posted on January 18, 2010 to:

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  • Video of Richard Esplin’s presentation on “Technology Cooperatives” is now available on YouTube at the following URL: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNjSbvBgV70>.

    Richard Esplin at UTOSC 2009

    Richard Esplin at UTOSC 2009

    Traditional technology businesses do not achieve optimal alignment between the interests of the developer, the business investor, the consumer, and the global community. Open source businesses attempt to improve on this situation, but unfortunately, most business models do not foster open source solutions. Technical expertise is expensive and awareness of the benefits of collaborative solutions is often lacking. Companies with significant technical know-how have many incentives to guard that know-how behind proprietary licenses. Companies who should be focused on their core competencies often have to build significant technical know-how to employ open source solutions.

    There is a way that non-technical businesses can take advantage of the services of technical professionals without needing to worry about maximizing capital returns. This problem is similar to how a community can pool resources in a common investment fund and take advantage of banking experience (think credit unions), how a bunch of mountain climbers can take advantage of bulk procurement expertise to lower costs (think REI), and how a collection of rural municipalities can provide shared electricity and communications infrastructure (think rural utility providers). For the last two hundred years cooperative businesses have been refining a collection of operating models which encourage collaboration and sharing of resources. These principles apply to information technology solutions. In this presentation, I’ll share my research into cooperative business models, and my experience trying to catalyze a technology cooperative for educational institutions.

    Since being indoctrinated in the philosophy of free software as a CS undergraduate, Richard has been a vocal free software evangelist. After trying a variety of open source business models, Richard thinks he has found an innovative solution to many of the common problems involved with making money building open solutions. By spreading the meme, he hopes to find the right partners for this endeavor.

    Richard’s website is at <http://richard.esplins.org/>.

  • The Utah Open Source Foundation, in its goal to promote Open Source throughout Utah and beyond, is proud to promote the following events. These events are generally related to Open Source and Technology in Utah.  If your event is not listed below, please contact clint@utos.org to get it added.

    Utah Technology Community Announcements

    * Southern California Linux Expo is coming soon – Learn more at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale8x/
    * PyCon is coming soon – Learn more at http://us.pycon.org/2010/about/
    * PodcampSLC Registration is now open – Read more at http://podcampslc.org/

    If you have announcements or events for February 2010 or beyond happening which you would like included, please contact clint@utos.org.

    Upcoming Activities for January 2010

    Saturday, January 9, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
    Ubuntu Utah LoCo Meeting
    Link: http://utah.ubuntu-us.org
    Where: MEB building at the University of Utah Room: 2555
    Contact: Christer Edwards, christer dot edwards aT ubuntu.com

    Wed, January 13, 11:30pm – 1:00pm
    SLLUG: Daytime SIG Meeting
    Link: http://sllug.org
    Where: BetaLoft SLC – 357 West 200 S, Suite 201, Salt Lake City
    Contact: Clint Savage, herlo1@gmail.com

    Wed, January 13, 7:30pm – 9:00pm
    Provo Linux Users Group
    Link: http://plug.org
    Where: Omniture
    Contact: Ryan Simpkins, simpkins.ryan @gmail.com

    Thu, January 14, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
    Utah Python User Group Meeting
    Link: http://utahpython.org
    Where: Bill Good Marketing, 12393 Gateway Park Pl #600 Draper, Utah
    Contact: Dave, tonedevf AT gmail.com

    Tue, January 19, 6pm – 8:40pm
    Utah Mobile Developers Group
    Link: http://www.utahmobiledev.org
    Where: 8th Avenue & C Street Salt Lake City, UT 84103 (Jon and Karen Huntsman Education Center, LDS Hospital)
    Contact: Glen Lewis glen aT glenlewis.com

    Wed, January 20, 7:10pm – 8:40pm
    Salt Lake Linux User Group (SLLUG)
    Link: http://sllug.org
    Where: University of Utah, Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 101 (or 103) (Previously known as EMCB)
    Contact: Marc Christensen marc aT mecworks.com

    Thu, January 21, 6pm – 9pm
    Utah Java User’s Group (ujug.org)
    Link: http://ujug.org
    Where: Intermountain Medical Center, Doty Family Education Center, Murray, Utah
    Contact: Chris Maki, chrismaki AT me.com

    Thu, January 21, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
    Utah PHP User Group (UPHPU)
    Link: http://uphpu.org
    Where: Bill Good Marketing, Draper, Utah
    Contact: Victor Villa, vvilla @ gmail.com

    Tue, January 26, 6:30pm – 8:00pm
    SLC Ruby (slc.rb)
    Link: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/urug
    Where: Neumont University Room #300
    Contact: Jake Mallory, tinomen @gmail.com

    Friday, January 29, 8:00am -  10:00am
    CTO Breakfast
    Link: http://www.windley.com/cto_forum
    Contact: Phil Windley, phil AT WINDLEY dot org

    Friday, January 29, 12:30pm – 2:00pm
    UTOS Geek Lunch
    Link: http://blog.utos.org/geek-lunch/
    Contact: Victor Villa vvilla at GMAIL

    ——————————————————————————————————-
    Each of the events are from the Utah Tech Events calendar.  Feel free to subscribe by clicking the link below (or adding the following feed to your calendaring program)
    ——————————————————————————————————-

    Utah Tech Events Calendar – Google Calendar: http://sn.im/ute-calendar
    Utah Tech Events Calendar – iCal Feed: http://sn.im/ute-calendar-ics

  • The Utah Open Source Foundation is proud to announce a new mailing list, announce@utos.org.

    The idea behind this mailing list is to simplify the announcements that UTOS provides to the community.  While we do a fair bit on our blog, we’d like to keep the mailngs going, but it has become complex to send mail to each Local User Group (LUG) every time we need to advertise an event or announce something.  In addition, sending mail to more and more LUGs will make it difficult as we grow the free and open source community in Utah and the Mountain West.

    Therefore, we are going to be moving all of our announcements and news to the official Utah Open Source “announce” mailing list.

    It is easy to sign up for this list, just visit our mailing list page and add yourself.  Here’s the link:

    http://mail.utos.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

    There will be a few announcements for this list sent to the individual LUG mailing lists.  I also suspect that every so often there will be reminders for those who are new to the community.  Beyond that, we plan to try to send email just to the UTOS announce list.

    Please feel free to invite your fellow nerds and those you think might benefit from activities that we promote.

    That is all.

    Clint

    Posted on January 7, 2010 to:

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  • Stormy Peters, executive director at the GNOME Foundation and one of the wonder-women of the open source world, delivered a powerful keynote presentation at the 2009 Utah Open Source Conference.

    Video of the complete presentation is available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzyaM7VWqOg

    Stormy Peters at UTOSC 2009

    Stormy Peters at UTOSC 2009

    One of the things about the free software community that continues to baffle those non-open source people is, “why do you do it?” Free software developers work on open source software for a number of reasons from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to contributing to a good cause. The interesting problem comes when money enters into the equation. Research shows that when someone works on something for free (for internal rewards) if you start paying them you replace those internal rewards. Then if you stop paying them, they will stop working on it. Does that hold true for open source software? Are commercial companies killing open source by paying people to work on it?

    Stormy Peters currently works as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Stormy joined the GNOME Foundation from OpenLogic where she set up their OpenLogic Expert Community and helped Global 2000 companies develop open source software policies. Previously, Stormy worked at Hewlett-Packard (HP) where she founded and managed the Open Source Program Office that is responsible for HP’s open source strategy, policy and business practices. Stormy joined HP as a software engineer in the Unix Development Lab after graduating from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science. Stormy is an advisor for HFOSS, OpenSource World, IntraHealth Open and Open Source America, as well as founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in developing countries. Stormy is a frequent keynote speaker on business aspects of Open Source Software at major conferences such as the Open Source Business Conference and the O’Reilly conferences, as well as government organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. Stormy is involved in GNOME and free source software because it is changing the world and the community is full of smart, passionate people!

    Posted on January 1, 2010 to:

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