Geoff Bowers did a presentation about “Setting Fire To Your Community”

The presentation was really good and I left the user group meeting with a nice feeling to try and help the opensource communities I daily use.

He gave really good (and a bit funny and disturbing) analogies comparing opensource communities with japanese mummies. Geoff also got into explaining some details about different opensource licensing schemes, and made us aware of the great difference between gpl and lgpl.

Even though most of us might just click next, next, next when downloading most of the software we use… If you are going to use that code in your commercial projects, you should really know what you are getting into and learn about the implications you will have when you distribute your project.

We also learnt that the extjs framework is changing its licensing from lgpl to gpl. This means that if you include that library in your code, you will have to opensource your project.

It was a great meeting and I’m looking forward to the next one. Chris informed us that the meetings will be held on every last Monday of the month, so the next meeting will be on May 26.

Using an add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird called Lightning, you can view events properly in Mozilla Thunderbird.

There are currently 2 Mozilla projects that let you do this, Sunbird and Lightning. I prefer Lightning because it integrates nicely with the email client.

You can view more information on the Mozilla Calendar Project.
Have you ever received those Events sent by Microsoft Outlook, and see them as raw text, like this:
Raw text:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT

When you install the Lightning Add-On, you get a better view of the event.
You can also send events, and view your following events inside the thunderbird client.
This is how you see it once it’s installed: