Aral Balkan

We have a very interesting joint London MMUG and UK CFUG meeting planned for this Thursday (February 19th). The champion of Open Source Software and publishing legend Tim O'Reilly is going to be coming down to talk to us about The Open Source Paradigm Shift.

Here's a brief introduction to the session he will be presenting:

"The computer industry has gone through a sea change in the past few years. The killer applications of the web era turned out not to be PC-based software packages like the web browser, but web hosted applications like google, mapquest and amazon.com. These applications are built on top of Linux and Apache, yet they are themselves fiercely proprietary.

But what would most developers do with their source code? These massive systems are valuable for their data as much as for their programs. And by opening up XML web services APIs to that data, the most innovative of these sites are creating new opportunities for hackers to "scratch their own itch." One of the greatest challenges for open source in the next few years is to understand and adapt to the paradigm shift implicit in network computing, and to shed the legacy thinking of the desktop era."

After the talk, he will answer questions as well as talk about Macromedia Rich Internet Applications, wireless and cell phones.

If you're in London and would like to attend, please sign up online to reserve your place as we are quickly approaching our capacity for the meeting.