Ramanraj K wrote:
My two cents. If someone from MS is going to talk about an MS only product or MS only tools that are not OSS (and have no direct relevance to the lug), however technical it might be, I think the answer should be NO. Same goes for a Mac. IMHO, that is completely off-topic for a LUG. LUGs are not only-tech-groups. There are certain philosophies and common sense rules that we do follow.
We have had quite loud discussions in this matter at ILUG-Delhi. The general consensus is that private sponsorship is acceptable, there will be no opportunity for any vendor to talk about proprietary products.
Talking about .Net is a bit into the gray area though, because it has some relevance to the Mono community. However, a condition can be put, that the only implementations that can be demonstrated, would be using FOSS toolkits, and not using Visual Studio IDE or the MS command line .Net compiler. I personally believe this is a reasonable condition, which wont let other people complain that we are "prejudiced to the company".
- Sandip