[Baypiggies] Thoughts on the commercial talks at BayPiggies meetings?

[Karen Dalton]

Short answer: I think the leadership should have latitude about what 
would be useful and informative to the developers.

TL;DR:
I am not opposed to talk on software that has a cost associated with it 
if that increases my technical knowledge. For example if a fake company 
had a new product SuperDevelopmentX that had a python component that 
made my (software development) life easier I would want to know about 
it, and learn more about it. Or if a high proportion of developers 
started to use the python SuperDevelopmentX module/API/service/whatever 
I would appreciate the chance to see what it could do so I could talk to 
the people above me why we actually should or actually shouldn't look 
into incorporating it. In my experience not all free software is good, 
and not all good software is free (though I hope it all can be).

I am happy to learn about open source projects and tools and I operate 
professionally in that space currently. But in the real world sometimes 
we, as developers, do have to use non-open source software or systems or 
services through corporate obligations or technical necessity.

If the Baypiggies group decided to only hear about only open source 
topics I would understand. But in the time I have left in the day to 
learn about additional things in the current python-o-sphere, I would 
also like to learn about all kinds of relevant topics that will help me 
excel in my current work, and make me marketable should I choose to go 
elsewhere. Which, I think, means embracing the reality of learning about 
non-open source things some of the time.

-Karen

On 3/17/16 11:36 AM, Jeff Fischer wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>  As you may know, I have been helping Glen with hosting the BayPiggies 
> talks this year. In planning the speakers for the rest of the year, we 
> ran into some questions about what kinds of talks people want to see.
>
>  Since Python is part of a larger Open Source ecosystem, most talks 
> focus on how to use various Python-based open source libraries to 
> achieve something useful. For example, Dan's talk last month 
> incorporated NumPy, Pandas, and Scikit-learn. Other talks may be about 
> commercial products built around an Open Source offering (e.g. a past 
> talk on Ansible <https://www.ansible.com/> and an upcoming talk on 
> RockStor <http://rockstor.com/>).
>
> So, what about purely commercial offerings? If you have to pay to use 
> an API, are you still interested? What about APIs to pay-to-use web 
> services (say, the Boto API to Amazon's Web Services)? Should we focus 
> on Open Source or cast our net wider? Where should we draw the line? 
> Does it depend on the specific topic or speaker? Whether the API is 
> available to individuals or just corporations?
>
> Personally, I am somewhat conflicted: I think we should welcome all 
> kinds of speakers, but I would not want to see us degenerate into 
> another meetup that is just pitches from Product Managers.
>
> Your thoughts on this are much appreciated! I am writing this with a 
> specific situation in mind, but I would like to establish some more 
> general guidelines.
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>
>
>
>
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