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

[wesley chun]

I'm glad we're having this discussion. There are many gray areas,... some
grayer than others, while some are obviously clear. There should be no
change to anything open source. When you start adding in the commercial
stuff that people pay for, that also has variance, and we've seen some of
those in this thread so far. I have another...

I could give a talk about Google APIs at a future meeting if there was
sufficient interest. Our APIs Client Library
<https://github.com/google/google-api-python-client> is open source and
available for multiple environments. Also, using our APIs are generally
free too. (The only ones that cost money are the commercial versions of
Google Maps, Analytics, and most of our Cloud Platform, but everything else
is generally free, and it's pretty easy to do in/with Python.)

The most important thing to me, however, is that the talk is technical and
given by an engineer, not a sales or product marketing person. Something
that's purely commerical to use *and* given by someone in Sales or Product
Management is too far I think, unless they're somehow sponsoring, i.e.,
providing the venue, food, etc. But I would at least hope that their API
client is open source, if not the service.

Cheers,
--Wesley

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 11:00 PM, Karen Dalton <kd at karend.net> wrote:

> 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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-- 
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"A computer never does what you want... only what you tell it."
    +wesley chun <http://google.com/+WesleyChun> : wescpy at gmail : @wescpy
<http://twitter.com/wescpy>
    Python training & consulting : http://CyberwebConsulting.com
    "Core Python" books : http://CorePython.com
    Python blog: http://wescpy.blogspot.com
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