While Paul covers the SQO-OSS sprint which I am also attending (an event well-supplied with expletives and cookies) I figure I might summarize the first Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner, which I got to attend thanks to an invite from Donna of the Gender Changers.

It was humongous.

As a guy I mostly stood in the corner and tried to stay out of the way. Some of the attendees were annoyed to find so many guys there; the ratio was 7:1 instead of the (usual in Computer Science classes in the Netherlands) 1:23. Plans were hatched for small-scale IT events around the country; networking and fiber-optic handling was discussed with much verve.

Fabienne, from HardHack.org and other places, a well-known hardware hacker, gave the presentation at this first GGD. All the fun things you can do with a cellphone and a soldering iron. That turns out to be lots. Inspirational is the right word. And if you’re interested in hardware hacking on the cheap, the HardHack event is this weekend in Berlin.

And then it was over and everyone snuck out of the FlexBar and back into late-night Amsterdam. The next GGD is in three months or so - watch the site for announcements.

The next morning I hurried through Amsterdam again to get to the FSFE licensing workshop. This was a congregation of business lawyers, Free Software people and corporate legal folk to talk about licensing. What works. What to watch for compliance (gpl-violations.org was there too).

So in short I spent a day in a room full of IT lawyers. I can continue to assert I’ve never met a lawyer I didn’t like. Lots of back-and-forth on interesting topics; trademark law, ramifications of the GPLv3, tools and compliance checking (KDE doesn’t do half bad on that front, simply because we have the EBN and some decent tools and a clear license policy). A good feeling of learning from best practices, too. And then that was over and I had missed the last train back home. Drat.

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