I popped along to the first open source meeting of the British Computer Society last night.
It began with a very entertaining talk from Sarah Ewen about Linux on the Playstation 2.
The Playstation2 Linux distro is apparently a limited run, it was based on Redhat 6.2, and will soon be sold out in PAL regions. She then showed a previous VU coding contest entries. I would find it hard to recommend this as an entry level machine for anyone, as at £253 including PS2 it is quite a poorly spec'd machine. For only £86 more, you could get yourself a Mac mini, which would fly for desktop usage.
After the presentation, the usual BCS governance was ironed out, and the committee were voted in for the next six months. Amongst the aims of the BCS Open Source Specialist Group are reducing professional uncertainty around the subject of Open Source and to encourage serious debate & examination of Open Source.
One thing that is apparent is that people interested in being involved will not all be able to get to London. As such a wiki and discussion forum has been setup, where you can contact other professionals/academics who are interested in Open Source, and it's applications. You don't have to be a member of the BCS to be involved, and indeed from my viewpoint as an open source developer, I see an opportunity for us to show the decision makers in all aspects of professional computing, the real advantages of adopting open source at all stages of development.
My thanks to the committee for organising a good evening, and the particularly nice cakes.