It must have been over a year ago that I was approached by a member of the Dutch Linux Users Group (NLLGG) who asked me if I'd be interested to give an OpenSolaris talk for a Linux audience. A bit surprised, but also realizing that we do have common grounds (UNIX, OpenSource) I accepted the invitation.
A few months ago I got an email, asking if I still was interested to do the talk. Surely I was --if only because I've learned that no matter where you go and who you present to, there's always great, positive reactions to our OpenSolaris story and to OpenSolaris itself. So we set a date and last Saturday (februari 2, 2008 for the record) Joep Vesseur (infamous Solaris kernel engineer and NLOSUG core member) and I went to the NLLGG event.
Within the minute I got a "back to the future" feeling: in the early eighties I went to many informal gatherings where I'd sit with my Commodore 64 and later my Atari 1040ST, talking techtalk and sharing experiences. The very same thing happened here!
We unpacked our stuff (NLLGG gracefully allowed us to bring booklets,
StarterKits and other SWAG), hooked up our laptops and the first people
started to silently show up. Our OpenSolaris banner was an eye-catcher
but at first people were just looking.
Around noon, Hendrik Jan Thomassen (who is one of the people who brought UNIX to The Netherlands back in 1974, wrote the book "UNIX, het standaard Operating System" (UNIX, The standard Operating System) and is one of the founders of AT Computing) started off the days program with a great and very humoristic talk about the history of UNIX; he described how he got in touch with Ken Tompson and Dennis Richie and picked up a tape with UNIX himself, bringing it to Holland. An impression can be found here, and his preso can be downloaded as pdf.
My talk was scheduled right after that and I ended up with great conversations with the audience, especially when telling about ZFS and DTrace. Because I ran out of time, as usual 
, I asked the people to visit us at our booth. And so they did! We handed out at least 30 StarterKits and booklets, and Joep did some great DTrace demos.
Around 4:30pm, we called it a day and went home. My feeling about the event? It was very good to note that there was no "Linux versus OpenSolaris" bashing. None at all. People were very interested in the OpenSolaris features and we were just techies amongst eachother. The image visualises this: Tux holding an OpenSolaris booklet (also notice the OpenSolaris login screen at the background).
More good news: NLLGG invited us to fill a whole day on OpenSolaris where they'll provide the room. And AT Computing offered us the use of one of their training rooms for a next NLOSUG meeting.
A big THANKS to NLLGG for the opportunity they gave us, and for the Openess and fun!