Nairobi, Kenya - Open Source and more

Wednesday night I left Amman, Jordan and arrived in Nairobi, Kenya early afternoon Thursday. Thursday and Friday I attended, presented, and interacted with attendees at a Free and Open Source conference. Microsoft at an Open Source conference? Yep - and I was not the only one there. I will be posting more on our involvement in the Open Source community and bridging the gap. In Africa Open Source is being used as a tool to help Africa emerge from poverty. Microsoft is investing a lot in Africa too with donor projects and other. We both share many of the same goals and our presence at the conference is about finding ways to work together instead of wasting engergies defending against each other.

On Saturday I presented a "crash course" of new .NET and SQLCLR features to the Africa.NET user group.

Kenya is one of my favorite places to visit. I hope in the future I will have more time and get to go on a safari. We did eat some more camel, goat, crocodile, ostrich, and other such meats again though. :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 25, 2006
  Bridging the Gap between two different worlds.I do remember they have came out with some opensource products...
• Anonymous
  February 25, 2006
  Microsoft has released ROTOR as well as many products offered under the Shared Source licenses. Not all are "open source" but are "open sources" for viewing, some for changing. I'll be posting a lot more on this in the near future.
• Anonymous
  February 26, 2006
  Kudos! Thanks for the Crash Course! It was very exciting. I hope you can do the same for other .NET user groups around Africa.