An open source sort of day

To Holborn Bars this morning to present a course - at last! - for CLT: everything else so far this year has been cancelled through lack of bookings.  An attentive audience, and although I hadn't delivered th talk for far too long, it came fluently and kept them listening.  I particularly enjoyed talking about the open source movement, although OpenOffice let me down a bit - couldn't  get the slides to come up on the screen very easily.

Then to Olswang for a seminar organised largely (perhaps entirely) by Jeremy, to mark the launch of a new book on patent law to which he has contributed.  Although the standout session was Christopher Wadlow, on the requirement in US patent law (from the Supremes' decision in Chakrabarty) that an invention be something new "under the sun".  He speculated on the patentability of vampires, werewolves, zombies and the golem (or golems, if there can be more than one), considering which of them are solar-averse.  Brilliant: taught me more about the patent system than many other sessions I have attended, but at the same time the easiest CPD I have ever scored.

Substantively, the best part of the afternoon was Bob Gomulkiewicz's presentation on the Free and Open Source Software movement - fair and objective, and highly informative.  Plenty of new material for my next talk on the subject!