The 5th Openmind conference organized by COSS - the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions - provided some interesting discussions about how companies, governments and individuals across Northern-Europe are using open source.
Speaking in the first session I had the chance to follow the whole event, and make my mind of how open source has become pervasive in those countries. Nina Helander and Mikko Rönkkö, presenting some findings of the annual Finnish software industry survey, reported an amazing estimation of the degree of use of open source within the IT industry.The survey mailed 3.639 firms, 660 respondents, 75% of them are using internally open source software, about half of them have some open source components in the offering. It is worth to notice that there is no statistically significant difference between different size classes, neither in usage nor in the offering. In a word, open source is mainstream in Finland, as much as predicted by Gartner for 2011.
Martin Michlmayr introduced the audience to FOSSBazaar and FOSSology, through which HP is demonstrating its experience with open source governance. FOSSBazaar is aimed at helping both experienced and unexperienced FOSS users, through blog entries, white-papers and other resources (including a self-assessment survey and OSS Discovery).
Ismael Olea spoke about OSOR, the recently launched European Open Source Observatory and Repository.
ElmarGeese, Tarent’s CEO, gave a great speech on mobile platforms, a look at enablers and disablers.
Ulf Michael (Monty) Widenius, MySQL CTO and IT investor, was also attending the event, posing questions and giving (great) answers, I will soon transcript parts of my interview.
Finland seems to have build a solid entrepeneurial ecosystems, where start-ups can access to financial support by local VCs, and experienced entrepreneurs like Monty can and do advice them. Local universities introduce students to open source usage, as results from the survey’s findings, and provide students also with business training courses, as far as I got from friends.
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