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October 20, 2005
[EuroOSCON] Closing thoughts
One advantage of having EuroOSCON in Amsterdam is that my journey home took under three hours. So, now that I've unpacked and sorted all my take-aways (only 2 t-shirts this time), time for some closing comments and thoughts.
As always I come away from a conference like EuroOSCON and my brain feels pickled. So much input both through sessions and hallway-talks, so many really interesting people you can just hang out with and talk to (and hopefully some new friends too). Enough input for a long time I'm sure.
But where is this Open Source business "thing" going? My trip to OSBC earlier this year left me with the distinct notion that our US cousins know exactly where they think it should be going. But here in Europe? My feeling is that the jury is still out on the state of Open Source business. At EuroOSCON there was little sign of European Open Source businesses, I could see no VCs running around hunting for budding Open Source startups. And I also didn't see any of those either.
To me, it seemed that companies like SpikeSource received less attention and interest at EuroOSCON than they do at OSBC or OSCON. Is their business model as interesting over here? Do European organizations want that sort of business offering? And if not - what do they want and do they even know yet?
But even so, I come away from EuroOSCON optimistic that this could be the starting shot to getting Europe back on the Open Source business map. And borrowing one of Tim O'Reilly's phrases: The opportunity is out there - it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Posted by Matthew at October 20, 2005 05:52 PM
Comments
Trackbacks don't tend to work for me, so I'll post the URL here. http://vanrees.org/weblog/1129839789
In short: plone (open source CMS) has sprouted a lot of open source companies in (especially) Europe as the community was laid out for that.
Posted by: Reinout van Rees at October 20, 2005 11:08 PM