Openworld Forum

Went to the open world forum last week. This is the first time I attend and found the event quite interesting.

There were a lot more business suits than I expected and most of the topics revolved around the business aspects of open source.

Had a chance to listen to Nick Halsey from Jaspersoft, Josep Mitja from openbravo and Yves de Montcheuil from Talend. I find it much more interesting to listen to these relatively young, yet quite successful, open source companies, than to the older organizations such as Apache, Eclipse and Linux which seem out of reach.

It seems these smaller OSS companies make their money mostly by selling subscriptions. This model has been very successful for Redhat of course but I am still wondering if it is as efficient for server technologies. I thought services would be an important secondary source of revenue for them but this does not seem to be the case. The explanation could be that these companies heavily rely on SI's to get them into accounts and therefore they can't sell too much services for fear of openly competing with these same SI's. The bright side is that this forces them to focus on software engineering rather than diverting their resources on services.

The most impressive presentation I saw was from Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu project founder. He had 3 slides with a single word on each of them. This is the first time I can remember 100% of a presenter slides content without taking a single note!