Go Open is the largest nordic knowledge and network arena for the open source community, with over 500 people participating and 50 keynotes, nationally and internationally. In this article I'm giving you an excerpt from some of the keynotes.
After obtaining the big admission pass from the registration area I quickly guided myself to the next cup of coffee I could find. With the coffee cup in one hand and my rucksack in the other I took a glance on the stands to see what businesses this event has gathered:
- Conduct
- Redpill
- Kommuneforlaget (Municipal Publishing )
- Linpro
- Open Nordic Conference ( I think eZ represented them )
- Trolltech
- Sun Microsystems
- Feide ( A norwegian based open source ID )
- Capgemini
- Bouvet ( norwegian consultant group )
- Telenor
- Umoe IKT OpenPed
- Grrl Project
- IBM
- NUUG ( Norway Unix User Group )
And many more...
As I could see, one of the largest consultant businesses in norway, Accenture was a no-show before the opening of the conference. After a big long wait and over 500 participants crowding the lobby, we were let into the main theater hall and after a very nice opening video, Hilde Austlid from the Friprogcenter had an introductory keynote about open source.
Hilde Austlid from the Friprogcenter
We share the future, she states firmly. Open source means freedom to choose, to use and to share. We are the door-opener to the future. Hilde Austlid
With open source, you're not cheating, you can switch partners daily!
Open source is not a small thing in Norway, 32% of all IT services and a total of 4% of the Gross Domestic Product is Open Source withint 2010. The fact states it, open surce is not a con!
During her opening speach, she mentioned a business that succeeded due to open source, a business that you don't really think about when open source is mentioned, a gold mine. A Canadian gold mine that was on the bring to shut down it's business decided to make all of their geomaps open to the public. They presented a competition to let the public find where the gold was. It was a bold move, top make business sensitive data open to the public, but now, the gold mine is one of the worlds most productive gold mine today. Due to open source.
Go Open shall bring knowledge and openness, the future needs to be open. Hilde Austlid states this firmly.
She finished her speach to proudly announce that they have pink bling bling t-shirts that fits girls this year, instead of the standard one-size fits all!
Next speaker was Chris DiBona from Google. Chris DiBona is the open source program manager in Google. He was an editor on Slashdot.org amongst other things.
Chris DiBona from Google
- I like burger, obviously, Chris DiBona.
He started of by describing his job, that the fun part of the job was Google's Summer of Code and the code hosting they have. The boring part for some, is the retrieval of code to Google and to let code out of Google.
- Google never bought high-end data processing units, Chris DiBona.
He showed us a baby pictire of the first Google machines. They had it triven on old Dell, Sun and IBM machines.
- We had racks in ca 2000, that had no casings around the motherboards, the hard drives rested on plexy glass ontop of the memory modules, they melted from time to time
A very interesting keynote, I could not take anymore notes now sadly, due to the extremely crap battery on my Dell XPS m1330, I've to order a new one with longer uptime.
The next speaker was Zak Greant from the Mozilla Foundation, a very ellaborate keynote. His keynote was mainly about what's free software (OS) is and why change from proprietary software. He shared his keynote with us.
Zak Greant
After two great keynotes, I went to see the short presentation of the PostgreSQL project, the keynote speaker was Raphael M. Guerrero, he works at USIT on the University of Oslo.
- MySQL kept me up at night when I used it. Raphael states after a question from the audience: How do you compare MySQL and PostgreSQL.
What now?
Stay tuned, tomorrow is the next and final day of Go Open 2008, will get pictures up aswell as soon as I find my USB data cable.