- Per Andersen, CEO IDC Nordic
- Heidi Austlid, CEO Nasjonalt Kompetansesenter for Friprogramvare
- Lasse Andresen, CTO Central & Northern Europe Sun Microsystems
Per started out with a couple of statistics. Fx. the use of open source in services, which is on the rise, fueled by the economic recession, but still only holding a small percentage of the overall service market. There is room and potential for growth in this sector.
Heidi Austlid was the second speaker. Giving us an overview of the state of open source in Norway as seen from her chair. On some points Norway is far ahead of Denmark, when it comes to initiatives regarding open source in the public sector fx. schools and municipalities (local authorities). Here the economic recession is also speeding up the adoption of open source in the public sector - local authorities want to use the tax money actively on welfare instead of passively on fx. licenses.
Also Nasjonalt Kompetansecenter for Friprogramvare is the main initiator of the Norwegian open source conference GoOpen, which had about 550 participants last year. GoOpen 2009 is scheduled for 16th -17th April. This year it is co-hosted along with the Nordic Perl Workshop and Sun Microsystems plan to have a small Nordic CommunityOne conference on the day before. From what I heard from the organizers, they have a strong lineup of speakers ready - so check out the program - it should be released any day now.
Last on the program, was Lasse Andresen, CTO of Central & Northern Europe from Sun Microsystems - and he was the main reason I was attending Talk-IT. David and Rikke from CommunityBuilder was nice enough to introduce me during the break, and I had a nice chat with Lasse, who was a very down-to-earth-kindda-guy (like most other Sun folks I've talked to) despite the fancy title.
Lasse's main focus of his talk was not OpenSolaris but the entire stack of open source software from top to bottom that Sun is capable of delivering. In fact I think he's opening remark was something like "This is NOT going to be about Linux" - which was very much in line with Per's notions on the growth of the open source service market. Sun Microsystems is right now one of the worlds biggest contributors to open source, only beaten by a very well known university (University of California/Berkley).
All-in-all it was a really good experience to participate in Talk-IT, and if you can find the time - the first Wedensday in every month from 15.00-17.00 @ CBS, you should attend.