Go! Go! Go!

There we go. Just back from HOSC, a very inspiring conference on OSS in Amsterdam, Holland. "Mind is like a parachute, works best when open" was the pitch for the event (the original quote is reportedly from Sir James Dewar). I like it!

I gave a presentation about "bringing open-source to the mainstream by federating business ecosystems". The talk by Enrica Chiozza (Project officer and Research officer at the European Commission) about innovation ecosystems was very complementary with mine. She prefers to use the term "innovation ecosystem" rather than "business ecosystem" because the latter wording refers to a system led by one or a smal party of (big) companies, typically software vendors. This does not apply to traditional open-source communities. In my opinion, third generation open-source organizations such as ObjectWeb, Eclipse, MMBase may be seen as the leaders of some ecosystem(s), although they are not for profit.

Enrica's boss, Jesús Villasante (head of the “Software Technologies” Unit of the Information Society and Media Directorate General in the European Commission) gave a keynote and sat in a panel about... innovation. He very openly talked about the way some software vendors use the open-source communities without always being faithful to the open-source ethics.