Business and Open Source meet in Germany (report from Heise Congress)

This week the already well known Heise Open Source meets Business Congress took place in Nurenberg, Germany. Richard Seibt and his team once again put together an interesting and relevant group of speakers to discuss the importance and impact of Open Source in business. And of course the poster children of open source - SugarCRM, Alfresco, eZpublish, Liferay, MySQL, RedHat/Jboss, as well as many less well known projects were there and presented their latest news and insights. Here’s a sample: Microsoft apparently “produces” 300 to 400 patents per workday currently and it takes approximately 4 million USD to fight one at court. Maybe we all should become lawyers. SugarCRM is now four years old, has already been downloaded 4 million plus times and successfully competes with the premier league of proprietary commercial CRM offerings. The Heise Open Source congress seems to be progressing nicely while many others open source events are struggling, maybe it’s the business and enterprise orientation that makes the difference. With more than 650 delegates growth against the year before was almost 10%. Enterprise Open Source was in the center of the delegates’ interest and a large number of credible customer case studies showed again how well it works and how beneficial it is for the companies. Optaros asked Swisscom Hospitality Services (Alexander Finger) to present a case study (Room 2.0) and we also spoke in one of the business workshops and explained how the Assembly of Open Source components actually works.