First Open Source Expo was a mediocre success

The first Open Source Expo in Karlsruhe is coming to an end.
Yesterday and today, the Kongresszentrum in Karlsruhe hosted Webinale ’08 and Open Src Expo ’08.
I understood it was the first Open Src Expo.
Webinale is an established conference.
You could tell the latter was (treated as) the bigger brother of the former.

I must say I found it only a mediocre success.
Somehow, it reminded me of FOSDEM, but far smaller ans less professional.
A handful of Open Source projects were represented at their stand and a smaller handful of people were walking around, talking and watching demo’s.
I had a nice introduction to OFBiz, The Apache Open for Business Project and was very impressed by it’s functionality.
In the main hall which could host over 800 people, some talks were held, generally attended by 30-like people, more interested in their laptop than the speaker (a sad trend I see coming up unfortunately, although I must plead guilty as well).
I do believe Open Src Expo ’08 has some potential though.
Keep it up!

It was also nice to see some Belgians around.
Machtelt and Wim from OpenBSD were there to talk about ODF and BSD Certification.
The Belgian TinyOpenERP had a stand as well.

I was also contacted by Edward Wijnen of SpringSource to talk about a partnership or other collaboration with Zeropoint.IT.
Sounds good.
I’d love to get the world to know about our Java team which loves working with Spring 2.5!