Open Nordic + eZ conference + midsommernatten = fun!

Live from the Gardemoen airport in Oslo. I’m
getting better and better in getting free internet access at airports lately. :-)

The last two days, the small town of Skien held three conferences at once: Open Nordic, the eZ conference (including the amazing eZ
awards event) and the very first Mobile Open Nordic.

I learnt one interesting fact. Most of the current Web 2.0 revolution we see
now, happens on top of the LAMP stack.

Let’s have a look where these technologies come from:

Linux:

started in Finland (Linus Torvalds)

Apache:

mainly American, but apparently has many Nordic contributors

MySQL:

Swedish/Finnish company

PHP:

started in Denmark/Greenland (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Basically, the Nordic countries can be held responsible for 75% of the LAMP stack!
(ok, Norway isn’t in the picture here, but they have Opera, for what it’s worth ;-))

I was very happy to see that Nokia (+ Trolltech), Sun, IBM and other big
players were represented by technical people, not by marketing people. In fact,
the most interesting talks I attended, were presented by people of those larger
companies. They really are trying to keep up with current trends.

Most interesting was also the main keynote speaker and opener of the conference
on the first day: Bart Hanssens from the Belgian federal government (Fedict). He held a talk about the
recent ODF guideline
implementation at our federal government.

Personally, I had a wonderful time. Met many new people,
mostly of the eZ crew and realised
the sheer joy of such an internationally orientated SME (especially at the
midsommernatten BBQ the last day). It felt great speaking 4 languages through
each other once more, especially increasing the level of my Norwegian again.
:-)

Yes, Norway… I completely fell in love with the country just once more…