Openmind/Mindtrek

Openmind was held as part of and partly preceding MindTrek. On Tuesday the 2nd of October, talks included those from Novell, LiPS, Gnome etc. and also some Finnish companies like Saunalahti and Codento (as part of the Star Wreck Studios talk). Also our company, Nomovok, offered a talk about open source in public sector. For me the most interesting speech was that of OpenMoko by Michael Shiloh from FIC.

On Wednesday Open Source Business and Innovation was one track of the five in MindTrek. Speeches included those from Sun by Thorbiorn Fritzon and from Canonical by Amy Jiang (in picture). One especially nice thing was that also one of the keynote speakers in MindTrek Plenary was about free (as in freedom) software, namely The age of literate machines - a visionary look at open source by Zak Greant from Foo Associates, mozilla.org and more. I think it was a good general introduction to not just the term open source but the more general freedoms, since the public in general might be more interested in the freedoms free software gives than only the fact that one can see the source code - not too many people are coders after all.

The best part anyway was meeting the people, since concerning many talks I knew most of the stuff presented and the information given is probably more of use to people not that knowledgeable in libre software. Openmind Club on Tuesday evening was a successful event together with the various coffee breaks and lunches.