Palle Simonsen & Lasse Larsen - Why should I consider open source?

Experience from the trenches as seen from an IT strategy advisor

Devoteam is your typical business- and IT advisory company. We meet clients in all walks of the private and public sector. Clients that needs to tackle business problems using some combination of it- and non-it solutions. For some of these clients open source is both a valid and desirable solution whereas for other clients it is not conceived as an option.

We will present the (F)OSS drivers and barriers we usually encounter, the trends in (F)OSS uptake we see as well as some learning’s from a major OSS project within healthcare.

The main purpose of the talk is to provoke a fruitful discussion about the commercial aspects and the commercial future of (F)OSS.

Palle Simonsen has been using Linux domestically since approx. '92, when he bought a set of kernel .99 1/4" floppies from a DIKU student. Those were the days of slackware, manual compilation, a wee bit patching and twm - later fvwm.

He has later used various distros like Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva, Kubuntu and Ubuntu and my current setup consists of two servers a laptop, a netbook and a desktop running various distros. Palle has co-written an article on Linux' memory management with Peter Toft for Ingeniøren (the proceeds was funneled back into buying a banner for sslug). Programming and architecture-wise he has written the SSL part of a payment gateway using open source modules, architected and programmed parts of a large LAMP application for a telecoms company etc. and have generally used open source components professionally when it have made sense to do so.

Palle's overall bio can be found at http://dk.linkedin.com/in/pallesimonsen. He current role is Senior Technology Director at Devoteam Consulting in Denmark.

Lasse Larsen works as a consultant in his own company: Centrit ApS.
Lasse was responsible for the descision to move the stack (OS, dB ..) from proprietary to open software for FMK (Det Fælles Medicinkort/Shared Medicine Records) in 2007/08. He open sourced the prescriptionservers sourcecode in 2006.
Lasse has been using Ubuntu since 2007 and is saving energy with his Fit-PC2 and Karmic Koala.
Public profile: http://dk.linkedin.com/in/lasselarsendk