A short post on open source business in Europe at "The Silent Penguin". He visited eurOSCON this week and his one disappointment was the apparent lack of enthousiasm for open source business in Europe.
One example where it does work and does thrive is the large amount of plone companies, especially also in Europe. Plone is an open source CMS that's made to be changed or extended. It works out of the box, but in a lot of cases you want it adapted just for your organisation. Which you can do yourself, but you can get a lot of effective and well-priced help from companies. There are at least three plone companies in the Netherlands (I work at Zest software, one of them), Germany has a lot, Austria has some. France, Norway, UK, Italy, etcetera.
Plone's "ecosystem" was build up by the founders with such small companies in mind. Make it work out of the box and make it easy to customise.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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