Embracing Open Sources

MAY 19TH, 2008
By MASTER

III Día do Emprendedor

Last week I was invited to participate as a speaker in the Entrepreneur Day at Galicia (día do emprendedor in Galician) to explain the different ways we have used to finance the foundation and growth at Warp and the development of eBox.

The Entrepreneur Day consists of a series of events celebrated in each region in Spain to encourage entrepreneurship among youth. In these events the main structure, materials and funding are provided by the Ministry of Industry but the way it is organized depends on each region. I think the formula is pretty good because the economical, demographical and social context can be very different from one region to another. Moreover, this way new ideas can be tested and reused in following editions.

As far as I know, Galicia is the only region that programmed a session focused on describing open source models and showing examples of companies that have succeeded based on collaborative technologies and open source software. It was great that Javi Vazquez, the CEO of Igalia and the one responsible for the open source session, managed to bring together interesting people such as Juan Freire, Eduardo Manchon or Dani Armendariz among others, sharing great stories with the audience.

The next day I was invited to attend a meeting of AGASOL, the Galician association of open source companies, where I could meet more players of our industry and learn about the ways they coordinate and get organized over there. With more than 20 companies registered in AGASOL and getting new members every month, it looks like there is something brewing in Galicia and I think they can teach quite a few lessons to the rest of Spain.

With all this pro open source environment, together with the natural kindness of Galicians, the beautiful old town and the night life at Santiago, Galicia has won me over