Hi Martin,
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:44:50AM +0200, Martin von Willebrand wrote:
Hi
Some quick comments without knowing the case:
Proactum is a long term OSS supplier in Finland. Small, yet continuously growing (3M+ turnover, currently) with important customers with a quite broad specturm. Proactum is COSS, member, in steering group, as is Kuntien Tiera Oy too. I think Proactum is doing important grass root business work. We need Proactum to grow and get more similar companies here.
Kuntien Tiera, well, it's a bit more complicated. They are a company owned by about 50 municipalities, or so: it's a purchasing and it-production entity. It had a strong idea of openness originally - and started with high hopes -, but there were some strategy and personnel changes about 2 years ago and it started to go proprietary. The original idea was lost. E.g. I believe they won't be doing open publishing at all, and will focus on their owners (=customers). I think that they are just using open source (a good thing, but meek in comparison from which this started) in building some of their services. But the bottom-line is that I don't really know. Their presence in COSS has been not so optimal, the person there is perhaps not the right one.
thanks for putting this into context! Sad as I am to hear this, it's good to have a realistic picture of what's going on.
I know the journalist who wrote the article quite well. He might enjoy poking them every now and then.
Would Kuntien Tiera be a useful target for our work of pressing for change? What could we accomplish there under ideal circumstances, and what could we expect to achieve realistically?
Or are there other agencies in Finland we should be targetting instead?
Best regards, Karsten