On January the 9th, 2009 I've presented at the 3rd Annual Gestionale Open Developer Conference. 

Gestionale Open is an open source ERP gathering interest in Italy, since it is compliant with local laws. This project has been started years ago by an entrepreneur with decades of experience in the field and now it's used by 100s of customers. They have concluded the porting to MySQL, which is now the default database for the product!

There were nearly 100 participants. Gestionale Open has catalyzed the interest of customers, distributors, software developers. It's nice to see complex business applications moving to open source.

The title of my presentation was: "Enterprise Innovation". I've chosen a banal title, but wishing to make an interesting dissertation on why MySQL is fuelling the innovation and who is using MySQL to seed projects and evolve from simple ideas to real business.

…

On January the 9th, 2009 I've presented at the 3rd Annual Gestionale Open Developer Conference. 

Gestionale Open is an open source ERP gathering interest in Italy, since it is compliant with local laws. This project has been started years ago by an entrepreneur with decades of experience in the field and now it's used by 100s of customers. They have concluded the porting to MySQL, which is now the default database for the product!

There were nearly 100 participants. Gestionale Open has catalyzed the interest of customers, distributors, software developers. It's nice to see complex business applications moving to open source.

The title of my presentation was: "Enterprise Innovation". I've chosen a banal title, but wishing to make an interesting dissertation on why MySQL is fuelling the innovation and who is using MySQL to seed projects and evolve from simple ideas to real business.

…

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Recently, my company has decided to go full (or mostly) open source by moving away from Microsoft technologies. This is a particularly exciting venture to be part of, but in order to explain what I mean, I need to go back a bit and explain the history of the company.


History

Since its inception, the company has been a traditional LAMP stack. Over time, some internal business applications were needed to be developed. The initial platform to solve this requirement was Microsoft Office and specifically Access database and some Excel sheets. Later on, more and more VBA programming was added to the Access database. At some stage, a decision was made to move to VB.NET and port the VBA/VB6 code to it.
So far, this story is …