Last week I was in Tampere (Finland) attending the Openmind/Mindtrek event where I had the chance to meet quite a lot of open source people, from Finland and beyond. Surprisingly (or maybe not) I knew already quite a bunch of them. Henrik has a pretty good post about the event, the people and the beers with Stephe and Mikko (which together with the festivals of Pilar that started last Saturday are going to kill my liver ).
I must say that it has been one of the most interesting events I have been in the last year. The first day I ended somehow being invited to Novell’s diner for special guests and I was lucky enough to sit close to Monty and we had a great chat about how to launch a virtual company, as they did in MySQL. I felt really honored to be able to get his advice on this point, as we are considering the possibility of adopting MySQL’s internal model with eBox. Most of the things he said can be found in an entry of Zak’s blog (who was also at the event, by the way) but I would like to summarize the general ideas:

• Having a virtual company does not necessarily lead to cost savings, as the whole team has to meet three or four times a year and that’s costly
• On the other hand, employees are more motivated in the company and you create a better feeling
• Also people tend to be more efficient and productive, as they can manage better their time
• You can easily involve the best people in your project and they will stay in the company even if they have to move to different places
• Surprisingly the internal administration of an international and virtual company is not as complex as I first thought. It usually takes two weeks maximum to launch a local company, which will then ease all the labor contracts
• Great professionals are the most important. Everything else should be secondary compared to keeping them involved and motivated

The next day he gave a presentation on How MySQL was able to create a world-class product with the open source community, describing the way they started and grew and what was important in the beginning. Our friends at COSS promised to upload all the presentations after the conference, so keep an eye on their web site