I’m fascinated by this Swedish organization who call themselves Open Source Sweden (“Leverantörer av Öppen Programvara i Sverige” in Swedish which means “Suppliers of Open Source Software”)

They claim to be some kind of business organization for companies that work with and within open source in Sweden, and they want to promote open source and help companies work with open source etc. All pretty fine ideas methinks.

So, let’s hypothetically say I am employed and associated with several companies and I basically work exclusively with Open Source software on my job and I work in many open source projects. Why would I make my companies join this organization? Their web page(s) give very few answers to that, and yet they have many members and some of them quite well known in our community.

For this very non-compelling reason to join, they charge ~600USD/year for membership if your company has less than 6 employees “with open source capacity” up to 3100USD/year if you happen to have more than 25 open source capable persons.

The only thing I’ve ever seen from this gang is that they get the honors to speak up on open source subjects in the media and they did issue a press release almost a year ago…

Their site lists 31 member companies (and a bunch of them are clearly in the >25 section). That’s a lot of membership fees every year.

So if anyone reads this. Why would I talk my companies into becoming a member? What can possibly be worth all that money?