Niels Hartvig is a trailblazer. A few years ago, he released his popular CMS called Umbraco under a MIT open source license. This is not unique of cource. But he was the first developer (at least here in Denmark) to open source an application that runs on Microsoft’s .net platform.

Back then I introduced Niels to some good people at Microsoft Denmark that I knew. And they – being this case pragmatic business people, not Redmond instructed IT policy lobbyists – immediately warmed to the idea. In order to get more customers and developers to adopt the .net platform, in particular within the Danish SMB segment, Microsoft needed to show that applications were available and worked on the platform. Umbraco was heaven sent on a Danish SMB CMS market heavily populated by cost-efficient open source based CMS’ with lots of functionalities.

Today, Umbraco is a success story with respect to the mix of Microsoft and open source environments. Niels is used (hopefully not misused) as a posterchild to promote more intgration between open source and Microsoft applications and platforms.

Full disclosure: Umbraco is a client with Bender von Haller Dragsted

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