Liferay had the chance to be a platinum sponsor at the Open Source Conference 2010, organized by Red Hat and Accenture. At almost 450 attendees, it was the Benelux region's largest-ever OSS focused conference. When I asked for a show of hands, most folks in the audience said they felt more comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt, so I'm assuming that we had a strong showing of technical folks. 
 

OSC2010 was held at the amazing Muziekgebouw, part of an urban redevelopment effort completed in 2004 that has helped restore this riverfront area to its historical vitality and importance to civic life.  

The general sense we got (and this was confirmed by others) was that open source awareness and understanding in the Netherlands is behind that in France and Germany. Many of the sessions seemed to cover topics and ideas that are now well known even for those not actively using open source: open source provides more agility, the chance to evaluate software without upfront investment, control over one's IT initiatives, better value for the cost, more secure software of higher quality than proprietary offerings. 
 

Liferay was a platinum sponsor at the event, giving us a great booth on the mezzanine with a view of the river and the main train station near the historic center. 

Tomas Nyström, an Accenture Senior Director heading up their open source practice, notably presented some new research findings from an open source survey they conducted earlier this year. The largest trends are that the driver for open source adoption is no longer primarily cost savings; respondents are turning to open source because OSS provider higher quality and more reliable software that better meets their needs and gets their solutions to market more quickly. You can find related research here and here. 
 

New research from Accenture shows varying motivations for using open source—not primarily cost.