Europe

After two weeks with staying with family, we were pretty desperate to get to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich">Norwich</a> and hang out with friends and kick back for a few days. Hence our enthusiasm on the journey there, punctuated by the discovery of a ridiculously cheap pub whilst transferring in Peterborough, that turned from a relaxing drink to a last minute mad dash to catch a train.

Last weekend I was back in Tirana for my second OSCAL, an awesome little open source conference that has a massively diverse audience and punches well above it's weight. Whilst in Albania I was conducting some interviews and research for a forthcoming article on the Albanian (likely also including Kosovo) startup and tech scene(s), but more of that later. When I visited Albania last year it was my first trip to a Balkan country and since then I have visited Serbia (twice) and Croatia. Last year, everything was new and novel, this trip I was seeing beyond that into things I might have missed.

Open source is at a crossroads. For the past few years, venture capital has directly or indirectly paid for many of the contributors and much of the infrastructure it needed to keep going.

The Opera Web browser, first introduced 30 years ago, has over its long tenure helped to pioneer features that would later become commonplace among all Web browsers—including tabs, sync, and built-in search. Opera was among the first to introduce a built-in AI assistant (Aria) as well as the ability to use locally running models with its developer version. Now, Opera aims to be the first to offer a new kind of AI agent–based browsing, with a feature called Browser Operator.

When the modern-day internet began emerging in the early 2000s, finding hosting services and resources to run the new wave of dynamic web applications was hard. You needed a database to store application data. These were slow, expensive, and unreliable, regularly bringing applications to a grinding halt when a single instance failed. You needed a server to run interpreted languages like PHP, Python, or Ruby. These were equally expensive, often needed configuration, had security issues, and frequently ran out of memory or CPU resources, again bringing applications to a grinding halt.