Today, I’d like to head back to one of the most visited posts of this blog, “Should HLkomm Be Sold by Leipzig Council?”. Surprisingly, an Indian friend of mine, Vikram Vaswani, requested me to write a follow-up as he apparently found the original blog post interesting and even provoking.

So, here’s the update:

On June 20th, there was a deadline for application to buy into 49% of HLkomm. Besides other companies, not known by name, some of my former co-workers (managers I reckon) made an offer as well. Cool, isn’t it?
Read the story in German: LVZ Artikel Mitarbeiter bieten für HL komm_2011-06-21

Although I am a bit disappointed that the rest of the HLkomm staff hasn’t been asked for participating in the bid and haven’t been involved in the plans, I guess the reasons for this bid have to been seen in a political manner: those guys are allowed to have a deeper look into the selling processes as they usually would have been allowed. Smart, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, Leipzig’s municipal has not been dormant: Apparently, they want to get rid of the formerly established homes for handicapped people. This seems to happen without any press release nor any other official note. I just got this information unofficially from one of my best mates who worked for them and was threatened to be fired soon.

I’ll keep you informed.

I personally was really surprised to see 16 people attending, including developers from our partners D³ Data Development (Thalheim, Saxony), GN2 netwerk (Coburg, Bavaria), marmalade.de (Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt), dotSource GmbH (Jena, Thuringia) and Ontraq Europe (Augsburg, Bavaria). Dirk Senebald (Gera, Thuringia), Gregor Berg (Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia) and Alexander Thomas (Berlin) also took part, together with my personal friends and (former) co-workers Mathias Fiedler (Leipzig/Berlin) and Erik Kort.

Christian Zacharias explains

Joscha Krug proudly shows off his OXID Commons shirt

These guys found something really interesting

Our host, Hannes from Geyserhaus, worked really professionally to ensure that everything was set up for us. The projector and the screen were already installed, together with the tables and power cords. Fortunately, there was no Internet connection; this allowed us all to concentrate on  Christan Zacharias‘ talk about the OXID eShop framework, the OXID eFire platform, how to write extensions, and news for developers in OXID eShop 4.5.0.

The entire talk took about six hours including interposed questions, laid-back discussions and straight comments to OXID’s (Erik’s and mine) point of view. We also had an interesting four-person discussion about the pros and cons of Open Source Software. Through the process, I picked up at least 25 points to be “injected” into OXID’s product management cycle. Thanks for all the comments, mates!

At the end of the day, I think the aims of a meeting like this – namely, getting to know the faces behind forum or mailing list posts, learning about the experiences of others and bringing coders together for collaboration chances – were absolutely fulfilled, and that it was an enjoyable and learning experience for all.

I’m curious now about upcoming meetings in other cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich (in progress), Cologne and Frankfurt. Are any of you keen to take over the organization of such meetings? Drop me a line or post a comment if so!

Although I personally don’t like their marketing strategy very much (Knut, where did the “Globish” = English HL komm website which we were talking about go?), I still feel bound to say a few words about my ex-employer after seeing the current discussions in the (local) press and municipal authorities. You see, once again, HL komm is on the sale block.

What is HL komm?

HL komm, founded in 1997, was spun out from Leipzig municipal public services, merged three years later with 3H (Halle) and TelSA (Naumburg), and then opened operations in Halle, Chemnitz and Dresden in 2005/2006. Today, they employ more than 100 people and own a network of 1.800 kilometers of optical glass fiber cable. Approximately 30 other carriers and backbone providers use HL komm’s so called “last mile”. Also, they serve a number of global players as well as SME clients in the region.

It is worth noting at this point that employees at HL komm are not working for the city council. They are paid and treated just like in a free enterprise company.

The biggest challenge I see in HL komm’s business development of the last few years is the “fiber-to-the-home” project. HL komm is mounting optical fiber to certain houses and homes to connect even private users to the IP broadband via Citylan. This is good for Leipzig, also known as the “Media City“.

To complete the picture, here is an image video (German) made by the HL komm guys:

Now for the news: HL komm is about to be sold by the Leipzig city council.

Why would they do this?

Rationale for selling HL komm

Let’s look at the numbers. The yearly turnover of HL komm today is about 40 million EUR, the profit comes to 4-6 million. In the past ten years, HL komm supported the City of Leipzig with 36 million EUR. Leipzig city council undoubtedly thinks that a highly profitable enterprise like HL komm could be sold quickly to any investor for a certain amount of money. There are already some interested parties like Versatel, enviaM and the German Telekom. All of them are internally called “grasshoppers”.

What is the likely result of such a sale? At the end of the day, HL komm might be restructured entirely. The present office could become a pure sales office, engineers  could be forced to go to another city and the NMC could simply be replaced by a call center. A lot of jobs could be lost.

Another perspective

Of course, the technology, the entire equipment and the business idea could be taken over by somebody else. But wait, isn’t a city council responsible for the entire infrastructure of a city? In addition to building streets, disposing of waste and looking after the public toilets, doesn’t it also need to provide high-quality Internet access? After all, this is a critical element of the infrastructure of a city that wants to see itself as a media-city in 2011.

Looking only at the figures, Leipzig should instead think about selling the zoo, or maybe the conservatory.

What do you think? Should HL komm be sold?

Many thousand programmers in the world code free software in their spare time or supported by their companies. They follow the principle of Richard Stallmann, who proclaimed already in the early 60th that program code is nothing else than thoughts and thoughts are free. From this, the GNU project evolved that produced the first open source applications. The most prominent examples are the operating system Linux as well as the Mozilla project with the Firefox browser or the office suite OpenOffice.org.

Today, open source software is stable, secure and functional. More and more public and private organizations in many countries are keen using it. Also the European Union as well as several German Federal Ministries support the usage of open source software and thus boost the competition between the software producers.

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Seb seems to to be really addicted to Dire Straits tbo. No day that I don’t hear “Sultans of Swing” played along on his guitar in a different version again and again. I really love it