History
Midgard Project was started in early 1998 by Jukka Zitting and Henri Bergius for a Finnish historical reenactment organization —Harmaasudet— as a system for them to publish their material online.
Since the organization didn't have resources to maintain a large development project by itself, the open source model was chosen for creating a community of contributors to the system. The version 1.0 of Midgard was released to the public on May 8, 1999. It attracted a steady stream of users, and the development project flourished despite quite primitive early user interfaces.
Commercial services for the platform started to appear in early 2000. One of the first adopters was Envida, a Dutch company that realized the potential of Midgard for Web hosting purposes. First proprietary application for the platform was Hong Kong Linux Center (HKLC) Nadmin Studio content management system.
In early 2000s (decade), Midgard developers participated actively in OSCOM, the collaborative organization for open source content management systems. This included development of shared content editing clients like Twingle and tutorials in various conferences. Midgard also featured in F.U.D., the Wyona Pictures documentary about OSCOM.
First application not connected with content management was Nemein.Net, a Professional Services Automation application released in 2002 by Nemein, a Finnish Midgard company. In May 2004 the Nemein.Net suite was renamed to OpenPSA and released under Open Source licensing.
By 2009, some social web services, like Qaiku have also adopted Midgard as their content management platform. It also runs in organizations like Helsinki University of Technology and Maemo. e-commerce implementations with Midgard include the Movie-TV online video rental service. It has been used by New Zealand government for running the country's eGovernment portal.
Midgard has seen some non-Web use also, including providing synchronization with the Tomboy note-taking application for Linux desktop.
In addition to regular content management, Midgard is seeing use in special web application scenarios like Lufthansa's system for managing global marketing budgets and HP's client documentation system.
The Midgard content repository library entered the Debian distribution in November 2010. Some parts of the history of Midgard are recounted in the book Open Advice.
Read more about this topic: Midgard (software)
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