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Midgard (software) 126
Etymology
The name Midgard comes from Nordic mythology, meaning Middle earth, the world of humans. Most of the
Midgard developer community comes from the Baltic region, [23] [24] and the project has been referred by CMS
Watch as the Hanseatic League of Content Management [25] .
History
Midgard Project was started in early 1998 by Jukka Zitting and Henri Bergius for a Finnish historical reenactment
[26] [27]
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 [28] . The version 1.0 of Midgard was released to
the public on May 8, 1999 [29] . It attracted a steady stream of users, and the development project flourished despite
quite primitive early user interfaces [30] [31] .
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 [32] [33] .
In early 2000s, Midgard developers participated actively in OSCOM [34] , the collaborative organization for open
source content management systems. This included development of shared content editing clients like Twingle [35]
[36] [37] and tutorials in various conferences [38] . Midgard also featured in F.U.D., the Wyona Pictures documentary
about OSCOM [39] .
First application not connected with content management was Nemein.Net, a Professional Services Automation
application released in 2002 by Nemein, a Finnish Midgard company [40] . In May 2004 the Nemein.Net suite was
renamed to OpenPSA and released under Open Source licensing [41] .
By 2009, some social web services, like Qaiku have also adopted Midgard as their content management platform [42]
. It also runs in organizations like Helsinki University of Technology [43] and Maemo [44] . e-commerce
implementations with Midgard include the Movie-TV [45] online video rental service. It has been used by New
Zealand government for running the country's eGovernment portal [46] .
Midgard has seen some non-Web use also, including providing synchronization with the Tomboy note-taking
application for Linux desktop [47] .
In addition to regular content management, Midgard is seeing use in special web application scenarios like
Lufthansa's system for managing global marketing budgets.
Licensing
The Midgard core libraries and the MidCOM CMS are distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License
(LGPL), a license which permits the software to be freely used so long as it is dynamically linked or the user can
relink it to new versions of the libraries. This is the same license used by the GNU C Library. This licensing scheme
qualifies Midgard as free software developed with an open source model.
Official documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License which supports the
free usage principles defined by the GPL for code.
Applications developed using the Midgard application programming interfaces (API) can be copyrighted and
licensed under any terms by their authors, enabling creation of commercial products and services based on the
platform.