Commercial Open Source Software

Recently my Olivetti Olibook S1300 - a gift of Salvo Mizzi, of the Working Capital fame - died. I decided it was great time to face the experience of making my Acer Aspire one printing. While below you’ll find a detailed report about my journey to make possible to print via Linux with a Canon LBP 810, first I wish to share my thoughts about what all this means.

Plug&Play maybe a frustrating experience if something goes wrong for some reason, since most of the times you have little chances to fix an issue if that arise. On the contrary with Linux you’re given the unique opportunity to be in full control of your destiny, and you can litterally build your own future (no pun intended).

As you can easily figure out yourself - or if you don’t have the time just go on and read my painful experience to make it print - freedom really come at a price here. Note that the problem is not that by bad luck my old Canon printer for some weird reason doesn’t come with Linux drivers. To be honest the LBP810 doesn’t even come with Mac drivers.

The Windows network effect is a fact, and the Microsoft industrial processes associated with making Windows the ubiquitous desktop is also a fact. All OEMs play by te market rules, and they make sure their products are compatible with all the Windows flavours. Unless the market will observe Linux desktop crossing the chasm, we won’t see any YoLD. Period.

So said, go on and read if you want to know how to configure your Acer Aspire to make it print on a LBP810.

Continue reading ‘Printing with Ubuntu and Why Microsoft Will Never Be Obsoleted’

When I’ve joined SourceForge my only concern was to abandon the SOS Open Source ship. While at a technical level I was still able to keep enhancing SOS Open Source tools, I had to give up all related business activities.

I’m happy and honoured to say that I have finally found a person who will take care of SOS Open Source business development.

Read more at SOS Open Source.

We appreciate all the support we’ve gotten over the years from Slashdot’s logged-in users. They take part actively in discussions, and in exchange for their active interest in the site, we like to give a few perks over and above what our beloved anonymous readers get. But we never want to deprive anonymous readers of the actual features of the site — whether you’re a logged-in account holder, anonymous, a subscriber, or have a username but are browsing anonymously at any given moment, Slashdot has always been freely available to read for anyone with a browser and an uncensored Internet connection. It’s a balance we try to maintain, too, Sure, we’d like you to login, and we think it has some worthwhile benefits (like tracking comment responses, building karma, and using the Zoo system to keep track of your friends and foes), but we’ll never force you to. Today, we’re building on this approach, by introducing a feature that benefits every logged-in user, but still leaves the page free to read for all. We’ll be phasing in over the next few days a button that logged-in users and subscribers can click to decrypt the text of each Slashdot posting with the trivial transform known as Rot13.

Read more at Slashdot.

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before that SourceForge has been acquired by Dice Holdings back in Septmeber 2012. As a result the name of our parent company has been changed in Slashdot Media. As you could easily guess the name comes from the heritage of Slashdot, one of the three Geeknet media properties bought by Dice (namely FreeCode, Slashdot and SourceForge).

So said, SourceForge is still dedicated to being the most trusted source for Open Source, and will continue to provide free hosting for your Open Source project, and you’re welcome either if you need the full set of tools or just a way to distribute your program.

If you didn’t check it out yet, take a moment to look at our brand new Enterprise directory (beta).

If you want to know more about our new corporate entity, you can read all about it at slashdotmedia new website.

SourceForge just launched a new Enterprise Directory, a sub-section focused specifically on Enterprise projects. These are the projects that are geared specifically for use within a company, ranging from office suites to ECM, backup software and more.

Either enterprise-grade projects developed at SourceForge or at other forges would benefit from being enlisted in the new directory, now enriched with a resource center containing useful information about partners, add-ons, books and upcoming events.

Over 40 million unique visitors per month come to SourceForge looking for open source software, and enterprise-grade products is a big part of it. The Enterprise directory is just aimed at making IT Decision Makers’ lives easier, by gathering projects’ relevant information in one single page.

Hope you’ll enjoy, stay tuned!

I have just received an email from the Agency for Digital Italy answering my self-candidature to join the working group aimed at defining the technical and economical assessment criteria for open source procurement.

Apparently they received an high number of requests, and my resume wasn’t good enough, says Francesco Grasso, Coordinator of the working group and sci-fi writer.

Having been writing about commercial open source for years, I finally decided to start a new blog category at SourceForge blog to cover the business side of open source. I’ll be posting on SourceForge blog interviews to people who can tell us stories about how they combine open source and business at SourceForge blog, and I’ll comment on them here. Continue reading ‘Company-led Projects: Liferay’

The PROSE survey - whose goal is to ascertain the requirements of a hosted source forge for EC ICT projects - has been EXTENDED until 11/01/2013, we’d welcome especially FP7 projects’ members to take the time to answer all our questions.

For more information visit the PROSE blog.

Thank you for your collaboration!

In 2012 Apache OpenOffice ™ become an Apache top level project, and 30,687,795 downloads of Apache OpenOffice were served via SourceForge.

I look forward to further collaborate with OpenOffice, the Apache Software Foundation and all open source projects making everyday easier living open source!

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, with my SourceForge hat I’m working on two different EU-funded projects, called MARKOS and PROSE. PROSE - whose aim is to promote Open Source in European Projects through an open source project platform, training on legal and business aspects and through dissemination events - is now running an online survey for Forge Platform Requirements.

Since the goal of the survey is to ascertain the requirements of a hosted source forge for EC ICT projects, we’d welcome especially FP7 projects’ members to take the time to answer all our questions.

All individual responses will be treated as confidential however we plan to use a summary of results in future presentations to the community. So, please fill out the PROSE online survey and contribute the improvement of FLOSS adoption in European projects.

For more information on the survey visit the prose BLOG http://ict-prose.eu/blog

Thank you for you collaboration!