Commercial Open Source Software

Italy has been one of the most conservative European countries toward open source adoption by the public sector, but the Italian Budget law has some interesting news about free software.
Before talking about what’s new, it’s worth to mention Italy has a long story about OS evaluation.

In light of the spread of the Open Source phenomenon, the Italian Minister of Innovation and Technologies Mr Lucio Stanca decided to commission a study. On the 31th of October 2002, was established a Commission for free software in Public Administration. The Commission invited enterprises and associations for auditions and eventually published a Cognitive survey on open source software.

The proposals in the study are summarized as follows:

• Government offices should neither prohibit nor penalize the use of OSS packages: the criteria for selecting software solutions is “value for money”.
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• Customized software should belong fully to the public office that developed it, but the proprietorship should not necessarily be exclusive. Outsourcing contracts should include suitable protection clauses.
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• The re-use of customized software owned by public offices should be encouraged and facilitated, and successful results and best practices should be shared among all the public offices of the country.
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• Public offices must be able to inspect and trace all licensed software, and must be safeguarded against the risk of a supplier no longer being able to provide assistance.
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• Government information systems should interact through standard interfaces that do not depend on a single supplier.
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• Public documents should be preserved and made available in one or more formats. At least one format must be open. Government offices can decide, however, whether any additional formats should be open or proprietary.
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• The transfer of customized software and licenses between government offices should be unrestricted.
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• Guidelines, planning tools and support services for the procurement of software products by government offices should be prepared, for which the expertise and resources present in the country should be strengthened and exploited.
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The Commission suggested to let OSS would be eligible for e-government projects, as seen with the European Commission within the 5th, and the 6th Framework Programme for Research . The procurement and use of OSS was finally endorsed by Minister Stanca’s Directive of 18 December 2003.

On February 2004 was established a Working Group by the Center for the application of Italian Ministry of Innovation and Technology politics (CNIPA). The working group by July 2004 released a document containing indications on how to be compliant with the Directive.

Up to now very few public tenders have been really compliant with the Directive, and OSS is far to be considered widely as a valid alternative by Central Public Administrations.

But two days ago everything changed: the Italian Budget law is considering open source as a favorable factor in assigning funds to sustain innovation by local public administrations.
Beatrice Magnolfi, undersecretary State for Public Administration Reform and Innovation, commented the law said:

We do support Italian software industry growth, an archipelago of SMEs managed by young people, bringing innovation and creativity into the market.

But why is she speaking about an archipelago? The Italian ICT market, as shown by a recent analysis conducted by NetConsulting, is made by micro enterprise (under 9 employees) in 93,7 percent of cases; only 0,2% of ICT firms employ more than 250 employees. Now it’s where it comes from the deep interest toward small firms.

Magnolfi talking about the availability of a public forge where Public Administrations and firms might buid an IT ecosystem said:

It’s totally new! We’re making possible a marketplace where IT goods and services are exchanged more effectively, where public administrations’ needs and firms’ competencies and skills on open source platforms might meet.

Is Italy going to have its own Adullact?

Quaerendo invenietis - By seeking you shall discover..

MySQL recently threw MySQL Winter of Code, an initiative for encouraging contributions to MySql. Kaj Arnö, Vice President of Open Source Community Relations, said that more coding happens during wintertime than in summer, referring indirectly to Google’s initiative Summer of Code™.

As in other Open Source projects held by a Corporate actor, all contributors have to sign the Contributor License Agreement, now available in a click-through version to make things easier.

At the first MySQL Camp yhere were 223 registered attendees, definitely a success.Partecipants asked if MySQL AB was planning going to ask the community members for:

• what new features they would want others to contribute
• what contributions they are proposing to implement themselves

MySQL told them they have been contemplating mostly the second item, but after feebacks they were considering both of them.
MySQL is trying to develop its hybrid approach from the commensalistic form to a more symbiotic one, evaluating if and how get community members in the whole production process, moving beyond bug reporting and fixing.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a non-profit organisation dedicated to establishing a free market in information technology, invites you to European Patent Conference, on Wed 24th of January, 2007, in Brussels.

EUPACO-1 is the second in a series of events aimed at constructing a new European patent system through dialogue and collaboration based on research and data.

The topics that this event will cover are wide, including:

• the Community Patent proposal;
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• the European Patent Litigation Agreement proposals;
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• the future of the patent system;
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• new patent examination models;
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• patent litigation insurance.
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Speakers include:

• Dr Johanna Gibson, Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute;
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• Greg Perry, Director General, European Generics Medicines Association;
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• Pieter Hintjens, President, FFII;
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• Tommy Schweiger, Greenpeace;
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• Roger Burt, IBM IP Law Counsel for Europe;
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• Amedee Turner, CJA Consultants.
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Entrance is free. Breakfast and lunch will be served to registered participants. Wifi will be provided during the day.

Please register on line. Places are limited and early registration is highly recommended.

For further information please contact Benjamin Henrion bhenrion (at) ffii.org FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403

Sustainable competitive advantage, that’s what Warren Buffett, one of the most famous investors in the world, said he looks for in a company. So to determine if you do know your competitive advantage Erica Olsen suggests to answer the following questions in less than 30 seconds, succinctly with clarity.

What is your company goot at?

But a list of strenghts it’s not your competitive advantage, you need to clarify which is your unique advantage. Read the full story, and if you’re really thinking to start a new company have a look at David Spitz presentation, it’s worth a click.

But.. what about the amount of VC funding invested this year in the Linux and open source-related vendors? A rough extimation says open source funding was up 131% to $404.5m in 2006, and you better take notice.

Few days ago I wrote a commented a Billy Marshall’s suggestion telling I was convinced was taking advantage of commons-based peer-production, and the difference between Red Hat and Oracle expenditures on R&D had a simple explanation.

Today I read Savio Rodrigues post, comparing Red Hat’s SG&A spending to similar data from IBM, Oracle or Microsoft and I got a clear picture of the (often) unseen side of the moon.
I think he did a very good job searching around SEC files.

And I’m happy he is also half convinced that proprietary enterprise vendors spend 5-10x more on sales and marketing. As I wrote it’s true that COTS open source software is found by users, but it’s not trivial to turn them into customers.

Dana Blankenhor reported the most read story on his open source blog this year was The War is Over and Linux Won. The article was about an IBM-sponsored study indicating that most CIO plan to increase Linux investments instead of Windows’ ones. He remarked:

I expected this to be controversial, but I was, frankly, amazed at just how controversial it was.

Besides was true or not that small companies are moving off Windows and larger ones are moving off Solaris, the article was a success.

While reading SugarCRM press release, announcing they reached more than 1,000 paying customers since the first edition released in September 2004, I rembered about vitger CRM.

Vtiger CRM, derived by SugarCRM, is an Open Source CRM software mainly for small and medium businesses, where SugarCRM began serving SMEs but than has established large enterprise customers.

Vtiger CRM is based on LAMP, it’s completely open source and it comes along with extensions for Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook Plug-in for Outlook users and, Microsoft Office Plug-in for Word users.

I didn’t find any real benchmarking or comparison, but someone saying is good and someonelse saying is bad. Whatever is the future of Vtiger CRM, it’s interesting notice that has happened with the Red Hat-Oracle case, a weak intellectual property asset is risky, from many different angles

Vtiger CRM is built over a LAMP stack, along with SugarCRM, gdwin32 graphic library, PHPMailer, ADOdb,phpSysinfo and, last but not least, modifications to the SugarCRM code under a different license, named vtiger Public License 1.1, based on Mozilla Public License (MPL); others applications developed by Vitger external to SugarCRM code are under MPL. Apparently its license has been verified, since it’s listed by the FSF Directory.

A couple of weeks ago professor Maria Lillà Montagnani invited me to give a speech along with Pierpaolo Boccadamo, head of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy by the Italian subsidiary, by Bocconi private University.

I have already met Boccadamo when I took part to the Microsoft’s “Linux&Open Source Briefing” partner program as open source expert, and I was already used to openly discuss with him about technical ed economical differences of the proprietary and open source models.

I spent part of the weekend to prepare my slides, and I was looking forward to listen to sudents’ questions to my statements and suggestions. The slideshow was starting with a picture of the famous movie Dr StrangeLove, a little parody I did to get their attention. After a brief introduction I got into the heart of the argument, talking about organizational economics aspects and other issues about innovation.
To my suprise no questions were raised up when I was speaking firms and communities relationships, neither when I talked about disruptive innovation, and how it affects incumbents’ market leadership, nor when I mentioned sequential innovation and technology club partecipation.

Than Boccadamo spoke about Google, Microsoft strategy, and many other things.
Again, no question from the public.

If Picasso was definitely right saying that:

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

What about a class without questions?

Over the weekend I was reading some news, and I sorted out that Time Magazine have chosen the person of the year, someone who “for better or worse” the editor believes had the greatest impact on the year’s events.

In 1982 spotlights were on the Computer, the first non-human abstract to be chosen.

The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.

But they’re not lonely thinking like that, Gartner says blogging will reach his peak in 2007.
Whatever will happen, I believe Time is right saying that:

Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas.

Today by the Free Software Foundation Europe blog I have read a post reporting a link to test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL. I found another website reporting the same quiz, along with the author’s name and a link to the free software used to create the quiz, more interesting than the source code reported by the GNU page.

I hope you enjoy the quiz!