Commercial Open Source Software

Savio Rodriguez in response to my post about the post about the SourceForge’s initiative, said that, being SourceForge the place where to look for if interested in OSS products, the idea of making a marketplace out of it sounds quite natural. Rodriguez addressed also other interesting issues.

For emerging projects or for projects with a small development team/community, a majority of the 144,548 projects on SF (i.e. Longtail projects), getting included in the Marketplace would make a lot of sense. [..]
Experience tells me that customers are cautious when it comes to spending money. When they do, they want to spend with vendors that have a strong future. So, for longtail projects on SF, I’m not sure that the SF Marketplace will change much of this customer behaviour.

I just received SourceForge Update: 2007-03-30 Edition email, and in the top 25 projects’ list there is about no trace of large projects who already have support & services business attached. I know that is not easy to turn a user in a customer, but many are downloading packages that do need some work to be setup in a working environment.

Blueprint by sweetsexything

Alex Fletcher commenting Savio’s post come out with some examples of the diversity of use cases for open source, showing how an open source package can be a key component within customized solutions, regardless if are developed in house or otherwise.

Commenting the examples Alex wrote:

The associated process involved much more than downloading and running an executable version, but did not entail the purchase of a commercial version or indemnification protection from a vendor. [..] This is exactly what needs to be standardized for open source products across the board.

I do totally agree, but the construction of open implementation standards could be highly expensive. SMEs, creating and supporting most of the commercial open source products in the “long tail” are not going to do that, because too busy with daily activities. In this respect the previously mentioned Observatory of European SMEs finded that:

Small firms have a short-term perspective and expect quick and concrete results.

Could eventually SF help them to get paid to produce vertical, clear, good blueprints?

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, SourceForge, Marketplace, blueprint

IDABC’s Monthly Open Source News Service has been just released. The Open Source Observatory ’s monthly new service keeps us updated on news related to the use of FLOSS in the European Public Sector.

Some interesting spots:

IT: Umbria to promote Open Source in schools
Open Source News - 27 March 2007 - Italy - Policies and Announcements

The regional government of Umbria is investing 100.000 euro to promote the use of Open Source in local schools. The Italian region will soon train students, teachers and education management in the use of this type of software.

DK: Open standards made mandatory
Open Source news - 19 March 2007 - Denmark - Policies and announcements

Denmark is making the use of open standards mandatory in state, region and municipal governments starting next year. This was announced on February 23rd by Helge Sander, minister of Sciences, Technology and Innovation. His plan comes eight months after a resolution in the Danish parliament.
FR: OpenMairie, competitive Open Source services for medium-sized cities
Open Source News - 15 March 2007 - France - Deployments and Migrations

OpenMarie, a French Open Source project aiming to develop governmental applications for medium sized French cities, is increasing the competition in the market for applications for public administrations.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, IDABC, Italy, Denmark, France

The GNU GPL draft for the long-awaited third revision has now been read by a multitude of people, and all changes went under deep scrutiny. The blanket prohibition on DRM has been removed, and the SaaS loophole has not been fixed. As a result both Linus Torvalds and Chris DiBona are happy.

Choosing sign by elston

Today reading Fabrizio Capobianco’s post, I understand there is a “minority” that is not welcoming all these changes. Before Funambol wrote the Honest Public License people at Affero worked on the Affero License and also my friends at Partecs spent some efforts to find a countermeasure at the service loophole.

Congratulations to the Free Software Foundation for daring, choosing is always difficult and I believe that it wasn’t easy to take an unpopular decision, but I guess they had to.

Changing topic: Will OSI eventually be able to sort out what to do with the attribution thing? They were supposed to close the issue within February.

Post Scrittum: Steve Mills, IBM Software General Manager, and Matthew Szulik, Red Hat CEO, are happy too. The former said:

At some point you become so shrill and beyond what’s required that you lose the audience and the audience moves on to something else. We’ll have to see what finally evolves through the [GPL] process, it’s going through an update and the Free Software Foundation has a particular view of free software. Free software is a wonderful thing but there’s also a business model.

while the latter said:

I think the draft we saw last night was much better than the earlier drafts, especially around patent infringement and TiVo-ization.

Technorati Tags: GPL, GPLv3, Affero, OSI, FSF, attribution

“OpenOffice.org 2.2 just released”

Trieste, 29th of March 2007 –The OpenOffice.org Italian Association (PLIO) is proud to announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.2, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. OpenOffice.org 2.2 also protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users’ PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web sites set up by, malicious individuals.

In version 2.2, users will immediately notice the improvement in the quality of text display in all parts of OpenOffice.org. The reason for this is that the previously optional support for kerning, a technique to improve the appearance of text written in proportional fonts, has now been enabled by default. OpenOffice.org’s unique pdf export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and support for user-definable export of form fields.

Openoffice.org ads by factoryjoe

Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org new release: The Italian OpenOffice.org Association announces version 2.2′

Michael Tiemann, President of the Open Source Initiative, today posted about the last draft of the GNU General Public License, just released by the Free Software Foundation.

As result from the FSF Press Release changes include:

Tiemann by pdcawley

• First-time violators can have their license automatically restored if they remedy the problem within thirty days.
  .
• License compatibility terms have been simplified, with the goal of making them easier to understand and administer.
  .
• Manufacturers who include the software in consumer products must also provide installation information for the software along with the source. This change provides more narrow focus for requirements that were proposed in previous drafts.
  .
• New patent requirements have been added to prevent distributors from colluding with patent holders to provide discriminatory protection from patents.

Tiemann commenting the draft wrote:

I have read the newly released draft of GPLv3 carefully, and I believe it is a stunning accomplishment. (Disclaimer: not only am I no Einstein, I am also not a lawyer. However, my 20 years of experience with free software, the GPL, and 18 years of commercial experience should count for something.) My reading tells me three things. First, the GPLv3 is familiar; it is not as if everything we know must be relearned. Second, the GPLv3 deals with corner cases which, if left unfixed, will collapse, taking all our good work down with them; collapse is bad enough, but predictable collapse is shameful. Thirdly, the GPLv3 reaffirms that in spite of all the growth and all the success that the free software movement has enjoyed these past 20+ years, the goal of the Free Software Foundation remains centered on software freedom, and that the only prohibition they uphold is against those who seek to undermine such freedom. It is encouraging to see an organization maintain principle in the face of prosperity.

This morning, with GPLv3 on one monitor and the OSD on the other, I read a license that should have no trouble achieving OSI certification. Based on my reading, I encourage the Free Software Foundation to submit their final draft when they are ready so that the whole open source community can review, discuss, and recommend to the OSI board whether they, too, see what I see. If so, we should see a much-needed update added to the roster of OSI-approved licenses, and we will be in a position to encourage those whose business depends upon fairness to offer them a licensing choice that is both sound and safe.

Technorati Tags: GPL, GPLv3, OSI, FSF, Tiemann

Reading Groaklaw I happened to know about “Potential Defenses of Implied Patent License Under the GPL“. a must read for people who thinks that GPLv2 is silent about patents.

Laura Majerus, OSI Director of Legal Affairs and Partner at Fenwick & West, previously wrote “Patent Rights and Open Source - can they co-exist?“, already containing some interesting spots on the subject:

Against software patent by kianee

Setting aside any arguments that the Preamble of the GPL is somehow not a part of the license, it seems clear that an author or modifier who distributes software under the gpl cannot assert his patent rights against subsequent users and redistributors of the GPL’d software. Thus, there is
at least an implied license to those who receive the GPL’d software in any patents covered by the software.
Why then, would anyone want to obtain a patent on an invention that is going to be distributed under the GPL?
There are several reasons:

1. the author may plan to license the patent to others to produce a revenue stream
   .
2. the author may want to assert his[/her] patent rights against redistributors who do not conform to the GPL license terms (for example, by failing to redistribute under the GPL)
   .
3. the author may want to have patent rights to use as an offensive or defensive weapon against infringers who are not using the GPL’d software and
   .
4. the author may plan to also distribute a non-GPL’d version of the software.

According to one reasonable interpretation, the GPL only precludes the patentee from asserting his [/her] rights against people who are practicing the invention by using his[/her] GPL’d software. People who independently create other software are not subject to this implied license. As an aside, it seems that the author could assert his[/her] patent rights against a competitor who is himself releasing independently developed software under the GPL, as long as it is not based on the original author’s distribution. The fact that the infringer himself distributes under the GPL is irrelevant as to whether he[/she] is infringing patents of others. The original author has not given permission for his[/her] competitor to use the patented technology.

The author could sue people implementing his/her patents without using his/her GPLed implementation. Infringing activity falling outside the GPL scope are, in this perspective, subjected to patent infringement suit.

The follow up article analyzes in more depth the impact of the GPL on the patent rights of the patentee, and various implied license theories that users of GPL’d software could use in defense against a patent suit.

Read the full article.

Technorati Tags: GPL, GPLv2, software patent, Majerus

Secunia, the Danish company that collects, evaluates, verifies and analyzes all the information about software vulnerabilities, has just published the 2006 Report. The document summarizes the facts of the past year, and offers some statistics on the software that have been hit more severely by security problems.

In 2006, OpenOffice.Org has been affected only by 5 vulnerabilities for the total of the three versions still available in the market (which have all been solved), while its largest competitor – a proprietary application – has been affected by 67 vulnerabilities (several of these problems have not yet been solved, even if they have been identified quite a long time ago). This makes this software a leader of a very unconfortable category.

The last problem identified by Secunia last week, about three vulnerabilities - of which only the first, related to documents in WordPerfect native format, has been solved by a patch  while the others are still under scrutiny - is going to be solved by OpenOffice.Org 2.2, which is going to be released very soon.

The full report in PDF format is available for download.

PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project, is the Italian community of volunteers who develop, support and promote the open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office applications (standard ISO/IEC 26300) and is available on major computing platforms in over 90 languages, available to 90% of the world-wide population in their own mother tongue.
OpenOffice.org is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL), can be legally used in any context. 

PLIO, Progetto Linguistico Italiano OpenOffice.org:
http://it.openoffice.org
“Vola e fai volare con i gabbiani di OpenOffice.org: usalo, copialo e regalalo, è legale!”
For further information: Italo Vignoli (+39.348.5653829), stampa@openoffice.org

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice, PLIO, Security, Secunia

I just received an email from Sourceforge.net team, advising me about a new feature to buy or sell services for Commercial Open Source on SourceForge.net.

Forging by stefmaxwell

Dear SourceForge.net community member,

As an active participant in the Open Source community, you may be excited to learn about a new feature that we will add to SourceForge.net in late
spring/early summer. This feature will allow you to buy or sell services for Open Source software on SourceForge.net.

Interested? Follow the link below and we’ll keep you updated as we move towards the official launch of this feature:

https://ostg.wufoo.com/forms/marketplace-interest-list/

Thank you for your continued support,
The SourceForge.net Team

Sourceforge’s marketplace apparently will be soon released, and I believe it is great time to, and no one is in the position to do it effectively as they are.

They also opened a position for a Senior Marketing Manager, SourceForge.net Marketplace in Fremont, California. In the meanwhile they invite all SourceForge users to fill in a simple form, a sort of marketplace interest list.

VA Linux’s quarterly report contains many forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The software segment, focusing on SourceForge Enterprise Edition products and services, despite the increase in the number of customers, is of little importance nowadays, being less than 10% of the last quarterly results. It worth to notice that sales were primarily to customers located in US.

Considering that their network of web sites serves more than 30 million unique visitors monthly I believe that they can easily open up new markets acting as the mediator.

I wish them best of luck in the near future!

Technorati Tags: SourceForge, Commercial Open Source, Marketplace

Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries,released a discussion document to encourage debate around public service intervention in digital media and the concept of the Public Service Publisher. The Open Knowledge Foundation made a joint response in association with the Open Rights Group to OfCom’s Public Service Publisher consultation.

Public Content by jlori

Firstly, we commend the suggested investment in open content and open data. In particular we urge that, where the PSP funds the generation of new content, such content should always be made available under a license such that others are free to enjoy, redistribute and, most importantly, reuse and refashion that content.

Secondly, we ask that OfCom pay special attention to the ability of the PSP to invest in architectures of participation, both by supporting the development of Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Open Content technologies and projects and by investing in the creation of content to encourage the growth of networks around these technologies.[..]

The success of an endeavour like the PSP will rely upon these details of its founding principles, and we urge OfCom to pay significant attention to those details now. For example, the PSP may commission a website for people to post and discuss short films, investing in the “architectures of participation” suggested above. But unless the use of Free/Open Source software is specified, and the resulting website platform is ‘open’, allowing re-use and modification by other interested parties, the PSP will not be fully meeting its public service remit. Similarly, The PSP might commission a set of short films to be placed on the website, to seed its growth as a network. But unless the PSP commission explicitly requires that the resulting work be ‘open’ so that others are free to use, reuse and redistribute the work, the PSP’s audience will remain ‘consumers’ of content, and the PSP will have failed to maximise the opportunities of the digital age.

Finally, the PSP should engage in advocacy and educational initiatives to enable people, organisations and companies to publish their material using open licenses, formats and technologies. It is our sincere hope that the PSP can become a strong, public voice in favour of open knowledge structures.

Read the full article.

Technorati Tags: Open Content, Open Source, Open Knowledge

Priority Sign by Pete Reed

Representatives of the US government have demanded that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) come up with a solution for prioritizing certain data within government networks and at the interfaces to other networks. [..]

At the IETF meeting in Prague Antonio Desimone of the US Department of Defense said that the switch to a “global grid” raised a number of issues, such as how delivery of a specific e-mail could be ensured within a defined period of time. What was needed was a prioritizing of data, one that also took in emergency and catastrophe scenarios. [..]

The solution would have to encompass the networks of partners, such as NATO, as well as public and commercial networks. As it was, the prioritizing of important data traffic was a topic of interest to all sides, he declared. [..]

At the IETF meeting in Prague it was impossible to miss that some parties had their doubts about a default “priority bit” for data traffic. Commenting on the idea Fred Baker, Cisco developer and former head of the IETF, told heise online: “Realizing the prioritization in all servers is undoubtedly a controversial matter with the IETF.” He said he was especially worried that prioritization might in reality not be confined to authorized persons. Should confinement fail script kids and hackers might find ways to use “priority bits” for their purposes, he observed.

Read the full article.

Technorati Tags: IETF, prioritization, US Government, NATO