Last saturday Rome guested the Opencamp, an ad-hoc gathering to share and learn in an open environment about Open Source and Open Minds (i.e. Digital Freedom, Trusted Computing, Net Neutrality, Collaborative Web, Creative Commons, Politics and Tecnology, Web and Technology Standards, and more).
Opencamp logo, designed by Stefano Federici Simone Onofri
Opencamp, organized by “LSLUG”, a local Linux User group, is the second BarCamp held in Rome, and was quite different the first. Among attendees - not many to be honest - there were either industry professionals or IT students, with practical work experience on FLOSS (Adriano Gasparri, Matteo Brunati, Nicola Larosa, Andrea Martinez, Alberto Mucignat, Luca Sartoni, Giacomo Tufano and Italo Vignoli just to name a few), along with some stars of the Italian Blogosphere (Stefano Epifani, Alessio Jacona, Nicola Mattina, Antonio Pavolini, Tommaso Tessarolo, Leo Sorge, etc).
I took the chance to give a speech completely different from “Free as in Business: lucrative coopetition“, and instead of being informative on open source business model taxonomies, I chose to share some reflections to open the debate.
Considering that Italian VCs are not open to invest in open source firms because of the “weak” intellectual property asset, I suggested hackers to keep into consideration the following arguments:
- free software availability: considering just SourceForge we find 146,079 registered projects, 93748 different topics, and 1,561,695 registered users;
. - the very long tail: only half of top projects offer enterprise support, someone got financial backup by VCs, and a very tiny fraction are public traded;
. - people try free software: during the second quarter of fiscal 2007 SourceForge served 201 million downloads.
. - ready for prime time? Most of open source projects miss a corporate actor taking care of marketing, stack assurance, benchmarking and indeminification;
. - getting ready for business.
Software, Free Software is a digital good, whether SourceForge’s marketplace will work or not, the Web can help to agglomerate geographically dispersed market segments–the proverbial ‘Long Tail’.
Hackers have a chance to become contributors, may be even committers, and eventually open up their shops. They can also simply get hired by software firms or, more likely in my opinion, IT customers willing to get the “open source promise” - be independent - granted.
If you can catch Italian have a look at RobinGood posts (OpenCamp Part 1 and OpenCamp Part 2), a very good example of how online video might be used to deliver live contentusing ustream.tv.
Last but not least, special thanks to SanLorenzo for its free - as in good vine - food!
Ciao Roberto, sono fabio, organizzatore del RomeCamp e del prossimo VentureCamp a giugno dedicato al Venture Capital. Purtroppo non sono potuto venire all’OpenCamp ma ho letto il tuo post e quello del Senatore Cortiana. Ho visto che hai partlato di Venture e spero di incontrarti al prossimo barcamp. ciao ciao
Il numero dei partecipanti non influisce direttamente sul successo o no di un BarCamp, lo stesso Fabio (oramai un esperto in questo) ha detto in un recente post che i BarCamp esteri hanno un numero limitatissimo di partecipanti.. consideriamo poi che il tema è specifico il target stesso è più ristretto… insomma… pochi ma buoni!
PS. il logo dell’OpenCamp l’ho disegnato io