Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

Savio Rodriguez wrote an interesting post on RHX, here a small excerpt:

The open source community really doesn’t need another arena for projects to live and be downloaded from. There are plenty of players in this space (Sourceforge, Apache, Google, Codehaus, etc.). RHX isn’t intended to drive 1M downloads a day, or hundreds of project ratings. These are functions that developers generally do. Enterprise buyers and decision makers are less likely (not unlikely) to play this role.

Read the full post.

Open source BI - Is Open Source BI seriously threatening to the traditional markets of companies such as Business Objects and Cognos?

How Microsoft helps open source - Dana interviews Matt Asay, recently became his colleague. Is Microsoft really helping Alfresco to expand its market with SharePoint?

OpenBSD founder: Intel leaves open-source out in the cold - Theo de Raadt , OpenBSD founder, accused Intel of understating the impact of bugs affecting Intel Core 2 processors.

Open Source Apps: Now With Smaller Teams - It seems like some open source projects are doing more with less.

The Open Source CEO: Gianugo Rabellino, Sourcesense (Part 16) - Matt Asay keeps interviewing Open Source CEOs, a bit like my blog category “my meetings” (great minds do think alike!;-). This time is Gianugo’s turn, and he beat me to it!

Solving the Open Source Conundrum - Glyn Moody talking of the problem with the term “open source” brings IBM software patents into the debate, not sure I like the approach.

GPLv3 due on Friday 29th - After a year and a half, GPLv3 is finally due this Friday, June 29th.

W3C Public Conference - Public Not Invited - A meeting about “Toward More Transparent Government” was suuposed to be public, when CNet attempted to cover it, the meaning of “Public” was reversed to mean “Closed to public”.

ODF is not open source, is open standard - Bob Sutor suggests to divorce open source from open standards, and I insist saying that European IT companies should pay more attention to the swpat debate.

Something strange about Wordpress - James Governor on Wordpress, also my platform of choice. I take the chance to send him a meme about Open Source Franchising.

Few months ago I wrote about the need of open source lobbyists, just after
Dana Blankenhorn post, and I eventually ended reporting Florian Mueller and Simon Phipps opinions around software patents war.

Florian Mueller, “No lobbyists as such” author and founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has recently announced to take his blog offline in about a month, because he retired from the patent policy debate, and I took the chance to ask Florian two more questions.

Talking about the role of interoperability, you wrote me that also Google played a role, so which is their position, in your opinion?

As for Google, I’m quite sure there are lots of people inside Google (well, even inside Microsoft) who are anti-swpat personally but the company position isn’t really clear. The only thing they really cared about in the final days before the EP’s 2nd reading vote 2 years ago was interoperability, just so they can continue to analyze PDF documents without infringing Adobe’s related patents etc.

Are you about to leave for good the patent policy debate? Why?

I still care about the software patent issue and a competitive software market, and I believe that my long-standing concerns over their impact have been validated by Microsoft’s Novell-type deals and its announcement to collect royalties from FOSS users. But after my recent and successful project to defend certain strategic interests of Real Madrid in the context of the EU’s ongoing sports policy initiative, I’m at least ten times more likely to take on another football-related assignment than to get involved with patent policy again.

I just don’t see that companies with an interest in fighting software patents would make the level of resources available that I would consider to be a reasonable basis. In other fields that’s a lot less of a problem, if any. That’s just a market reality.

Florian Mueller by duncandavidson

In Europe we are still facing very talented lobbyists working hard on this controversial political issue, and despite patentability of computer-implemented inventions is not yet legal in Europe, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Interoperability matters, but software patents do matter even more: the file format war is not the ICT market panacea. I invite medium to large IT European companies to think about it, and invest money to lobby. Now.

Technorati Tags: google, software patent, lobbyists, mueller

The first Italian Barcamp about video-blogging and Web TV went live over the Internet in many different forms, last Saturday from Taxi Channel studios, here in Rome.

Vlog camp, Robin Good & Tommaso Tessarolo Smeerch

Despite the hot day, there were quiet a few people, and I happened to know Bruno Pellegrini. founder of Nessuno.TV a portal for Italian videobloggers, and also TheBlogTV, probably the first TV station broadcasting user-generated content. Bruno wrote also a book, entitled “Io? Come diventare videoblogger e non morire da spettatore” (eng: Me? How to become a videoblogger and do not die spectator), given as a present to all participants.

Tommaso Tessarolo, author of another book entitled “NetTv“, was also present, and he presented an interesting backstage video.

Robin Good went live all the time on his robingood.tv, I happened to help him recording his speech about how to become a video-blogger, and I interviewed Amanda Lorenzani and Leo Sorge talking about Italian startups.
Robin Good reported the whole event through two different posts Part 1 and Part 2, if you speak Italian or you want to, have a look!

Technorati Tags: vog camp, barcamp, theblogtv

The Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, on the 22th of June announced the creation of the second Open Source Commission, composed of sixteen members and coordinated by Angelo Raffaele Meo. The Commission will be supported also by the National Center for Information Technology in Public Administration(CNIPA) and the Department of Innovation.

Italian coffee cirox

The start of this commission is further proof of my personal and Government willingness to aid the diffusion of Open Source software, fostering open source policies and making them central.

The Commission follows two other important initiatives:

• the Italian Budget law assigned funds to substain innovation through open source by local Public Administrations;
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• The Collaborative Development Environment launch, offering Italian Public Administrations a medium to co-develop open source applications with other public administrations.

The Commission will define guidelines for IT Public procurement of open source software.

Technorati Tags: Open Source Government, Open Source Procurement, Italy

Open Source Comedy as Smart Marketing - What about making an Open Source Comedy to tell people about “false” Open Source firms? Between irony and sarcasm there is plenty of space for education through fun

What makes an open source company: Centric CRM’s response - Michael Harvey gives his explanation of what open source is. Is granting customers the freedom to modify their software or any part of it for internal use enough? I doubt

Little red hens of open source CRM - Dana Blankenhorn come back talking about the Open Source CRM thing: The value of business software comes out only when you work with it, when you tweak it, when you support it. Absolutely right, s I mentioned few times, there is no third way in this respect: best code or best knowledge.

Pragmatic Open Source - Coté starting from the perennial open source question goes much, much beyond. A must read.

Calling Socialtext Open Source - Ross Mayfield, SocialText CEO, asks the community what they should call themselves, while telling us about the experience to get his license certified by OSI.

Thoughts on OSI, OSD and quasi-open source - Alex Fletcher suggests OSI to proceed constructing (and consistently update) a comprehensive account of the open source which is in violation of its definition of open source, and promote this list to the general community.

OSI to take more active role in open source definition enforcement - Ryan Paul at ArsTechinica says that although he sympathizea with OSI’s concern about vendor abuse of the “open source” label, the organization should be above starting a needless fight that it can’t win.

The OSI crackdown: too little, too late? - Gianugo talking about Tiemann’s position, come out with thr idea of an awareness campaign, making sure that the world knows who’s been fathering the Open Source Definition, and what is not. I buy the idea.

Micheal Tiemann: Protecting the Open Source Definition - Amy Stephen does some hypothesis about what might happen, food for thoughts.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, OSI, Tiemann, SocialText

Michael Tiemann, President of the Open Source Initiative, yesterday took a clear position against the abuse of the term Open Source, replying to a Dana Blankenhorn post ” How far can open source CRM get?“.

I have been on the board of the OSI for more than 5 years, and until last year it was fairly easy for us to police the term open source: once every 2-3 months we’d receive notice that some company or another was advertising that their software was “open source” when the license was not approved by the OSI board and, upon inspection, was clearly not open source. We (usually Russ Nelson) would send them a notice politely telling them “We are the Open Source Initiative. We wrote a definition of what it means to be open source, we promote that definition, and that’s what the world expects when they see the term mentioned. Do you really want to explain to your prospective customers ‘um…we don’t actually intend to offer you these freedoms and rights you expect?’.” And they would promptly respond by saying “Wow! We had no idea!” Maybe once or twice they would say “What a novel idea! We’ll change our license to one that’s approved by you!”. Most of the time they would say “Oops! Thanks for letting us know–we’ll promote our software in some other way.” And they did, until last year.

It is interesting to see how things change: O tempora, o mores (Alas for the times and the manners).

So here’s what I propose: let’s all agree–vendors, press, analysts, and others who identify themselves as community members–to use the term ‘open source’ to refer to software licensed under an OSI-approved license. If no company can be successful by selling a CRM solution licensed under an OSI-approved license, then OSI (and the open source movement) should take the heat for promoting a model that is not sustainable in a free market economy. We can treat that case as a bug, and together we can work (with many eyes) to discern what it is about the existing open source definition or open source licenses made CRM a failure when so many other applications are flourishing. But just because a CEO thinks his company will be more successful by promoting proprietary software as open source doesn’t teach anything about the true value of open source.

Stand up by groc

I welcome Tiemann stand up, really. Nonetheless I am among them thinking that Tiemann could hardly enforce his plan, though. My concerns are about the following open issues:

• Badge-ware: OSI has still to sort out the MPL+attribution issue, eventually showing us why we need them;
  .
• Approval Process: I don’t like much OSI, or worse FSF, license approval processes, but what is really wrong with both it is that are far to be a (fully) democratic process, as results also from the Open Source initiative approved rules:
  ..

4. Send your proposed license by email to license-approval@opensource.org. Indicate in the email whether you want the license posted to the license-discuss list with your identification or anonymously. We are willing to consider licenses that the author doesn’t want posted at all, but since community review is an important part of the approval process, we will have to circulate such licenses privately to individual reviewers: because of this, licenses not posted to license-discuss at all may take longer to approve, and are likely to require more interaction with you

Consider taking a position also on these issues, please.

Technorati Tags: OSI, Tiemann, attribution, Open Source

Few weeks ago Ross Turk, SourceForge Community Manager, went to LinuxTag to find out more about the open source community in Germany. While in Europe, he decided to visit me in Italy to do the same thing.

Ross asked me to have a conversation to better understand how SourceForge.net can be a more useful resource to Italian open source developers and users, and we started talking about SF Marketplace. Ross understandably refused to gossip about what Michael Rudolph, formerly working at eBay, will be doing with his new (beta) trading platform. Despite his “corporate silence”, I took the chance to tell him few things I would like to see on SF Marketplace:

• Ads that sells: the SF marketplace once up and running will likely be a “glocal” market, and I see a tremendous opportunity to sell ads to local providers (needless to say based on searches, top downloads, etc);
  .
• Fostering communities: The SF marketplace could greatly help upcoming projects to find developers, users and customers, through local get-together, sprints or virtual meet-ups. Cross-projects collaboration in the long tail, new (unexpected) open source stacks, and much more, the sky is the limit;
  .
• Adding value to value: the SF marketplace might address the needs of SMBs looking for single developers or small firms, but could also respond to the medium size enterprises’ needs, looking for complete IT services. Sooner or later Cross-selling, Up-selling and Down-selling will find their way, I guess.
  .

Ross eventually ended answering also some questions, below the interview:

Ross Turk at LinuxTag by Axel Hecht

Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get where you are today?

I started working for SourceForge in May of 2000. Of course, we were called VA Linux at that time, and I was an engineer in the Professional Services team. Shortly after I started, we began getting requests to install corporate instances of SourceForge.net, and I was among a handful of engineers initially performing those deployments. After a while, VA Linux decided to turn what we were doing into SourceForge Enterprise Edition and become VA Software. I stayed on and became a PS Architect, where I met with customers and did some of our heavier customizations.
In about 2005, I was looking for a change. I asked to be moved to the SourceForge.net team, where I became the Engineering Manager. The two years I spent in that position were a tremendous education for me! Very few people get the opportunity to be so closely involved in the architeture and operation of such a large web site. However, the more I learned about the site, the more I began to see the need for better communication with our user community. The minimal time I could devote to community-based activity just wasn’t enough. In the last half of 2006, it became clear that it could use someone’s full-time focus - I asked for the job, and that’s what I’m doing now!

You’re the Community Manager for SourceForge.net. What does that mean?

Our team is now more focused on what will make the community successful than I’ve ever seen it. Certainly, the position of Community Manager isn’t like anything SourceForge.net has had before.
When you reduce it down to its simplest form, my job is to talk to as many people in the SourceForge.net and open source communities as possible. I am here to spread the word about SourceForge.net and ensure that our constituents know what we’re up to. More importantly, I’m here to provide my organization with the “eyes and ears” that it needs to help our community members succeed at what they’re trying to do.

I think that if the members of our community are successful, we will be too.
I think that I just may have the coolest job of anyone I know. I get to talk to the smartest, most innovative, and most passionate people in the industry, and I get to travel the world while I’m doing it.

What has the SourceForge.net crew been up to recently?

We just launched the open beta of the SourceForge.net Marketplace, a set of tools on the site that allow our community to buy and sell goods and services from one another. Using these tools, any member of our community with expertise on a particular project or technology can make their services available to everyone else. I think these features will be invaluable - not only for developers looking for a way to financially support their open source work, but also for end users looking for access to those most familiar with the technology they use. It’s a whole new direction for the site, and our team is really excited to be working on something fresh!

We also introduced wiki functionality into our project toolset through a collaboration with Wikispaces. Their wiki tool is full-featured and user-friendly, and having their help allowed us to release this functionality a lot quicker than if we’d have written it by ourselves. Needless to say, we expect this to become a large part of our projects’ tool arsenals.

However, the nearest and dearest to me is the SourceForge.net Community Section. As I’m writing this, it’s still being built…[now live, see it] but by the time your readers see this, it’ll probably be live at http://sourceforge.net/community.

It consists of a blog we can use to talk about our feature roadmap, make announcements, and highlight some of the personalities in our community that readers might find interesting. It will also have a forum system that will allow users to discuss things related to open source and SourceForge.net. The first thing that I plan to promote heavily on the Community Section will be our Community Choice Awards, which entered their primary nomination phase a few weeks ago.

I would love to talk with your readers about any of these topics, or anything else related to SourceForge.net or open source, and I can always be reached at rturk@corp.sourceforge.com. Thanks for taking the time to write about what we’re up to!

Thank you Ross for your answers, happy hacking!

Technorati Tags: SourceForge, Marketplace, RossTurk