Commercial Open Source Software

A Few days ago Nuxeo, a UK-based provider of Open Source Enterprise Content Management solutions based in Paris, announced the appointment of Steve Raby as their UK Country Manager.

Nuxeo, is a European Open Source firm basically selling subscriptions and services to aid customers and partners to operate their projects on top of the Nuxeo platform.

Nuxeo, that might be named a “pure player” - if such characterization still makes some sense - don’t reserve advanced features to proprietary versions - what we call Split OSS/Commercial product - providing also support on the “community” version.

Stefane Fermigier, Nuxeo’s CEO, told me:

We don’t make this kind of distinction between “community” and “professional” versions, there is only one Nuxeo version, which has all the features we can put into at a given time, and for which customers can buy support if they need.

Steve Raby

Nuxeo hiring Steve Raby - bringing his 25 years of sales experience, 17 years of which at Sun selling high-end solutions to Enterprise customers and dealing with partners, and 3 years at JBoss building up the UK/Northern Europe sales organization from scratch - made a step typical of “traditional” IT vendors. Stefane commented:

Steve is the right guy for us at this stage of our development. For instance, during our first conversation with him, we was convinced after less that 15 minutes that he had a deep understanding of the open source business, that he could articulate very clearly the benefits for this approach for the customers.

Open Source or not, it is still the business that pays!

Technorati Tags: Open Source ECM, Open Source Strategy, ECM, StefaneFermigier, SteveRaby

Today the GPL v3 and LGPL v3 were unanimously approved by the OSI board, as reported by Michael Tiemann, President of the Open Source Initiative.

Tiemann blessed the GPLv3 few months ago, and the OSI board this time was really fast to close the GPLv3 approval process, showing a very different attitude compared with an other recent approval.

I really wish to congratulate with you all!

Michael Tiemann by pdcawley

Tiemann commenting on the OSI blog said he liked to personally acknowledge few people, among them all of us:

The broader communities of both the free software camp and the open source camps, who both challenged and supported the license drafting process. These communities made the drafts stronger as a result.

Now it is great time to take into consideration more difficult tasks, and I hope you are definitely not going to follow Eric Raymond line of thinking.

Despite my previous determination, I find I’m almost ready to recommend that OSI tell Microsoft to ram its licenses up one of its own orifices, even if they are technically OSD compliant. Because what good is it to conform to the letter of OSD if you’re raping its spirit?

A license is a license, it is definitely not matter of spirit!

Technorati Tags: GPL, GPLv3, OSI, FSF, MichaelTiemann, EricRaymond, Microsoft

Yesterday SELF - a community-driven platform for the production and distribution of educational materials sponsored by the EU IST programme  - has been officially launched by the Free Software Foundation Europe in the Netherlands during a conference on Free Software in Education.

The SELF platform aims to bring together educational institutes, training centres, software companies, publishing houses, government bodies and Free Software communities to centralise, create and disseminate educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards.

From linuxelectrons:

The SELF Platform has been developed by a global team of non-profit organisations, universities and volunteers engaged in the SELF Project, an initiative for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards. Users, primarily learners and teachers, are enabled to assemble selections of learning contents and create custom-made learning material for lessons in their language. The Platform is launched in beta stage to involve the growing community in optimising the tool.

All SELF materials are available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), materials from third parties are licenses under various similar licenses.

Let’s see now if  students and teachers will join the effort..

Technorati Tags: Free Software Education, FSFE, IST, SELF

VON Europe Autumn will be held in Rome on the 26th and 27th of September, industry leaders from all over the world will talk about where IP communications is going in Europe. SIP, IMS, IPTV and Voice are all being covered at this event, along Open Source Telephony issues and perspectives.

As chairman of the “Open Source Sustainability from the business perspective” conference I will be pleased to introduce Jon Hall ‘Maddog’ who will open the conference talking of “Open Source Telephony: the winning application in the Open Source world?”.

Jon Hall Maddog by Pizel y Dixel

Next to him professor Alfonso Fuggetta will give a speech about “New Business Models and Open Source”, a topic he is looking into from a while now.

Greg Vance - Digium Sales Manager - will bring us in the domain of Open Source PBX, talking about “Asterisk: an OS project that has become mainstream. What’s new”.

Bogdan-Andrei Iancu - CEO of VOICE SYSTEM and co-founder of the OpenSER project - who on Wednesday 26 will held also a course on OpenSER Administration, will talk about “The OpenSer: from Universities to industrial applications”, an Open Source SIP server.Last but not least, Diego Gosmar, Giuseppe Innamorato, Stefano Osler, authors of the book “Asterisk e dintorni” will talk About Asterisk and beyond.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Open Source SIP, Open Source PBX, Asterisk, OpenSer , JonHallMaddog, AlfonsoFuggetta, Bogdan-Andrei Iancu

Entering their third edition, the ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ Awards 2007 are now open for nominations. In 2005 the prize went to the bogus Campaign for Creativity, a front group used by large IT companies to lobby for software patents and intellectual property rights.

This year you can nominate for two categories:

1. The ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ Award for the lobbyist, company or lobby group that in 2007 has employed the most deceptive, misleading, or otherwise problematic lobbying tactics in their attempts to influence EU decision-making.
2. The special ‘Worst EU Greenwash’ Award for the company whose advertising, PR and lobbying lingo is most at odds with the real environmental impacts of their core business activities.

It’s up to you who will be eligible for these two awards! Until 15 September 2007 you can submit your nominations, see also some examples.

For more information and the nomination form see the worstlobby website.

About the Awards.

The ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ Award is to be given to the lobbyist, company or lobby group that in 2007 has employed the most deceptive, misleading, or otherwise problematic lobbying tactics in their attempts to influence EU decision-making. This year’s event also includes a special ‘Worst EU Greenwash’ Award for the company whose advertising, PR and lobbying lingo is most at odds with the real environmental impacts of their core business activities.

Technorati Tags: worst EU lobbying, software patents, EU