Labornet FILAS, a company created by Regione Lazio to sustain development and enterprise innovation processes offering courses for the enterprises development, organized a webinar on SMEs and Open Source.
The webinar was aimed at exploring the issues and concerns around open source from IT firms’ perspectives, providing answers to questions about open source readiness.
I was happy to join the initiative and therefore held my first webinar. I found breeze easy to use, but we experienced few problems with bandwidth and document standards (Open Document Format are not supported apparently).
Attendees were impressed by the honesty of my speech when I went through OpenOffice Migration issues.
Talking about how open source firms inter-relate to their communities, I described the symbiotic, commensalistic and parasitic categories. An attendee asked me if, in my opinion, all Italian IT firms were falling in the last one. Unfortunately, almost all Italian open source firms are not symbiotic to any community. Some are collaborating at some extent in a commensalistic fashion. As a matter of fact, the majority are parasite.
Not surprisingly none of them see her company develop its own product, so the only approach they are considering at the present stage is both the best knowledge here approach, not the best code here (despite there are at least two Italian firms doing it, Funambol and Medialogic).
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