Commercial Open Source Software

“Mind the Bridge” is an opportunity for Italian entrepreneurs to present their ideas to a core group of experienced executives and potential investors in the Silicon Valley.

A useful bridge by petetaylor

The initiative - see also the full video of the event presentation, guested by Cisco - is led by Marco Marinucci (blog), a Google executive and affiliate member of First Generation Network, is aimed at aiding Italian entrepreneurs to get funds in Silicon Valley to build their own startups.

Fabrizio Capobianco is going to be in the selection committee, so Open Source Entrepreneurs can hope to be welcomed enthusiastically!

Be fast, the deadline to present your business plan is the 21th of December, there are only seven seats on board!

I take the chance to meme some friends to spread the word, I know them all are interested in Venture Capital (Alessio Iacona, Amanda Lorenzani, Andrea Genovese, Fabio Masetti, Leo Sorge, Nicola Mattina, Roldano De Persio, Stefano Maffulli, Tara Kelly).

Technorati Tags: business plan competition, Italian Startup, Mind the Bridge, MarcoMarinucci

At the 6th NorthEast Asia Open Source SW Promotion Forum held in Seoul on the 12 September 2007 Christophe Forax, representing the EU Telecom and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding, stated that Europe should better monetize open source software.

Help the fairy penguins by jojo79

The European Union, notably through its IST research programme, has been supporting open source for many years with projects in areas as diverse as eHealth, digital libraries, Grid infrastructures, the GEANT research network backbone, eGovernment, multimedia, embedded system applications, software and middleware development. [..]

Indeed, for the time being, whereas anybody can contribute to an open source development – our citizens and companies actively do it – most of the management and the marketing business on open source is done by US companies. These are issues that should be addressed by the European and Asian software and IT communities and by governments in a more proactive way.

Few days ago Viviane Reding in person commenting “Truffle 100 Europe,” the leading ranking of the top 100 European software companies, is told to have said similar things.

Open Source analysts commented calling for “Europe’s open source opportunity” and claiming “Europe the leader, not the follower in open source“, bringing interesting arguments and questions on the table.

Geographical distribution of developers.

Matthew Aslett asks where come from statistics stating that 70% of open source developers worldwide are European. I asked Ross Turk, SourceForge Community Manager, some statistics for September 2007 (25 million unique visitors):

• 17.89% United states
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• 7.77% Germany
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• 6.35% Italy
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• 5.72% Spain
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• 5.64% France
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• 4.27% Brazil
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• 4.05% United Kingdom
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• 3.12% Canada
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• 2.72% Japan
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• 2.40% Poland
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• 40.07% Other

While I am not sure that SourceForge users’ geographical distribution is a good measure of how many open source developers are based in Europe, I can hardly believe that 70% might be an accurate estimation. FLOSSimpact research gets a point looking at committers. Besides Debian it could be relevant to examine also what happens within the Apache Software Foundation and other international organizations.

Europe’s position towards Open Source.

It is quite difficult to talk about a European open source strategy, but reading the last IDABC Open Source Observatory News Roundup is clear that something is changing:

• EU: Council of Ministers calls on members to also use Open Source.
• Networks effects: Plone for Belgium and beyond
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• EE: Open Source ID developers connect to national ID card
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• PT: Government Institute to migrate to OpenOffice
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• CY: Open source provides tools for Universities

It is not a general trend yet, but it is true that many European countries and regions are looking more and more in open source software. While Public Administrations get interested, medium to large IT firms are still unable to fulfill customers’ expectations, lacking to offer services on a wide range of applications and infrastructures.

Evaluation of costs/benefits of transitions.

Guidelines, case histories and blueprints are needed to speed up open source adoption by public administrations and private firms.

KBSt, the German Federal Government Co-ordination and Advisory Agency for IT in the Federal Administration, published a Migration Guide aimed at migrating the basic software components on server and workstation, revised on March 2005. Despite has not been updated recently, it really worth reading.

IDABC, the Pan European eGovernment Services, in November 2003 published the IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines, designed to help public administrators decide whether a migration to OSS should be undertaken. It’s a general introduction to migration’s issues and opportunities, still a good start point for newbies.

A long time ago I happened to read the Deliverable 6.1 of COSPA, the Consortium aims at analysing the effects of the introduction of Open Data Standards (ODS) and Open Source (OS) software for personal productivity and document management in European Public Administrations (PAs).

The goal of Deliverable D6.1 is to run experiments on the introduction of OSS/ODS in the partner PAs, and to benchmark the effectiveness of the deployed OSS solutions through a statistical and cost/benefit analysis using the framework developed in D3.1.

Despite news section still announces the availability of this deliverable, I couldn’t manage to find it. I am happy that the Wayback Machine still archives those pages, and the full document as well.

Enclosed you will find in depth cases studies of Total Cost of Ownership and Migration Costs, I hope you will enjoy and help the dissemination, since apparently the COSPA website gave up with it.

Why that? Remember, transparency pays, always.

Technorati Tags: Open Source Migration, Open Source Government, Europe IT strategy, OpenOffice.org, Migration, FLOSSimpact, IDABC, Open Source Observatory, KBST

It has been a long, long, long road, but after the evaluation by the Commission, I am happy to announce that we have finally published our guide for small and medium enterprises, designed to help the adoption process of open source and free software.

We have striven to be pragmatic (no vendor-paid research, for example) and practical; two more editions will follow, every 6 months, to allow for updates and new material.

Open Source Directions by geraldinha_1/

The guide (developed in the context of the FLOSSMETRICS and OpenTTT projects) present a set of guidelines and suggestions for the adoption of open source software within SMEs, using a ladder model that will guide companies from the initial selection and adoption of FLOSS within the IT infrastructure up to the creation of suitable business models based on open source software.

The guide is split into an 80 pages introduction to FLOSS and a catalog of 165 applications, selected to fulfill the requests that were gathered in the interviews and audit in the OpenTTT project. The application areas are infrastructural software (ranging from network and system management to security), ERP and CRM applications, groupware, document management, content management systems (CMS), VoIP, graphics/CAD/GIS systems, desktop applications, engineering and manufacturing, vertical business applications and eLearning.

The guide is available at the guide web page ; the two pdfs are 2Mb (”FLOSS Guide“) and 20 Mbytes (”FLOSS Catalog“), so take it into account if you are connected by narrowband or cell phone.

I welcome any suggestion, addition or criticism; I hope that this can become the beginning of a collaborating community centered on helping the use and adoption of OSS in companies. I thank Roberto for the many suggestions and for the use of his blog as a media for future updates and interactions with any welcome contributor. To facilitate conversation on the topic touched by the guide, and in particular those related to open source business model, we are preparing a mailing-list that will be announced soon.

Technorati Tags: FLOSSMETRICS, OpenTTT, Software Selection, Open Source Adoption, Open Source Strategy

The GNU Affero GPL v3 has recently been published, eventually closing the ‘Software as a Service Loophole‘, preventing code covered by AGPL to be offered as a service without modifications being published. Simon Phipps is surpised SugarCRM didn’t wait for Affero, while Michael Tiemann would like to see the AGPL tested in the marketplace.

Simon and Michael raise an interesting point, in this post my final objective is to understand whether SugarCRM should or not adopt the AGPL. First, some background on the CRM market and SugarCRM.

Gartner claimed that worldwide CRM software revenue is forecast to exceed $7.4 billion in 2007 and SaaS-based CRM adoption is growing at more than double the rate of the CRM market as whole.Despite SugarCRM’s Magic Quadrant position is not brilliant, SugarCRM appears to be pretty in the know compared to others, as results also from SugarCRM’s results.

Back in November 2007 John Roberts Sugar, SugarCRM CEO and co-founder, explaining “why attribution matters” wrote:

These folks were simply lifting our identifying marks and “pretending to the world” that they wrote software that they indeed had not. They also had no intention at all of adding to the SugarCRM project since that showed they weren’t the original authors of the software.

Suprisingly few months later SugarCRM announced that the Sugar Community Edition 5.0 was going to be licensed under the GPLv3. As a matter of fact SugarCRM appears to be the most visible among the open source CRM SaaS vendors, if not the only one. At the end of August on-demand installations accounted for 40% of SugarCRM’s customers: as a matter of fact sales SaaS-based were already important. Hence the questions posed by Simon and others:

Could distributing the software with licence exposed to the GPL loop hole place SugarCRM at risk? How could SugarCRM have possibly changed its mind by embracing GPL considering the importance formerly given to brand protection? Futhermore could competitors easily “steal” customers from SugarCRM using SugarCRM?

Let’s start seeing some SugarCRM’s unique selling points:

• SugarCRM is well integrated with other productivity applications;
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• SugarExchange, the SugarCRM marketplace, offers hundreds of module extensions, themes and language packs provided by SugarCRM community members and partners;
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• SugarForge is a vibrant open source community, able to bring SugarExchange to guest 400 applications in less than 4 months. SugarForge can allegidely be considered one of the most important community after the Linux group. SugarCRM is amazing because it’s a community built around an enterprise software application rather than an infrastructural platform.

Yes, competitors could attract SugarCRM’s customers but in order to do that they would need to:

• Spend a large amount of money in marketing;
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• Create or replace proprietary plug-ins and add-ons;
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• Close partnerships with those partners that are currently working with SugarCRM.

As seen with the competition between open source vs proprietary software, it takes time to overtake an existing proposal with a functionally equivalent one. Even using just the same product, as seen with Unbreakable Linux and Red Hat, it’s proven not to be such an easy task, despite Ellison pretends it is. Partnerships, marketing and the addition of proprietary plug-ins makes the overtake definitely complex.

Keeping all of this in mind I doubt SugarCRM would ever consider using an unknown licence as the AGPL. What matters to the customer is the free availability of the community edition enabling their hassle free try&buy evaluation processess. Going GPL SugarCRM makes customers’ lives much easier than it was with the MPL +attribution thing.

Unfortunately the AGPL is unlikely to get a broad acceptance even in the long run, just because so much free software is released under the GPL, no matter which version, it’s not going to magically turn into AGPL. ASP welcomed the GPLv3, there is no chance they will move to AGPL considering their attitude to creating differentiating software.

In conclusion, SugarCRM will likely stay with a well known licence making its customers’ and also partners’ life easier. Now that investors are convinced that SugarCRM doesn’t need to stress the brand through weird licences there are really no reasons to have second thoughts. The GPL loophole is here to stay but it’s definitely not SugarCRM’s problem.

Technorati Tags: SugarCRM, Commercial Open Source, CRM, AGPL, SaaS, GPL loophole, Open SOurce License, Customer Relationship Management

Nuxeo, an open source firm pioneering in the Open Source ECM revolution from 2001, announced that Nuxeo has been choosen by the Press Association. Being the second time that Nuxeo addresses the market of press agencies, I asked Stefan Fermigier, Nuxeo CEO, to tell us more about it.

Taylored by metrò

From the press release results that the national news agency of the UK and Ireland (Press Association) has chosen to improve its digital news production process using Nuxeo:

Rapidly changing requirements and demands for digital multimedia news distribution drove the need for PA to develop a much more robust and efficient ECM platform. Nuxeo has developed an ECM prototype for PA, which PA has approved. Both parties are currently working together on the final release.

Stefan, is prototyping a valuable business development tool?

Definitively yes! Prototyping a project with, for instance, the 20% of the functionalities that clearly showcase 80% of the business value, is a great way to startup a business relationship with a new customer.

More generally, our most successful projects (on the occasions where Nuxeo, and not a system integrator, is asked by the customers to do the developments) have been done in an iterative fashion that goes roughly like this:

1. start with a proof of concept or prototype;
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2. sign a framework contract with the customer and define the initial scope for the project;
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3. develop the application iteratively, collecting feedback from the future users by making frequent (for instance, monthly) releases, and fine-tuning the specifications if necessary;
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4. deploy the application to a small group of actual users;
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5. support those users and collect their feedback from real use;
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6. start a new phase for the project, with enhancements requested by the users, and roll out to a larger user base;
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7. iterate last part until roll out is complete.

And later do more projects with the same customer using the same technology, as they are now confident that the technology can be used for real.

Open sources firm implementing solutions based on open source products often follow a similar path. Tailoring open source software to specific needs requires a deep knowledge of both the product and the specific process. Here customers can see a risk of having no support down the road.
Did it help you to get it having previous experiences in the field?

In this particular case, yes. We have already done a successful project with Agence France Presse, and which, according to the agency’s IT directors, led the AFP to raise the production of the journalists using the application by 40%.

Even though they are competitors (on certain markets), AFP helped us convince PA that we have a great technology and a strong understanding of the needs of a news agency.

With these projects, as well as several other ongoing projects with AFP, we believe that we are now well positioned to address the worldwide market of press agencies and other news producing bodies.

Nuxeo in this case is addressing a vertical market in the long tail, betting on the possibility to exploit business process execution within a specific market segment. We will see more and more Enterprise Content Management solutions targeted at particular verticals, and identifying the right ones is really important.

Is the improvement of PA’s digital news production process of any interest to other potential customers?

As stated in the press release, PA is in a fiercely competitive market and wants to leverage the application to gain competitive advantage. Hence there are parts of the project that are proprietary and won’t be shared with others. But we can still work with other news agencies on their own particular needs and help them develop news production systems on top of our platform tailored to their needs.

And there are many enhancements that we’re doing to the platforms we’re using to do the project, Nuxeo EP and Nuxeo RCP, that will come from the project’s requirements, and will be available in the next releases of Nuxeo EP as well as in the first packaged release of Nuxeo RCP, both scheduled for early 2008.

Unlike some “open source” companies that develop the new versions of their product behind closed doors, the source code for these enhancements is already visible in our source code repository. (While of course all customer-specific code is in a private, secure repository.)

Open source is often about customization, and moving from artisanship to industrial requires a pyramidal structure. Large System integrators would act as “mediators” towards specialized firms. Maybe partners like Atos Origin, Capgemini or LogicaCMG will play a role to deliver solutions targeted at other verticals.
“The 80-20 rule” unfortunately applies the other way around: a general purpose infrastructure fits the 80% of cases and 20% of resources are needed to fulfill them, but to cover the remaining 20% of cases you need 80% of the resources.

No “free” lunch for open source firms today, and congratulations to Nuxeo!

Technorati Tags: Open Source Strategy, ECM, Nuxeo, Stefan Fermigier, Press Association

Will the opened stay unbroken? - Dana on “open” standards.

Microsoft’s Hilf Opens on Open Source Strategy - Bill Hilf on Microsoft’s open source strategy.

Are Wiki’s ready for Enterprises? - James McGovern is skeptical.

Tracking the emergence of open source community governance - Alex Fletcher says that a community should be handled with care. I totally agree, open source firms have to pay attention. More.

The Drupal Association and the Software Freedom Law Center - Dryes Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, announces that The Software Freedom Law Center agreed to provide legal representation to the project.

On monday Free Software Foundation published the GNU Affero GPL v3, a modified version of the General Pubic License v3. Differently from the GPL, the Affero license is aimed at ensuring cooperation with the community in the case of network server software.

As a matter of fact the General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public. The Affero license instead add a requirement that if the software is used on a public server, users must be able to get the source code.

I want you! by Sunbound

I asked Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol CEO - who formerly addressed the “GPL loophole” creating a new license - to comment the Affero version 3. I was late, he already posted on the subject, announcing Funambol’s decision to go with the AGPL.

Well done Fabrizio, great move! As a matter of fact you are the first. I am afraid you are not going to win your bet with Mark Radicliffe: AGPL is not going to become more popular than GPL in the next five years.

While I believe the AGPL is not going to be Google’s worst nightmare, and is not specifically designed for Web Services, I hope you consider taking actively part against the GPL loophole, now!

Related posts:

Closing open source loopholes
FSF releases license for network-distributed software
A new GPL for software as a service
FSF finalizes GPL-based license for Web services

Technorati Tags: Affero, Affero GPL, GPL, Licensing, Funambol

The second Internet Governance Forum (IGF) hosted by the United Nations is officially over.

The IGF, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 12–15 November 2007, was aimed to advance discussion on issues related to Internet governance, mainly on the following five themes: Openness, Access, Security, Diversity, and issues related to the management of Critical Internet Resources.

The best part of IGF 2007 was undoubtedly the various workshops, “dynamic coalition” meetings, and best practice sessions, which were independently organized by the meeting’s participants. The level of quality of the dialogue in many of these sessions was outstanding, with diverse stakeholders coming together to engage on a common topic and present different viewpoints. All of the new ideas discussed at this year’s forum — indeed all discussion of “emerging issues” — came from the independently organized workshops and best practice sessions. As IGF Chairman Nitin Desai put it during the 2007 closing session: like the Internet itself, all the real action at this forum was at the edges.

In addition to the robust quality of the non-main session discussions, IGF-Rio offered an incredible number (84) of meetings on a broad range of subjects – indeed so many that participants had to choose between several interesting sessions that were scheduled concurrently. But don’t fret: you can still watch or listen to all missed sessions for years to come via the Internet.

Read the full report at IP Justice Website.

Technorati Tags: IP Justice, IGF, Internet Governance Forum

RIO DE JANEIRO - Intellectual property-related issues were a topic avoided by governments during the 2003-2005 World Summit on the Information Society, which gave way to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). But at the second IGF in Rio de Janeiro last week there were several IP-related workshops.Organisers of the dynamic coalitions on open standards, access to knowledge and the newly formed coalition on digital education said they were satisfied with the attention IP issues drew.

David Gross, the United States delegation lead, said he had been interested to see how much IP issues had come up. “IP issues of course are always an important issue,” said Gross, the US coordinator for international communications and information policy. “But there are many other places devoted to that topic, like WIPO [the World Intellectual Property Organization] or WTO [the World Trade Organization]. The fact that people think that the IGF is a place for these issues was interesting to me.” But Gross called it a misused opportunity that issues of the free flow of information had not come up more instead.

Read the full article at the Intellectual Property Watch.

While at the Future of Mobile, the event organised by Carsonified Systems last week in London, I enjoyed very much Tony Fish’s key-note speech.

I asked Tony to pass me over his presentation in order to write an article for an Italian magazine, and here I am reporting just some of his notes regarding Digital Footprint.

Enjoy also his full presentation.

Footprints: Like Neil Armstrong we all leave footprints. 2.0 has a fascination with this data, in web 2.0 language ‘the next intel inside.’ I don’t associate footprints with identity. Footprints are about where we have been, for low long, how often and the inter-relationships.

Therefore Digital Footprint is not identity, your passport, bank account or social security number. Digital Footprints come from mobile, web and TV – the digital data and metadata of who we are, the true value and why the ownership of this data is the battle ground to be won and lost, the reason why Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google wakes up thinking mobile before he looks at his email or worries about the value of double click or improving a search algorithm.

However this footprint and its digital data I contend is mine. Google gets your hands off it, but who will I trust with my digital footprint if I don’t want Google to have it. I need a trusted, open digital footprint store. Collecting, collating and serving my footprints, through an open application protocol interface across all platforms. I want to share my footprint, as this will lead to service companies improving my experience as it will become personalized. But who should I trust and what should I trust them for. To understand this we need a small diversion to chat about advertising, as this is a model to justify your views and assertions.

Advertising started with the age of assertion, “washing powder washes whiter than white”. It moved to the second phase of engagement, comparison and involvement – “look what your neighbour uses.” The current phase is about attitude – “Dirt is Good”, but advertising in what-ever shape or form requires channels and feedback, something it lacked until recently. Advertising is currently used to justify every business model, with the associated convergence or bundling issue of everything else is free. A symbiotic parasite. But the advertising to give you something for free requires an understanding of your personal data, based on your digital footprint. Therefore if I control your digital footprint, I control the advertising revenues. But as Google only controls the web footprint, control of the mobile is critical, especially when you consider Mobile adds whole new classes of unique data – location and attention.

But there is a school of thought that says if I own my digital footprint data, I could sell this to advertisers directly, but this poses the difficult question of who would store it, how it is collected, shared and protected, great topics but not for now.

I want you to consider line of sight advertising for a moment. Consider the following model. Suppose that a bill board, or a scene that it within your line of sight could be controlled by you mobile device. Advertising now becomes specific to the person looking? But how would it cope with the crowd. Would the utopia vision focus on those who are strong and marginalize the weak. The social gap becomes formed not by the technology but by those who don’t have the same opinion. We only get to listen to the voice we want – this is how you train a terrorist. As a design consideration – how about taking away the screen and then consider the uniqueness.

Indeed, where is there value, is there more value in knowing what I am doing or who I do it with. The TV can provide some data, the web probably more, but the mobile would be unique.

Therefore as you consider mobile and bring your experience - think about the context and where value is created, not why your doing it, but how others can and will extract value from it.

Technorati Tags:   TonyFish, Future of Mobile, digital identity,