Commercial Open Source Software

Give One, Get One, Then Some - Tiemann says that the One Laptop Per Child project is one of the boldest vision.

On the Road again - Intalio after releasing BPMS 5.0 decided to run a road show, Europe ates are December 12 Paris, December 13 Geneva, December 14 London. I’ll try to catch them up in London I guess.

Enlightenment E17 Desktop UI running on the OpenMoko Neo1973 Mobile - Enlightenment UI desktop running on the OpenMoko.

Magnolia Community Edition 3.5 (RC1) Available - Magnolia user mailing list announced the availability of version 3.5 RC1.

FSFE’s Sun Fire T 1000 - Well done Georg, Sun will appreciate your help with word of mouth marketing. It is a transaperent sponsorship, I like it. On the contrary I am still awaiting updates on why you are supporting “Certified Open”.

Volantis, the world’s leading supplier in the field of Mobile Content Adaptation, announced that they are going to release in open source a Volantis solution to deliver content to mobile users.

The Volantis Mobility Server - a solution enabling content providers and carriers to benefit from a ‘write once view anywhere’ content strategy - is already available for download at the community area. Open Source release, under the GPL version 3, is expected within the first quarter of 2008.

At the Future of Mobile I didn’t get a chance to meet in person people from Volantis, but yesterday I had a skype conversation with Mark Watson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Volantis Systems.

My first question to Mark was about why they are going open source.

It is difficult to write mobile applications without an application server like ours. Mobile web is not moving as fast as it should be, and Volantis by contributing with software to the market can help accelerate it.

Is Volantis expecting to get voluntary contributions from the community?

We would like that, we don’t want to necessarily depend on it. We don’t want to bet on that for our success.

While at the present stage there are no plans in place to cooperate with other open source communities, I believe that commensalistic approaches are likely to happen. Let’s wait and see if eventually the Volantis Community will develop a symbiotic approach towards open source communities, and viceversa.

As a matter of fact Volantis is the first mover in the mobile content delivery arena willing to publish its code under an open source license, and they spent time and effort to choose the appropriate license (Doug, you should also count them from now on!!).

While Volantis sounds internally organized to keep its mobile equipment database updated - and they might not run Code Sniper or Phone Sniper as does Funambol - I see other similarities with Funambol. Just as Funambol, Volantis today is basically addressing the “top” of the pyramid (the carriers), but by opening its platform, Volantis can substantially enlarge its customer base with a try&buy formula.

Last but really not the least, I believe that many small IT firms that couldn’t afford platforms like Volantis in the past can now step into this market. And maybe Mark is right in stating:

We believe that for every potential web application in the PC world, there is going to be a mobile equivalent.

My suggestion to Mark is the following: what about organising meet ups among IT firms interested in Volantis, just like the Atlassian Group?

Technorati Tags: mobile content adaptation, open source mobile, volantis

Black Duck Software is an intellectual property management firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts delivering services to identify risks and vulnerabilities in an enterprise’s open-source code.

Doug Levin, Black Duck’s CEO, today was available for a phone call to tell me more about how they help organizations use open source software and third-party code components while managing software licensing obligations and other business risks.

Firms offering intellectual assets giving “horizontal” support, meaning companies that sell services not related to a specific package and not related to software development, could play an important in the European market.

While Asia and USA are historically more acquainted with buying his services, Doug claimed that the European market would develop in the near future and he cited several open source project (Mandriva, ZEA and Alfresco among others) that the company has already worked both directly and indirectly. SourceSense among others is already partnering with them in three different countries, while other two medium sized IT German firms are also Black Duck customers.

Software patents are not central to business accelerators for Black Duck; copyright and 3^rd party and OSS license violations are central to Black Duck’s services, products and training.
Talking about takers of GPL Doug stated:

So far small gpl projects associated with FSF were the first to go. We are seeing GPLv3 adoption in relatively small numbers and not being adopted by large projects. SugarCRM and Sambva were exceptions in this respect.

Doug and I agreed on the fact that SugarCRM made the best decision by not abiding to the OSI “badgeware approved license, and instead choosing the GPLv3, a license which is much closer to the community.

I am looking forward to meet him soon in Europe, and let you know more about how Black Duck is going to help the European open source ecosystem.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, Open Source Risk, Open Source, Intellectual Property Management, Black Duck, Doug Levin, Software Patent

What did Oracle ever do for open source? Part two. - Matthew Aslett on Oracle Open Source Strategy.

Retail Therapy for OpenCms - Integration between OpenCms and the Java based commerce system KonaKart.

Opening the right layers - Is the Google proposal splitting mobile Java delivery still further?

Unhetical Open Source - James McGovernor argues about CentOS’s approach. Opinions?

Red Hat & Hyperic Finally Made Me Happy - Savio was definitely right, Red Hat did it.

Defense procurement ill-suited for open source - about Open Source Procurement by Public Administrations.

The Future of Mobile took place yesterday in London. Among speakers Luca Passani (AdMob) and Andrea Trasatti (dotMobi) of the WURFL fame, and Dave Burke (google), to talk about Android.

The event, organised by Carsonified Systems, now looking for someone to lead the Mobile event, was mostly aimed at developers and designers. Brian Fling - an apple-enthusiast - was the host of the event. The great key-note speaker Tony Fish asserted that “Digital Footprint is not identity”, with a fast and furious presentation that really impressed me.

Luca talked about WURFL and WALL news, in terms of architecture and functionalities. The point on the new WALL NG was made with screenshots: Luca rebuilt the first page of Ebay UK for mobile and showed how the user experience was great on high-end devices, while degrading gracefully on older phones. He also spoke about the upcoming web application designed to simplify the contribution process, today mail-based.
He raised the well known Vodafone issue - regarding the fact Vodafone is stripping out the essential device identification information that mobile phones send - receiving the applause of the audience. On the topic he remarked that W3C was not playing the “policeman role”, eventually arguing with a W3C representative attending the event.

Andrea Trasatti explained the dotMobi strategy, and it came out that his open source attitude is not part of his new job at dotMobi. I took my chance to ask his opinion about Volantis going open source, and he told me that all these open source efforts (W3C included) are welcome. On a commercial tone, he believes that the dotMobi device database is going to make the difference, since open source projects like WURFL could fail to keep an updated database.

But Volantis is the first (commercial) mover in this arena, and I believe that at the end of the day if their community is taking off, dotMobi might change its strategy.

David Burke, defined as “frighteningly good looking“, got straight to the point showing the audience how easy it is to deploy a simple application with Android. He was really effective, as clearly results also from Mike Butcher’s live blogging.

Talking about the Android technlogical club, David answered a set of questions about licensing and lock-down hypothesis the Android FAQ way, eventually failing to convince Mike:

One questioner asked if Google would be subject to anti-trust allegations given that a lot of Google applications will come default with the handsets, but Burke gave the impression that this would be unlikely as handset makers could “swap out applications.” We’ll see I guess.

So what’s the upshot of all this? In terms of content perhaps not a great deal. If one were to be cynical, one would say that this was mainly about a Google guy appearing in London (which has a big mobile community) at a conference aimed at mobile developers, and was in hiring mode…

As a matter of fact the technological club behind the Open Handset Alliance seems unwilling to disclose the platform until they have eventually got their first mobile equipments on the shelf. For that we have to wait one year. A result that could be obtained also with a “deffered” GPLv2/v3. Apparently the club likes the apache license more, a risky bet considering OEM’s hystorical attitude to proprietarize the “commons”. See the “successful” Symbian fragmentation.

I really hope Google makes it work, but lock-down strategies are enabled by not copyleft licenses, and this market has greatly proven to be unable to share any sort of standard, despite everyone yesterday spoke about that. And yes, I agree, “the Future of Mobile is not in the hands of Planet Mobile anymore“!

Technorati Tags: Android, FOM, AndreaTrasatti, LucaPassani, WURFL, Volantis, Open Source Strategy

The Government of Brazil is hosting in Rio de Janeiro the second Internet Governance Forum meeting. The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF.

HELOISA MAGALHÃES: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to talk in Portuguese. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am a Brazilian journalist from the “Valor Econômico,” and I am deeply honored to take part in this meeting. For us journalists in economics and finance, this issue is of utmost
importance. And for me as a Brazilian, there’s special appeal to this. We are a country full of inequalities, and the Internet has proven to be a means of overcoming the challenge. First, I would like to call upon Mr. Ronaldo Lemos, who will chair the session. However, before, I’d like to remind all of you that our intention is to promote a debate. This is to be an interactive session.

Questions and answers — questions from the audience. I would like to invite those who are sitting at the back of the room to come up closer so that we can have a true interactivity, so that we can have a more joyous interaction. First of all, Mr. Ronaldo, I give you the floor.

Read the full transcript.

Few days ago I wrote my first post about migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, but I want to start it all over from the very beginning, step by step.

Andrea Trasatti after my post asked me more details over a skype conversation, and I decided to translate and share a slide-show about Migrating to OpenOffice.org.

The slide-show was originally produced by Davide Dozza - PLIO President and co-mantainer of the Italian Lang OpenOffice.org Project - in collaboration with Carlo Daffara, involved with COSPA project, and myself. I eventually used it at a Java Conference back in 2005, when I gave a speech on the subject.

There are many reasons to migrate to OpenOffice.org, ranging from cost savings - apparently still the most appealing reason for a change - to legal motivations or social ones. Last but not least the escape from vendors’ lock-in, considering that the choice is getting wider. To be honest there is even another reason why firms look into OpenOffice Migration: ask Microsoft a (big) discount!

Whatever is your reason, you should consider to have a look at “supposed problems“, things that people are going to mention as big (unresolved) issues. Among them it is worth to highlight that one of them - functions appear to be elsewhere - is not as critical as before. Why? Just have a look at Office 2007, and wonder how long will it take to bring your employees to be productive using it!

You’re not alone, many others have already traveled your road, so please take your time to look to successes and failures as well. Look at the Market share analysis, despite the difficulties due to the informal OpenOffice.org distribution process, they are meaningful and, at some extent, encouraging.

Every migration involving end-users has to cope with psychological issues, because people don’t like learning to use new tools, and motivations are needed to overcome inertia to change.

As matter of fact Communication is important, in terms of Internal Marketing, and customized version of OpenOffice, peer-learning and intranet tools could greatly help in this respect.

Despite Big-Bang migration could sound cool, they simply don’t work. So once you have done a deep analysis of the situation, analyzed your documents and identified homogeneous class of users, you’re ready to go. Step by step.

Outsiders, i.e. technlogical leaders also known as “champions” in the COSPA terminology, are those people to whom colleagues ask for hints and tips about software tools. Those people are key in a migration, both because they can help others or, if unhappy, prevent the migration to succeded.

Migration tools and Enterprise management tool are still few, so if you use applications integrated with Microsoft Office don’t look for “packaged services” and consider go alone. But, if you are an IT firm, keeping in mind that European companies are often SMEs, and that the Public Sector - where office suite are often used as an individual productivity tool - is seriously wondering about OpenOffice migrations, consider that there is plenty of space to run a business on OpenOffice migrations.

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, Open Source Migration

Google to speak about Android and OHA at the Future of Mobile Event - good news, I am in London this week and I won’t miss the opportunity.

Nagios creator launches commercial support business - Matthew Aslett at 451 CAOS talks about upcoming Nagios commercial support. Nagios Enterprises is born, great news! Read also Ethan Gastald post.

Funambol challenges iPhone lock with open source app - Dana skeptical about open source gaining a significant foothold on Apple’s phones. I agree.

Open Source Marketing List - Sandro Groganz started a wiki on the subject. Meme: ask Italo Vignoli to tell everybody about the Italian OpenOffice.org marketing case: 320 published articles, only in September!

Certified Open: Welcome to life after ICT lock-in - FSFE partners with Open Forum?! I would like to ask Georg Greve which is the idea behind this partnership..

Today I took my time to zoom back over my last year blogging over open source. Commercial Open Source blog has just completed its first year of life.

In November 2006 I scrambled with the generous help of Antonella Beccaria and little advice of my new media mentor Robin Good to create the blog site you are just reading now.

A year in review by _mpd_

I was happy. I was excited. I could not hold myself in place. I felt that the time to share my ideas, some of my experiences, a bit of my know-how had definitely come.

I see the web as a venue for sharing, exchanging and making valuable conversations, and I thought that I had to make myself fully part of this.

One idea that significantly influenced my decision to take on blogging was the Open Source Franchising business model. As a matter of fact in the summer 2006 I had already written a paper describing such business model, which I had also submitted to Sun Microsystems. My desire, especially since Sun didn’t ever comment back on my proposal, was then to extend my quest for feedback and opinions from other authoritative open source thought leaders.

Matt Asay positively commented my idea, and many others followed, opening the conversation. It was my very first success as blogger, and it showed me the importance and effectiveness of using a blog to create an online dialog. The conversation went on for several months, until Simon Phipps - Chief Open Source Officer at Sun - fully embraced my idea to the point of taking up the flag himself.

Thanks to this and probably to some of my other writings, some initial gigs came through:

• IDC invited me to give a speech on my early experience of corporate blogging;
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• I got involved in a joint research activity with the FLOSSMETRICS project;
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• the University of Agrigento asked me to talk about professional blogging at the e-learning and multimedia conference;
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• The 18th Annual Jolt Awards invited me to participate as judge.

And that’s how I discovered how blogging could be helpful to get invited in meetings, events and conferences, eventually opening me doors and new opportunities. As I go forward in my blogging experience I am realizing that my use of writing to get greater exposure and visibility may very well be my very best marketing strategy.

Like it or not, I had also my share of ego-boosting. Initially mostly for psychologically reward, later on as an increasingly valuable meter of my own professional credibility, I have had spent my share of time checking up technorati and looking at google ranks, just as everyone else. And I learned a few things:

1. you can get to know lots of like-minded people who share your interests, passions and sometimes business customers and reach out to them in ways that would be next to impossible in the physical world:
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   • a chat with Ross Turk - SourceForge Community Manager - brought me in the SourceForge Marketplace Board;
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   • my interest for Open Source Government led my in touch with International programs aimed at enabling and empowering the use of Open Source in Public Administrations.
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   • after Joomla! went GPL I have been kindly asked to give them advice on their business model, as I did through my blog, on forums and also off-line;
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   • open source startups, associations and also VCs reading my rants on open source business models eventually started to contact me through my blog.
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2. among my key referrals opensource.org and openoffice.it/org have played a significant role in sending me huge number of visitors, that made me realize how important is to keep contributing whenever possible to such large and important communities;
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3. Robin Good was totally right suggesting me to pay great attention to choose the tag-line. Googling for Commercial Open Source my blog is always one of the very first results. In reason of that PR agencies and CEOs from all around the world touch base with me daily to open more and more conversations.
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4. I learned to stay focused and to not get distracted by off topic arguments, as soon as I did I was rightly “ripreso” for that.

Last but not least, I wish to share some authors and bloggers I found inspirational:

• Savio Rodrigues for his opinions on open source market trends;
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• Matthew Aslett analysis and reports on Open Source VC funding;
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• Dana Blankenhorn taking an in-depth look into open source enterprise;
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• James McGovern’s sight on human aspects of technology around open source;
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• Alex Fletcher’s ramblings on the open source industry;
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• Red Monk’s folks, with their insights, unconferences and challenges.

I learned a lot from them, and with some I am enjoying regular conversations. After all the ultimate reason to keep writing daily for all of us is that it is really true that no man is an island, not even a blogger!

Technorati Tags: open source blog, professional blogging, SavioRodrigues, DanaBlankenhorn, MatthewAslett, RossTurk, SourceForge Marketplace, JamesMcGovern, RedMonk

The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The position of the German Foreign Office, as host of the event, was made very clear. The Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in his opening word, called ODF “a completely open and ISO-standardized format”, considering it an “excellent basis” for “a free exchange of knowledge and information in a time of globalization”. The Foreign Office has already linked its foreign missions in a network using open-source programs and shifted to OpenOffice and Linux operation systems on their laptops and has in view to extend this program to all diplomatic workstations by the middle of 2008.

Read the full news.
About European Digit Rights.
European Digital Rights was founded in June 2002. Currently 28 privacy and civil rights organisations have EDRI membership. They are based or have offices in 17 different countries in Europe.

Members of European Digital Rights have joined forces to defend civil rights in the information society. The need for cooperation among organizations active in Europe is increasing as more regulation regarding the internet, copyright and privacy is originating from European institutions, or from International institutions with strong impact in Europe.

Technorati Tags: EDRI, ODF, File Format, Europe