Commercial Open Source Software

My friend Giacomo Poderi, Free Software Foundation Europe Italian representative, today forwarded me a document introducing Document Freedom Day, a global day for document liberation scheduled for 26 of March.

It is a day of grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open Standards in general. The DFD is supported by a large group of organisations and individuals, including, but not limited to Ars Aperta, COSS, Esoma, Free Software Foundations Europe and Latin America, IBM, NLnet, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, OSL, iMatix, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Inc., The Open Learning Centre, Opentia, Estandares Abiertos.

The initiative clearly promotes ODF, the website reports the ODF logo and, just to name another open standard, the Portable Document Format (PDF) is not even mentioned. Why you didn’t call it Open Document Format Day then?

The ODF logo, courtesy of RedHat

My friends, Freedom it is about choice..

Technorati Tags: Open Document Format, ODF, Portable Document Format, PDF, Open Standards, FSFE

Open source VoIP programs could help to cut telephony costs, and I wish to bring to your attention a post, I happened to know thank to Amy S. Quinn, listing few open source VoIP programs (SIP Proxies, SIP Clients, H323 Clients, IAX Clients, PBX and IVR Platforms, Stacks and libraries).

Read the full article.

Technorati Tags: Open Source VoIP, SIP Proxies, SIP Clients, H323, IAX Clients, PBX, IVR

The OpenOffice.org Italian Association is proud to announce that the Italian release of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite has experienced a surge in demand for its software since the launch of OpenOffice.org 2.3 and with the follow-up Release 2.3.1.

OpenOffice.org experienced more than 1,000,000 downloads in less than five months, this put the Italian release of OpenOffice.org in a leading position in the worldwide office productivity application market.

Davide Dozza, Association’s President and Co-Maintainer of of the Italian Native-Lang Project, commented:

I’m very proud about this result. It demostrates that the community effort can yield amazing results, especially when such community is composed of eterogeneous and expert people.

How do you like Italian open source?

Update: Italo Vignoli, PLIO Marketing and Communication Manager, wrote:

Apologies. On September 18, 2007, while announcing OpenOffice.org 2.3 we boldly stated that during the following 6 months the software would have been downloaded by one million people.

At the time, it was a brave announcement, as the previous million of downloads took exactly nine months, from January 18 to September 17, 2007, and the total of the previous 30 days was a meager 116.405 downloads.

And, in fact, we were wrong, as it took only 151 days (i.e., four months and 28 days) to get to that threshold: on Friday the 15th of February, OpenOffice.org in italian got to 1.001.185 downloads, at a daily average of 6.742,82 since September 18.

Read his full post, is enlightening.

[tags] OpenOffice.org, openoffice, PLIO, DavideDozza[tags]

Olliance Group and DLA Piper last week hosted the third Open Source Think Tank “The Future of Commercial Open Source”, bringing together industry leaders to brainstorm potential solutions to the issues that commercial open source is facing today.

This is the open source season by Philisopher Queen

The Open Source Think Tank is the greatest networking event in the open source arena, gathering about 130 professionals ranging from CIOs and open source firms’ CEOs, to consultants, analysts and VCs.

Andrew Aitken, Olliance Group CEO, kicked off the meeting with some opening remarks, reporting about the lack of resources - as later confirmed by many CIOs demanding for a better vendors’ support - and foreseeing an increase in consolidation over the next years, prediction confirmed also by Larry Augustin.

Andrew in his speech mentioned also the fragmentation of open source, an old mantra that miss the value of the Group Forming Networks, also known as Reed’s law:

The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

The number of mature open source projects and developers is raising daily, last but not least at the Google Code site, and many of them answer vertical markets‘ needs. Chris Anderson keynote, on the second day, remarked the importance of the so called “long tail”, and introduced us to Chris’s last adventure: open source hardware and its still obscure licensing.

Many CIOs during their panel sessions screamed against license proliferation, a term referring to the so called “explosion of choice” in open source licensing. Why that? I think that Larry Rosen was right telling them that it is plenty of proprietary licenses, and I tried to figure out why all this concern for open source licensing. Talking with Colin Bodell, Amazon VP Website Applications Platform, I confirmed the idea that the big guys cook their own meal. Basically they don’t need to spend time and effort with any procurement process to acquire (by downloading) open source software, but they have to ask the legal department. I see the problem, though I understand that SMEs are not affected by this, while they experience a much bigger problem with open source software selection.

Europe and North-America are definitely two different markets: Europe look for solutions, while USA ask for products. John Newton, Alfresco’s CTO, once speaking about these differences told me:

This is a phenomenon that I have observed for over 20 years. It may have something to do with the proximity of US companies to the software developers, their earlier development of software, a cultural willingness to experiment with business, or just general risk taking.

After speaking with few North-American CIOs I believe John is right, but that is definitely not the only difference

European public administrations demand for open source, while in North-America customers are mainly medium to large enterprises. It is not by casualty that I didn’t meet any representatives of North American Public Administrations at the Open Source Think Tank, I think. On the contrary every Italian open source conference see little participation of Manufacturing or Financial CIOs, but it is packed by people from public institutions.

I really enjoyed brainstorming sessions, and I asked Cristopher Keene, CEO of Wavemaker, formerly known as Activegrid, to summarize our first session, when we were asked to brainstorm on the following question: Does the open source industry need another organization to represent it’s increasingly broader commercial interests?

The idea we developed at the open source thin tank was to create a council of CIOs who use open source products within their organizations.

The goal of this council would be to educate the open source community about business issues which make it hard for CIOs to adopt open source, such as licensing complexity and product completeness. The council could also drive an important dialogue around licensing requirements and patent indemnification risks that are holding the industry back now.

One way to start this council would be as an outgrowth of Open Source Think Tank conference. CIO attendees of this conference could identify what they see as the top three barriers to open source adoption today and then work over the next year to articulate what they would like to see vendors doing to overcome these barriers.

Christopher rightly suggested to connect to Jerry Rosenthal, Open Invention Network CEO, but we eventually ended missing the opportunity for the time being. I think that the idea we discussed for about an hour would merit to be investigated further, considering also the possibility to create different councils for different market segments. Customers’ dimensions could refine matching criteria to bring CIOs under the same umbrella.

During brainstorming session I happened to talk with Richard Daley (Pentaho), Erica Brescia (Bitrock), Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), Brian Gentile recently appointed as Jaspersoft CEO, Larry Rosen, Mark Brewer (Covalent, now SpringSource), and many others.

Beyond brainstorming sessions the Open Source Think Tank was a great chance to meet in person the who’s who of open source. I found myself chatting with our open source hero Mårten Mickos, congratulating him up on his honors while drinking a glass of Californian wine (call me conservative, I still tend to prefer Italian ones!). I happened to talk with so many interesting people that I am afraid to forget mentioning some of. Sanjiva Weerawarana (wso2) and I spoke about OSI and how open source is growing in Asia. I finally had a chance to meet in person Sam Ramji, Robert Duffner and Bryan Kirschner to talk about Microsoft open source strategy. I spent an evening with Ross Turk, and I enjoyed meeting Philippe Cases (partechvc), kindly introduced to me by Mårten. I had breakfast with Raven Zachary (the 451 Group), and we planned to meet up in Europe soon to talk more. A small chat with Kim Polese (SpikeSource), kindly introduced to me by Sam during the wine tasting around the Napa Valley, and I also had a short but interesting spot with Larry Augustin just before Chris Andersen’s keynote. I really enjoyed speaking with Dave McAllister (adobe) about open standards and with Dominic Sartorio about OSA, I definitely need to report about all these IT conversations in a series of postings.

I had great time with many sipping some wine, among them: Joseph A di Paolantonio, Aaron Fulkerson (MindTouch), Roger Burkhardt (ingres), and I was happy to meet few other European actors: Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer (Hippo), Alexandre Zapolsky (Linagora) , Bertrand Diard (Talend). Talking about Europe I had also the opportunity to discuss with Olliance people about an Italian Open Source Think Tank, let’s see if it could eventually happen..

An open question: Why I didn’t see any Solution Providers, but Accenture?

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, think tank, open source think tank, olliance, AndrewAitken, CristopherKeene

Related posts: Chris Coppola - Chris Keene - Chris Marino

So far, it’s not clear how open QualiPSo’s operations will be, or how much its activities will benefit all of the European OSS community, not just QualiPSo members. Besides these concerns, in this first year there has also been grumbling about the lack of a published work plan and, in general, of enough information and interaction between QualiPSo and the community. There is still time to fix this now that the project has officially gone public.

Read the full article, by Marco Fioretti

Technorati Tags: MarcoFioretti, Qualipso, commercial open source, EC funded

It is widely known that despite many significant advantages, “explicit” use of OSS is still not as widespread. One of the many approaches designed to help in overcoming the adoption gap is the creation of “OSS competence centers”, that provide support and knowledge to facilitate open source software adoption.

Creating a competence center may take years, especially when it is necessary to create everything from scratch. But as I wrote in a recent presentation, it may be more efficient to “piggy-back” on top of existing IT incubators or IT districts, leverage what has already been produced in other projects and especially offer mediation as a service, because it is clear from the many surveys that companies need significant hand-holding when performing the first open source migrations. We will test this approach (after several trials) at the FutureMatch event colocated within CeBIT,

The 2008 Open Source Think Tank was a great chance to meet in person great people in the open source business community, a must for whom interested in professional networking.

On Friday I spent an evening chatting with Ross Turk, and I asked him to tell about SourceForge Marketplace state of the art.

The SourceForge.net Marketplace has been a very interesting experience. As you know (or may not know, actually), we wanted to start down this path with an implementation that was as flexible as
possible. We didn’t want the tool we provided to limit the creativity of its primary users, our community. We felt strongly that it was a better idea to simply provide the tool and watch how people use it, since they’d come up with far more creative uses than we could come up with ourselves.

That said, what we released appears on the surface to be rather basic. Under the covers, there was a lot of effort put into some stuff that nearly nobody will ever see but the system can’t exist
without, so I don’t want to say it wasn’t a lot of work - but to the users, it’s a simple listing and transaction engine. Just about anything can be listed for sale, and almost any kind of transaction
can take place. There’s a flipside to that, though, because in order to get that flexibility as quickly as we did we’ve implemented mostly just the bare necessities. Even in retrospect, I think that was a good strategy, because almost immediately we began to learn things.

First, we learned that people are interested in the idea. People are responding to it in pretty large numbers; growing numbers, in fact, and I think that’s good.

Second, we learned that there are a few types of transactions that people seem to want to do that our system doesn’t support. For example, people who want to sell services by the hour are working around the lack of that ability by creating listings for a single hour of service and dealing with the discrepancy in purchase price with the buyer directly. Adding the capability to have per-incident, per-hour, and per-project pricing would be useful to a lot of people.

Probably the most subtle thing we’re learning is how to balance the market-based nature of what we have built with the somewhat non-market tendencies of our community.
Some projects are happy to have their services prominently displayed, but I can imagine there are a few folks out there who would rather keep the suggestion of commerce as far away from them as possible. I think that our community has varying opinions on the commercialization of open source, which leads to the question: At what point does suggesting available services on the pages of an open source project stop providing value for that project? I think we’re learning where that line is.

Ross, what about the SourceForge Advisory Board?  

There’s not a whole lot to say about the SourceForge Advisory Board yet, since not a lot has happened! In a nutshell, though, here’s the deal: we realized last year that, while we think we know about our business and our position in the open source ecosystem, there’s a good likelihood that we’re a bit too intimate with what we do to be as accurate on those things as we could be with a little help. We need an external group of people who understand what we are, what we should become, and what we should value.

Right now, we’re planning an initial kickoff meeting in California. I assumed that dealing with the travel logistics of an international advisory board would be a monster task, but I seriously underestimated the difficulty of just getting eleven people to agree on a date. We’ll all know a little bit more about this topic once that happens, I think.

Ross I simply can’t wait to join you and the others, please keep me updated. All the best!

Technorati Tags: open source think tank, rossturk, sourceforge, sourceforge marketplace

During the yearly conference ‘Free Software in Higher Education’ held by ALT Linux in Pereslavl in Russia last weekend, there were several interesting talks on the migration of schools to Free Software, which made me change previous views on the ways of migration of schools to Free Software.

It is no secret that teachers in schools all over Russia are now very concerned about the problem of software legalisation as a failure to do so may lead to criminal persecution. The case of Alexander Ponosov boosted the level of awareness dramatically. However, it takes more than fear to be able to move to Free Software after years of experience teaching on top of proprietary software on Windows. If the teachers do not start getting involved in promotion of Free Software, the country may end up paying more for proprietary software than ever while becoming progressively dependent on proprietary products.

What makes me feel more optimistic is that such positive view on Free Software (not just a refuge from proprietary software, but a better alternative) is now gaining momentum in Russia. And the process is developing on its own without any direct involvement of state or large enterprises.

On the community level, a dozen of teachers of Computer Literacy in small towns and villages of Tomsk region connect to each other via an irc channel to share experiences and methods of migration to Free Software. They install Free Software packages for Windows, test-drive and migrate to Linux distributions in their own schools and they spread the knowledge in neighboring schools. On the municipal level, a town of Dimitrovgrad sets an example of creation of a municipal educational network for schools built with Free Software. The town also promotes installation of the ALT Linux Junior distribution (which is the most probable platform of the planned country-wide migration) at schools and gathering of feedback.

Meanwhile, the Republic of Tatarstan is boasting to be the first to come up with the idea of creation of a tailored Linux distribution for educational purposes with localisation for Tatar language (previously unavailable on any platform) — before a similar initiative was launched on the federal level.

Thus, Free Software in Russian middle education seems to be possible as it has proven to be able to gain support on all levels: federal, regional and municipal/rural. What we need to achieve now is to help the positive examples of Kazan, Dimitrovgrad and Tomsk region replicate in other places. Second, we need to help the representatives of all the three levels get to know each other and cooperate with each other while staying aware about the experience of colleagues in the other regions.

Technorati Tags: free software, schools, middle education, Russia, Tomsk, Dimitrovgrad, Ponosov, Kazan

The EU has for a long time supported research on open source software, first with the creation of the European Working Group on Libre Software, by sponsoring studies and research and through various EU branches, like IDABC (the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens). Among the most interesting activities:
IDABC OSS observatory: a long term activity, that provides news and information on OSS with a focus on Public Administrations. It provides news, a software repository, a taxonomy of software applications, a list of OSS competence centers, and several resources and papers related to legal and adoption processes for Public Administrations.
The IST research area of the Commission has a long history of research in OSS, including past projects like SPIRIT (open source healthcare) or the FLOSS study (one of the first longitudinal study of OSS participation and development). More recently, projects like COSPA researched the real costs of migration of public administrations to OSS, and provided the data for later research like the EU study “Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU” that had a significant impact. Other significant projects were CALIBRE (open source in industrial applications) and EDOS (Environment for the development and Distribution of Open Source software).
Several new projects focusing on OSS software quality were funded, like SQO-OSS, FLOSSMETRICS and QUALOSS, collectively grouped on a coordinated initiative called FLOSSQUALITY. While in the beginning the Commission was more interested in “stimulating” OSS production in under-represented areas (especially those that are more relevant for EU at large, like embedded systems, security, development tools like TOPCASED) now most research is devoted to other areas like economic impact and business models, along with the many projects that are using OSS licenses to disseminate the results to a wider population.
This is just a small outline of the most recent activities, and I will provide a small summary of the results of individual projects in future posts.

Yestersday’s RedMonk 5th birthday party  was a friendly start here in San Francisco, and a chance to meet in person few people of the international open source scene.

Stephen O’Grady was a good host, he introduced Gianugo, Italo and me to some RedMonk’s friends, like Rita Manachi.

Cote and I spoke a little bit of Sun+MySQL M&A, but mainly we enjoyed the party sipping beer.

I also enjoyed to chat with Greg Stein but  because of jet-lag I had to leave early, eventually missing to speak with James Governor and Danese Cooper, just arrived when I was already out of the door.

Technorati Tags: redmonk, italovignoli, gianugorabellino, danesecooper, jamesgovernor, cote, stephenogrady, gregstein