Commercial Open Source Software

FR: Education Minister encourages Open Source use - Last month Mandriva and the French Ministry of Education agreed on a 60 percent discount for the purchase of the commercial version of the free software for all teachers and staff at France’s schools and universities. Austria too has plan to increase open source usage at school.

DK: Committee appointed to evaluate impact of Open Standards - The Danish government appointed five experts to evaluate the implementation of Open Standards in the country. The committee is part of a study requested earlier by the Danish Parliament. I hope Italy will soon consider similar investigations.

DE: Munich GNU/Linux desktop selects European Open Source licence - The development team of the most told migration project believes that having selected the EUPL will help other Open Source developers to implement and use their work. EUPL is one year old, but this project migration started back in 2003: what is going on?

Brazilian government lists preferred Open Source applications -The list is intended to prevent equivalent software solutions from being developed several times. Public managers should check out the portal before starting a new software development project, and if a solution exists the procurement can then be adapted to improve on that software project. It sounds a great idea, maybe the Italian Government could consider a similar policy.

LV: City council to provide OpenOffice courses - The city council of Ogre is providing free training for OpenOffice, an Open Source suite of office applications, to improve the competitiveness of the local businesses and boost the performance of the local government.

Sign up for the IDABC Monthly Open Source News Service if interested in similar news.

The objective of the round-table “Between cooperation and competition: the necessary synthesis to help open source dissemination” recently held at the ForumPA was to facilitate a better understanding of what is missing in the Italian open source market from the public administration perspective.

ForumPA, the greatest Italian event of and about the Public Administration, represents the largest community of practice in the Italian Public Sector, gathers more than 120.000 stakeholders of the public sector through the conference and by emailing the newsletter.

In the Crowd by Pensiero

I am honored to have been asked by Gianni Dominici,Vice General Director of ForumPA, to chair the only open source session. I invited selected speakers to contribute on topics often not well covered by other nationwide open source gathering.

Davide Gorini, Director of the first Italian open source business incubator, told the audience all about the business incubator offering facilities and consulting to entrepreneurs engaged in Free/Libre Open Source Software services and products.

When OSS Incubator project was born we fixed three goals; giving support to FOSS startups, create networking and relationships with the suburb area, facilitate the encounter between software manufacturers and public administrations.After just one year since the launch the assessment is very positive; the response from entrepreneurs is enthusiastic and the structure is nearly full; companies have different business models, from CRM platform to GIS software and that helps the natural collaboration and internal networking.

Contaminations with the suburb area are giving interesting feed-back; there is a growing exchange of ideas and participation to events and activities in order to spread the values and concepts of free and open source software.

The third goal has been achieved and the result is the involvement of the incubator and of the companies working within it in projects of software development, training and support together with local and central PA.

The conclusion is that such initiative has proved to be very effective and should be encouraged from local and Central Public Administration interested in promoting models of local development, knowledge diffusion and innovation.

Italo Vignoli, OpenOffice.org Italian Marketing Manager, gave a very thoughtful speech on the need to marketing open source products, showing the audience OpenOffice.org marketing results. I took the chance to mention again ClamAV as example of good open source product with poor branding and hence little diffusion, proving the need for an open source awareness campaign.

Getting back to OpenOffice.org Italian success, wearing my OpenOffice.org community hat I asked CNIPA representatives to fund our association with some money to help us to develop an OpenOffice.org add-on to digitally sign ODF document as required by CNIPA regulations (Adobe is already doing it).

I asked Flavia Marzano, Strategic consultant for public administration innovation and long-time consultant on open source for public administrations, to talk about the story of free software in Italy, below her short recap.

What can we say as a summary of the “story”?
Since 1941 Italy has laws that help Public Administrations in buying free software, since 2004 Regions begun to make laws on free software for PAs, since 2006 Italian Government put money on free software for PAs… in 2008 we are still waiting for free software in PAs! Let’s go on…

Paolo Zocchi, Senior Adviser of the Minister of Regions and Local Authorities by the previous Italian government, instead has adopted a much more positive tone, maybe even too much in respect of the actual Italian open source ecosystem.

The round-table was interesting because of the diversity of the experiences of the speakers, and attendees could pose questions and get answers for about twenty minutes at the end of the session.

My intention for the next year is to run it as an unconference event, do you agree?

Technorati Tags: open source government, gianni dominici, davidegorini, italovignoli, flaviamarzano, paolozocchi, open source dissemination

My decision to start Commercial Open Source blog was significantly influenced by my desire to share ideas on open source business models, extending my quest for feedback and opinions from other authoritative open source thought leaders.

Rereading Matt Asay’s post about “the convenience of proprietary software“, to which just yesterday followed Stormy Peters’ answer, I thought it was time to throw another business model idea: open source network marketing.

Make a difference by aepoc

Wikipedia’s entry on Network Marketing reports (the italic emphasis and URLs are mine):

Network marketing is a business distribution model that allows a parent multi-level marketing company to market their products directly to consumers by means of relationship referral and direct selling.

Independent unsalaried salespeople of multi-level marketing referred to as distributors (associates, independent business owners, franchise owners, sales consultants, consultants, independent agents, etc.), represent the parent company and are rewarded a commission relative to the volume of product sold through each of their independent businesses (organizations). Independent distributors develop their organization by either building an active customer base, who buy direct from the parent company and/or by recruiting a downline of independent distributors who also build a customer base, expanding the overall organization. Additionally, distributors can also earn a profit by retailing products which they purchased from the parent company at wholesale price.

Skepticism around Multi Level Marketing has its place, and there are many resources explaining what’s wrong with Multi Level Marketing. As a matter of fact the legitimacy of MLM businesses can’t be given for granted, and many pyramid schemes try to present themselves as legitimate MLM businesses. Apparently the Federal Trade Commission advises that MLM companies setting greater incentives for recruitment than product sales are to be viewed skeptically. Others state that the real problem with MLM is the people it attracts, highlighting that network marketers often have little or no experience developing business relationships other than that of employer/employee, and they are in danger of disappointment caused by the failure to quickly satisfy unrealistic economical expectations.

So, why do we need a scheme like an MLM to sell open source?

Information asymmetry make categorizing open source customers a not so easy task, and I believe that is not uncommon to see users - read potential customers - spent a lot of time (therefore money) instead of buying commercial open source products and services. Someone, somewhere in the IT department, knows how much time spends to make things work.

These people can make the difference, they can really help to turn users into customers, from inside.

They use open source software, they know what kind of support do they need, they are the best distribution channel than ever. They do know how to reach customers - rather they live by them - and how to offer your value proposition.

The point is: what you can offer them?

Technorati Tags: Open Source Business, Open Source Marketing, Open Business, Network Marketing, business models

The Open Source Think Tank has been a great opportunity to meet in person many open source CEO, and I just managed to run an email interview with one of them: Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker.

WaveMaker, providing a web application development platform consisting of a visual AJAX component and a Java one, started life as a partly open source company building software for grid computing. In 2007 the company with the name ActiveGrid moved on to building a visual development platform in Python, finally under the NewWaveMaker brand.

Chris Keene by twoeggs

Chris, was AcriveGrid open source from the beginning?

ActiveGrid was only partly open source because we had not fully embraced publishing our source code and involving the community in the development process. This meant that we had all the headaches of open source - people wanting everything for free - with none of the benefits of a committed community.

What happened next?

I joined ActiveGrid in early 2007 and made two immediate decisions: first, to move from Python to Java and second, to become a real open source company. We needed to move to Java in order to get corporate adoption and also because we found that the Java community had many robust components like Spring and Hibernate that could accelerate our development efforts.

Why did you need to move to open source?

We needed to move to open source because we lacked the enormous marketing and sales budget to sell our software directly to the enterprise. Instead, we needed to leverage word of mouth in the open source community to help us sneak into corporations through the back door of open source.

I understand going open source basically was part of your marketing strategy.

Did you benefit from the move?

In December 2007, we renamed the company WaveMaker. In February, 2008, we announced our new WaveMaker product and our support for the AGPL license.

Within two days of announcing our open source release, our download volumes skyrocketed by a factor of 20, from 50 downloads a day to over 1,000 downloads a day. At the same time, the number of registered users and daily posting volumes in our community at dev.wavemaker.com jumped by similar amounts.

These results are pretty impressive, I admit. Lurking around your forums it looks like if answers usually come from WaveMaker’s employees, users seem to have a pretty parasitic approach to the “community” space. Developers following the motto “we don’t use software that costs money here“are probably happy with WaveMaker now, but how to turn downloads into profits is a different problem.

Chris, how do you profit from your product?

WaveMaker is available under a dual license: AGPL for open source projects, and a commercial license for projects which need support or enterprise security features.

WaveMaker website reports about some customers and also about alliances, that is both useful for potential customers and partners, but is lacking of information about the differences between the open source and the proprietary version.

If having a business model around the free software is fundamental, to let people know how your business works and how they can benefit is also important.

About WaveMaker.
WaveMaker is an open source, visual development platform for building Web 2.0 applications. WaveMaker applications are based on standard Java and Javascript and leverage other open source components such as Spring, Hibernate and Dojo.

Technorati Tags: open source framework, wavemaker, activegrid, chriskeene, open source think tank, open source web 2.0, open source marketing

The European Legislative Observatory sends to subscribers a list of changes, I found interesting the Commission’s report on the application of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

Read the Commission Staff Working Document (PDF). Oddly Italy is mentioned just once, while as far as I know we are having a “sophisticated” approach to the copyright matter.

Technorati Tags: European Legislative Observatory, Copyright Harmonization, Italian Copyright law

In the last few years, the open source software has transformed itself from a niche reserved to the “happy elected people” to an effective and mature business model. Maybe the course of this process has followed a path which has been different from what was thought at the beginning: in general nor the push of the public sector neither the “ideological” perspective have brought important results to the cause of the OSS. Much more has been done from the development and growth of a widespread network of SMEs (Small and medium enterprises) which gave birth to a large community and to a cluster of applications which can be used with effectiveness from every users, starting from the PC alternative to MS Office, Openoffice.

In many cases, mainly in Italy, OSS has been considered in the past as a fashionably way by politicians at all the levels in order to proof their attention to the innovation topic to their own audience. That has not been in general a good way to help the open source growth. During the last decade, lots of municipalities have passed bills or deliberations on OSS: in most of the cases, very little activity followed those political acts, and, even in the cases where a project would follow, migration problems and red tape have been more a hurdle rather than a way to make the process smoother. In general terms, this was the result of an ideological approach to the OSS (Free software vs. proprietary software, Linux vs. Microsoft….) which, while stimulating generic political positions, deranged the focus from the technical and organizational issues that OSS brought with it and with the real point, to build up a concrete business model for the OSS.

So, migration was one of those issues and maybe the most important of all. As many experiences have demonstrated, migrating from a proprietary system to open source is not only a political choice and something immediately convenient from an economic point of view, but also an organizational effort which could be often lasting and difficult. As Munich experience have shown, the results should be not always effective and satisfying.

However, the stuff works and today the OSS has become a real alternative not only from a budgetary perspective or as an inferior total cost of ownership, but also because it represents a more effective way of writing appliances, maintaining software, updating and get results. I.e. a new business model whose many small companies could use in order to become bigger and to produce more added value.

Indeed, the very shift between a generic, empty and ideological approach, to a business model, came when many small enterprises began to face migration problems and to create new applications based on OSS rather than trying to transform overnight complex systems based on proprietary software in OSS eldorados. But a big part in this frame has been played by the consolidation of the contractual forms (mainly the GPL especially the last releases) which are now a corpus regulating the OSS adoption and use.

Furthermore, the OSS affirmation comes at the very moment when the big corporate who are still running on user licenses business model, are rapidly losing ground and turnover, especially in the public sector. The music in the balance sheet of the IT multinational like Microsoft, Oracle and so on is still how many license are sold, and not how many web services could be developed for the customers. It’s easy to forecast that in the next years, and maybe quarters, who’ll have the more delays in changing this antiquate model, will be the loser in this special dance contest. Some blip of it is already on the radar screen: it’s probable that this new OSS music will became soon the main song in the ballroom.

Technorati Tags: Open Source Government, Open Source Italy, PaoloZocchi

Caroline Arms on digital formats for digital long-term preservation - Jon Udell met Carolina Arms. Caroline works on the American Memory project at the Library of Congress. The Library participates in standardization efforts such as PDF/A and Office Open XML. By the way, I hope that the Italian OpenOffice.org association will join the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group to participate in ODF maintenance.

Alfresco and E2CM - Is Alfresco priced too high as a framework for building custom applications? Probably it depends on where you are coming from…

Firefox Plugins: Hyperwords - All the text on the web becomes richly interactive - Learn how to translate web pages on the fly using Hyperwords plugin.

WordPress Birthday Party - WordPress next Tuesday will be five years old.To celebrate they are throwing a party in San Francisco at 111 Minna, starting at 9PM. Get the full details and RSVP on Upcoming.org or on Facebook.

BlogLab is a laboratory course held by Stefano Epifani and Antonio Sofi at the University of Rome, Faculty of Communication Science. BlogLab introduces students to blogging and how to blog, allowing students to learn by doing through face-to-face and on line discussions with fellows.

The image was removed as required by the original author, see comments below

BlogLab is at its second edition, the course aims at helping neo-bloggers to manage their blog with the aid of experienced bloggers for a period of time. A jury will evaluate the works produced, and the winners will eventually get an internship opportunity by selected companies.

Last year 60 students participated to the course, 50 blogs were opened and managed by the students and 7 companies offered an ad hoc internship program.

This year I am going myself to be a fellow instructor, along with many well-known Italian bloggers like my friends Nicola Mattina, Diego Bianchi and Antonio Pavolini who I just met yesterday afternoon when I got there.

Happy blogging!

Technorati Tags: BlogLab, StefanoEpifani, AntonioSofi, NicolaMattina, DiegoBianchi, AntonioPavolini

Microsoft announced that it will update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5 and PDF/A. Microsoft will also join the OASIS ODF working group and the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group, actually on duty for ODF maintenance.

Promise of a new day by ۩ QTR974 ۩ عـــبـــدالله ۩

Andy Updegrove, Erwin Tenhumberg and NoOOXML seem happy about that, while John MCreesh is of different opinion advice.

OpenOffice.org is a large community, the Italian OpenOffice.org Association has taken part in the process and is expressing its opinion directly from the voice of its President, Davide Dozza.

The Italian OpenOffice.org Association PLIO could not do anything else than welcoming Microsoft’s announcement, considering our openness to dialog and cooperation with Microsoft expressed in our open letter on the 22th of February, expressed also at the OMAT conference on the 2nd of April.

The public dialog strategy is paying off, PLIO and Microsoft Italy today are bringing an important contribution to the software community as a whole.

Today users are winners.

Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, Microsoft, Microsoft Interoperability, ODF, PDF, OASIS, ISO, DavideDozza, PLIO

Funambol, a provider of open source push email and PIM sync solutions for the mass market, announced the launch of a new forge.

The new Funambol forge will be a unique access point for Funambol-related open source projects, resulting in a central collaboration site for developers and community willing to share code and technical tips, as well as downloading software and documentation.

A New Forge by carlos.benjamin

I asked my friend Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager, what is going to change from before.

The new Forge is a tool that Funambol community members deserve. For a complex project as Funambol is, all my efforts are in the direction of giving to contributors a place where it is easy to find things like code, samples, support and documentation. The main obstacle to newcomers is the quantity of data accumulated, the legacy of the project, that looks like a big knot. The new Forge builds on top of this legacy, which is good stuff, to create a better environment for collaboration. This is the reason why I made an effort to migrate in the new system all archives of past years email in Funambol lists.

I understand archives are important, and a little more tweaking is still needed likely. Take the chance to make your product roadmap as easy as possible to access, potential users and customers might be interested into it, despite Debian lives without it.

How those changes will affect your job?

Contributors and community members will have their life at Funambol easier and I wish I will too Or better, now that the new Forge is up, I’ll be able to focus on the development of Funambol more closely on one hand, and on the other hand to spend more time talking to the community because there are still many Code Sniper bounties to be collected.

I am a great fan of sniper programs, and considering how micro-contributions are key to Funambol success, I believe you did a very smart move setting up your own forge.

Technorati Tags: community manager, funambol, code sniper, stefanomaffulli, open source forge