Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

The pilot project to migrate schools of three Russian regions to Free Software has recently expanded its geography. Now it is possible for the schools outside of Tatarstan, Perm krai and Tomsk region to voluntarily apply for participation by completing a special form (Russian) published on the project website.

The project, if successful, may be the first step towards large-scale migration of Russian secondary education instutitions and, consequently, of the other state agencies to Free Software as President Medvedev stated last year (Russian) while being the First Deputy Prime Minister.

Children in the Putino village of Perm Krai running Linux

It is a hot summer for the project contractors since the schools must be migrated before September 1, when the new academic year starts. By now, according to the official website of Armada, the consortium that unites the firms involved in the project, the project is slightly ahead of schedule. Moreover, Armada’s CEO Igor Gorbatov expects (Russian) the total number of schools migrated to Free Software to surpass the target number of 1000 (the goal is to migrate 50% schools in the central cities and 20% in the rest of the three regions) so that there may be 2000 or even 5000 schools.

According to project statistics (Russian, but the numbers are quite self-explanatory) published by Armada on June 4, only 182 schools of 1084 had been migrated. However, the project members are actively promoting Free Software, the most notable activity being the on-site install seminars that are organized almost every week in various towns and villages of Perm Krai.

Technorati Tags: Russia, schools, migration, Armada, free software, Medvedev, Perm, Tatarstan, Tomsk, open source

After a hiatus of three years, the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) met for its 12th session on June 23, 2008 to June 27, 2008. Given the collapse of the talks to initiate a Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) to harmonize patent law with respect to prior art, novelty, inventive step and grace period, even the most prescient of WIPO watchers were at a loss in prognosticating the outcome of the WIPO SCP. In 2007, informal consultations of the WIPO SCP were not able come to consensus on deciding upon a work program for the WIPO patent committee.

As a result the the WIPO General Assembly (2007) instructed the International Bureau to

establish a report on issues relating to the international patent system covering the different needs and interests of all Member States, which would constitute a working document for the next session of the SCP. The Report would contextualize the existing situation of the international patent system, including reference to the WIPO Development Agenda process, and would contain no conclusions.

Under the stewardship of the Chair (Maximiliano Santa Cruz, Chile), and his two Vice-Chairs (Mr. Yin Xintian, China) and (Bucura Ionescu, Romania) working in concert with the International Bureau, this meeting bore witness to the flexibilities displayed by Member States including Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, the European Union, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Singapore and Switzerland to ensure that the WIPO patent committee embrace a positive agenda. This positive agenda is evidenced in the Summary by the Chair(SCP/12/4 Rev) posted by WIPO on June 27, 2008. It should also not be forgotten that during the patent committee interregnum, the International Bureau launched a series of patent symposiums that covered a range of issues including the research exemption and patents and standards.

Despite strong signals sent by Group B countries (rich countries) early on in the Committee that left no doubts that patent harmonization was foremost on their agenda, the conclusion of the meeting took a different turn, a balanced outcome that gave something to developed countries and developing countries, users and right holders alike.

Read the full article, by Thiru Balasubramaniam

To coincide with EURO 2008, Matthew Aslett is embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

We lost with Spain, and Matthew wrote his Italian Open Source Tour.

Key policies:
In October 2002, a commission for free software in public administration was established to study open source adoption. in May 2003 CNIPA (Centro Nazionale per l’Informatica della Pubblica Amministrazione) published a study (PDF in Italian) that recommended (amongst other things) that public offices should neither prohibit nor penalize the use of OSS packages. A working group later produced guidelines (PDF in Italian) as to how to remain compliant with the recommendations.

The Italian government put its money where its mouth was in December 2006 as Italian budget law committed €30m over three years to projects that stimulate the information society (although what happened to those funds is open to question) while in May 2007 Italy launched its own repository of open source software for public administrations, the Collaborative Development Environment.

In June 2007 Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, announced the creation of the second Open Source Commission to define guidelines for public procurement of open source software. In May 2008 it published its first draft report.

Key projects:
National open source success stories include the Ministry of Justice, which has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as has the Ministry of Economics and Finance.

Meanwhile the National Institute of Design and Mint is using JBoss, and Corte dei Conti is also using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In July 2007 the IT department of the Italian Parliament presented plans for the migration of 200 servers and more than 3,500 desktop PCs to Linux and OpenOffice. The migration was due to begin in September and take two years.

Regional government projects include Cremona, Foggia, Rome, Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Genoa, Bologna, Balzano, Savona, Umbria, and Tuscany again.

More details are available of Rome’s open source policy, Genova’s OpenOffice trials, Bologna’s open source projects, and Bolzano’s FUSS project.

Read the full article.

Congratulations to the Funambol team for raising 12.5 millions of funding in a series B financing led by mobile-focused venture capital firm Nexit Ventures, along with Castile Ventures (new investor) and was joined by existing investors, Walden International and HIG Ventures.

Investors are banking in a long term perspective, while Funambol is cash flow positive from the beginning of this year, so I asked my friend Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, the following question:

How is this money going to be spent?

A tight-rope walker (funambol) by hdc.

Our plan is to use the cash to scale up the organization. In particular, around sales and operations. Commercial open source companies tend to have leads in every part of the world, which is a great thing. However, in order to follow the leads through, you need people on site (in particular if you are selling a product to service providers). Therefore, we are opening a few more offices world-wide, where we already have customers, to properly serve them and expand our presence.

Sometimes easy questions are a valuable tool to get interesting insights. Open source ISVs facing the “turning OSS users into customers” are likely to meet Lead Users - a term coined by Eric Von Hippel referring to users of a product experiencing needs actually unfulfilled and who could significantly benefit from the solution to those needs - from all over the world. If thinking global is the natural choice for open source firms, acting locally requires individualization and customizations to your customers’ needs, yet a local structure to effectively implement such needs.

As mentioned in my first interview to Fabrizio, Funambol addresses only the “top of the pyramid” (carriers, large ISP, etc), enabling also the base of the pyramid - the “free” Customers - to generate value for Funambol, as it is happening with AOL who just selected Funambol to help with synchronization of its own online and mobile mail.

In the meantime Funambol ignited also a partnership with SpikeSource, in order to address through SpikeSource and their partners other layers of the “pyramid”. Fabrizio himself commenting the partnership said:

This partnership with SpikeSource enables every company, regardless of size, to benefit from the simple implementation of Funambol’s mobile open source application.

Funambol besides fostering its community and delivering its wireless sync application for the iPhone, is creating an open source (mobile) ecosystem around its platform, as every open source firm should do.

Kudos to Fabrizio and his team!

Technorati Tags: Funambol, SpikeSource, Spikeignited, Venture Capital, Nexit Ventures, Castile Ventures, Walden International, HIG Ventures, FabrizioCapobianco, lead users, free customers, pyramid market

Mail merge in OpenOffice.org - mail merge in OpenOffice.org made clear.

Microsoft Invites to ODF Workshop in Redmond - Erwin Tenhumberg, who is leaving Sun to join SAP, reports about the event.

Open source tour of Europe: Portugal - Matthew Aslett reports about OpenOffice.org/StarOffice in Portugal since 2004, just as happened in Italy.

epractice.eu, the portal created by the European Commission offers a service for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners, reported about Lazio e-Citizen, a digital inclusion project.

The programme responded to European directives on the Lisbon Strategy and its objectives were to increase the residents’ awareness of the importance of digital literacy, the benefits that e-skills bring to their personal and professional lives, and to fight against social exclusion. The project developed a strategy to bridge the digital divide based on specific criteria: gender, age and skill levels.

Don’t be a secret keeper by *Drangongly*

I asked Alessandra Devitofrancesco (ECDL foundation), author of the Lazio e-Citizen case reported on epractice to tell me more, and she kindly put me in touch with the AICA (ECDL member) responsible of the initiative, Pierpaolo Maggi.

He explained me that the project has been developed using the open source course management system Moodle, and that the portal is accessible also through Firefox and Netscape. On the contrary the article on epractice and also e-citizen FAQ report (bold emphasis is mine):

The schools, universities and Permanent Territorial Centres which were involved in the Lazio e-Citizen project were chosen according to different technological requirements:
- Availability of one or more rooms with at least 12+5 desks and Internet access (ADSL or wireless)
- LAN network among all desks and shared printer
- PC Pentium 4 (or superior) or equivalent (i.e. AMD)
- Windows 2000 or later versions
- Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 or superior
- Accessories: audio set and headphones: CD ROM reader, minimum video resolution SVGA 800×600

It is time for outing, I publicly invite project’s promoters to disclose the specific technology choice (moodle), how it has been used and, last but not the least, telling people that the portal is accessible to open source.

eAccessibility and eInclusion are definitely also about allowing open source users to access information.

Technorati Tags: eAccessibility, eInclusion, digital literacy, digital divide, moodle, lazio e-citizen, course management system, epractice, Lazio

SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, a competitiveness cluster aimed at developing the local economy and enterprises’ competitiveness, using partnership and training to produce and deliver enabling innovations, just run its third internal convention. Among the five thematic groups, since October 2007 has been included a technology-oriented working group on open source (Logiciel Libre).

Paris, capital du logiciel libre by Koninho

Roberto Di Cosmo, professor at the university of Paris-Diderot and president of the Logiciel Libre working group, invited me to join the event to learn more about what is going on in the Paris area in the free software arena.

Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva’s CEO, is the vice-president of the open source thematic group, while in the council are sitting representatives from big firms like Cap Gemini, Bull, C-S, along with people from INRIA, university Pierre et Marie Curie and Nuxeo.

Roberto explains that the goal of this group is to help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area by federating research laboratories, SMEs and big firms through R&D projects, partially supported by public funding in the standard scheme of competitivenes clusters.

The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors. On the other side, this framework has been put at work in the particularly fertile ground of the Paris area, that hosts 50% of the ITC R&D of France, with a significant presence of Open Source ISV, a large number of research centers and Universities with IT laboratories, that have a long tradition of contributing to Free Software, and an exceptionally high concentration if IT expenditures.

Roberto, how System@tic allocates resources to the projects?

A distinguishing feature of the R&D projects in a competitiveness cluster, is that they must bring together at least two industrial partners and a research laboratory. In the case of our group, resources are allocated in the following manner: 59% SMEs, 26% laboratories, 15% big firms. The projects go through a rigorous evaluation process, first inside the group, then at the level of the cluster, and then in the services of the ministry of Industry, the region, and the departments of the Paris area.

During the first year public investments sum up to less than five millions euro, less than half of the how much has been allocated for open source software by the Italian budget law last year, this year and next one. Italy is investing more money actually, but it is still unclear how such investments will eventually benefit the IT Italian ecosystem, though.

Italy is still missing a clear strategy about how to foster the Italian open source ecosystem through training, education, research and outreach, while France apparently has found its own path for developing it.

Dominique Vernay, Systematic president, during his opening speech congratulated the Open Source group for the speed with which it has started 4 high quality R&D projects, integrating quickly in the Systematic infrastructure.

Marc Lipinski - vice president of the Conseil Régional de l’Ile de France for higher education, research and innovation - gave a particular importance to the role of this group while addressing the over 400 delegates present in the room, stressing its creation as one of the most significant events in the last year for Systematic.

During coffee-breaks I spoke with few French open source actors, among others Cedric Thomas (OW2), Ludovic Dubost (Xwiki), Stéfane Fermiger (Nuxeo), Daniel Schaefer (Kalis), but also with open source customers, like Denis Teyssou (AFP) or Marie Buhot-Launay (Paris Region Economic Development Agency), inward investment adviser for ISV companies wanting to invest in the Paris area.

People had a very positive feeling with regard to the approved open source projects, and looking at projects like scribo is easy to share their thoughts.

SCRIBO - Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies - aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents. SCRIBO has a total budget of 4.3M? and is partially funded by the French administration. It brings 9 participants together: AFP, CEA LIST, INRIA, LRDE (Epita), Mandriva, Nuxeo, Proxem, Tagmatica and XWiki.

Italy beat France on a soccer field, but on the open source ground we have a lot to learn from them.

Technorati Tags: France, Italy, Open Source Government, ecosystems, DominiqueVernay, RobertoDCosmo, MarcLipinski, FrancoisBancilhon, Scribo, System@tic

Profoss last week organised an event on OpenOffice.org deployments in professional environments.

Running with the seagulls, by * Toshio *

The event was opened by Roberto Galoppini, who talked about the approach and methodology available for a successful OpenOffice.org migration. After an introduction to the OpenOffice.org community and the way OpenOffice.org has been promoted in Italy, with significant results (doubling of download year over year), Roberto went ahead with advices on OpenOffice.org migrations, based on his own experience. I won’t make a recap of this talk here, but as often, the most obvious points are those that are worth repeating: involve your users, evaluate the situation before migrating, etc. Worth noting is that integration of OpenOffice.org with other enterprise systems might cause troubles at some point. Maybe a repository of approved or certified OpenOffice.org extensions might be helping here, but Roberto doesn’t see a global initiative happening soon, or unrelated to commercial interests of a company.

Next was Eric Descamps, project manager at the Belgian Post for the pilot on OpenOffice.org. After evaluation of the business case of an OOo deployment at the Belgian Post, it was discovered that the returns were more or less the same if the deployment started in a window between now and in 2 years. As a result, the project is now frozen, but can be restarted anytime. I guess this is a good argument when negociating with Microsoft. Let’s hope it won’t be limited at that though. Because the pilot at the Post brought interesting information. As an example, most problems encountered by users where due to format conversions. And this is in agreement with Roberto, who advised to switch to ODF altogether when switching to OOo.

During the break, Bruno Lowagie, from iText fame, gave a demo combining iText and OOo for the generation of PDF documents: the template bring edited in OOo, and the final document generated by iText.

After the break, it was Machtelt Garrels‘ turn to talk. Machtelt is the co-founder of the Belgian chapter of the OpenDoc Society, and gave a passioned talk about avoiding the common pitfalls during a migration. As mentioned above, it’s funny to see the most obvious things be worth repeating. One such thing is that management has to give the example. How can an employee be motivated by a change to OOo if his own managers don’t take the step themselves?

Her talk was followed by a panel discussion where all speakers participated.

This panel discussion closed the third Profoss event, which was again highly rated by all participants.

Profoss was started one year ago to provide quality information about the use of free and open source software in professional environments. Open source technologies are still too often dismissed as unreliable, unsupported geek toys. This is a judgment generally based on unverified allegations or due to ignorance of the open source world. Profoss wants professionals to take their decision to use or reject open source technologies on hard facts.

To reach that goal, Profoss’ first initiative was to organise events bringing non-commercial, informative content.
This was followed by other initiatives like a news website, directories of software and professionals specialised in open source and a planet aggregating feeds from blogs talking about professional open source at planet.profoss.eu.

If you want to be updated about Profoss activities, you can join the newsletter.

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, openoffice, Profoss, RobertoGaloppini, EricDescamps, BrunoLowagie, MachteltGarrels

RRDTool, the round-robin database tool, announced the release of RRDtool 1.3. The new release includes additional capabilities and functionalities, and it has been rewritten to make it more modular.

Tobias Oetiker, the author of many famous open source tools like RRDTool, MRTG and SmokePing holding a seat on GroundWork Open Source’s Project Lead Council, approaches software development from an hacker perspective: to scratch a personal itch.

Tobias Oetiker (on the right) by QFamily

Since I had issues to solve and did not find existing software to do it. Then because I use OSS almost exclusively in my work, I found it only fair to share the results of my work too. After all OSS only works when several parties throw their goods into the basket.

How all this started?

I wrote MRTG and SmokePing because I needed the functionality. So essentially I wrote them for myself. And since I like to see people enjoying using my tools, I put them out there. In the case of rrdtool, I did not need it directly, but based on the experience from writing MRTG I had a pretty clear vision as to what tool is missing from the system managers toolbox.

So the motivation for writing rrdtool was primarily drawn from the positive feedback I got from mrtg users. As it turned out, I had actually hit a nerve with all three of my tools since they all got pretty good use across the net.

For most of the time while developing the tools I have been working for ETH Zurich and did the tool work mostly in my spare time. Since I had a fixed income from the University I did not explore commercial opportunities.

Originally economic incentives weren’t the cause behind such code developments.
What about the economic incentives, today?

I found that publishing software as OSS has the nice effect of triggering more feedback than in a closed environment and also draws contributions every now and then which is a very nice plus the economic value is in me being known quite well for my work which makes it very easy getting contracts, because people assume I know stuff, which is not entirely a wrong assumption <smile>.

There are also direct benefits, in the sense that some companies contract me to develop additional features for the OSS packages. I always draw up the contracts such that I can include the results back into the mainline. Most of smokePing extensions have been created in this way.

Tobias was the typical hacker described by researches interested in understanding motivations (intrisic motivations). Later Tobias was also also motivated by financial rewards (extrinsic motivations), coming from selling consulting services on his products, and he eventually ended open his own company.

Which are your source of revenues, besides consulting?

Well I am trying this with the sponsorship approach, the idea is that companies that profit from the products become a sponsor who just gives money to encourage the future development of the product. I use this money to pay for maintaining the products and developing some additions which are not covered by some other contract, just because I think they are necessary a further source of income is google ads which works quite well due to the high traffic on the website.

Which are the advantages for your customers? And for you?

The big advantage of this approach is that the customers normally have a clear vision of which problem they want to solve, and since I know the tool well I can integrate an optimal solution which will continue to evolve even after the contract ends, since the extension is now part of the product.

This leads to a forth motivation to do it all. Being the author of these well known tools gives me a certain standing in the industry, which comes in handy when bidding for contracts, since customer assume (rightly) that I know stuff and I am able to finish projects.

Our biggest contract last year had nothing to do with any of the tools but the customer asked us only because he had seen my name mentioned in connection with monitoring.

Tobias creates tools in a way that users can get along without needing any extra support contract. The software is enriched as part of their service offerings, and as time goes by they enhance their toolbox. They do not sell tools, but the stuff they make the tools for.

Oetiker + Partner AG is a pure IT service company, for some probably the highest form of open source firm.

Happy hacking Tobias!

About RRDtool
RRDtool is a freely (as in freedom and in beer) available software tool for the collection and graphical display of time series data and is deployed to monitor computer networks and network traffic. Installed at hundred thousands of sites world wide, RRDtool monitors everything from small local networks to large IT infrastructures of internationally operating telecom providers. RRDtool is included in the family of Open Source tools developed by Tobias Oetiker, which also includes MRTG, and SmokePing, which is used for the measurement and display of line quality parameters in Internet connections. For more information about MRTG, RRDtool and SmokePing visit: http://oss.oetiker.ch

Technorati Tags: TobiasOetiker, Open Source Monitoring, Network Management, GroundWork, RRDTools, MRTG, smokeping, motivations

OpenOffice-based applications with Mono and MonoDevelop - Miguel de Icaza teaches you how to build OpenOffice solutions with Mono and MonoDevelop.

Italian Webinar - Materiale, Domande e Risposte per il Webinar “Guida alla scalabilita’ di MySQL” - Ivan Zoratti Q&A session held during the Italian webinar on MySQL scalability.

Go hybrid - Paul Bach is looking for projects hosted on CodePlex interested in participating a research aimed at designing Codeplex support.