Commercial Open Source Software

Sardegna Ricerche, in cooperation with CRS4 is carrying out a project for a DistrICT Camp, within the activities of the program “Sardegna DistrICT”.

The Summer DistrICT Camp program, hosts young people from all Europe aiming at fostering the co-operation between enterprises and innovation and research system.

Diving in the Sardinian Open Source sea by paolofusco

Summer DistrICT Camp is dedicated to 25 young people from all Europe, interested in developing innovation projects, applied to the many technological laboratories, among them an “Open source software” Lab. The Open Source Lab will create a group of developers experienced in management and creation of open source projects, to be applied in the fields of school, public administration and Italian companies.

Read the full Set of Rules and join the program before the 29th of August (via Arturo di Corinto).

About the Sardinian ICT District.
Located in the area between Cagliari and Pula, the Sardinian ICT District has developed around a group of scientific, technological and entrepreneurial specialists, experienced in the field of Information and Communication Technologies and Internet advanced applications.
The project for the development of the District, aims to create nine “technological laboratories”, where scientific and technological activities and experiences of Universities and Research Centres can merge, with the precise intent to start research and development projects at the service of the entrepreneurial world.

Technorati Tags: Sardegna Ricerche, CRS4, Summer DistrICT camp, ArturoDiCorinto, Open Source Lab, open source, precompetitive research

Legion of Tech announces that Mark Shuttleworth is the next speaker in their Legion of Talk series, today in Portland from 6 PM to 8 PM, just after the first day of OSCON 2008.

If interested register for  free and see you there!

5 reasons to avoid the iPhone 3G -  Free Software Foundation campaign against DRM goes on, effectively I would say, since many blogger write about it.

Forrester projects growth in open source DBMS - Zack Urlocker reports about Forrester’s findings.

The Impact of Open Source VoIP -  Luca Filigheddu’s essay on open source voip.

Radiohead goes open source.

Sonatype, founded by the creator of Maven, Jason van Zyl, after committing their m2eclipse plugin to the Eclipse Foundation, recently joined the Eclipse Foundation as a strategic developer, gaining also a seat on the Eclipse board.

m2eclipse, accepted as an Eclipse Technology Project, sets the standard for integrating Maven and Eclipse, and aims to make easier to use Eclipse IDE.

I posed Jason few questions to learn more about how the Eclipse ecosystem works.

How was the m2eclipse project accepted as an Eclipse Technology Project?

There is standard process at Eclipse for the acceptance of new projects. As a project you voice your intent, and propose the project to the Eclipse Foundation as we did with m2eclipse. A public announcement is then made about the project to the Eclipse community and a newsgroup for the project is setup to field questions and concerns by the community. For us, after a few months everything was going smoothly so the Sonatype developers working on m2eclipse submitted a project proposal to the standard “creation review process” where our project was approved and then provisioned. We are now in the process of working through the Eclipse IP process, and in parallel moving our project’s code and documentation over to the Eclipse Foundation’s infrastructure. It’s been great working with the Eclipse folks, they have a very professional, and thoughtful setup.

Is the project economically sustainable?

All of of the projects being developed by Sonatype are economically sustainable. We have a number of very large clients, whose names everyone would recognize, who are using Eclipse with Maven and require high quality integration and support. We are experts on integrating Eclipse with Maven, and moving our project to the Eclipse Foundation is a display of our commitment to the project. We have joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Development Partner, which entails providing 8 full-time employees to work on the m2eclipse project. This commitment meant that we needed to be economically viable before we brought m2eclipse to the Eclipse Foundation.

How does the Eclipse Foundation see community building?

As part of the standard process toward having a project accepted the Eclipse Foundation likes to see an active community, because for many projects, community involvement is an integral part of their success and viability. Our m2eclipse project has been steadily growing over the course of three years, we’ve worked hard to improve the quality in order to attract a larger community and have currently seen over 50,000 downloads. The community is definitely a key aspect in the decision making process to accept a project at Eclipse.

Did considerations about community building influence the decision to commit the project?

The reach and influence of the Eclipse Foundation is very powerful and is a great way to increase exposure to new users. Any project that is part of the Eclipse Foundation is known to be of high quality because the Foundation demands a great deal of rigor. Moving our project to Eclipse is a sign of our commitment to them, but we appreciate the visibility and chance of attracting new users and developers, as this is a critical factor in the success of any open source project.

Thank you Jason, and happy hacking!

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, open ecosystems, eclipse, sonatype, maven,   m2eclipse, JasonVanZyl

Joel West joined the conversation on community-led and sponsored open source projects. His newer paper on the role of participation architecture in growing sponsored open source communities explores governance issues at a deeper scale.

Transparency and Accessibility matter by Josh Sommers

Joel and Siobhán O’Mahony compared corporate and voluntary production models, or sponsored and community managed projects, as they called them. Their study had two research questions:

how did sponsors design open source software communities in the hopes of attracting external participation, and how did this differ from the design of autonomous based communities?

Interesting questions indeed, coming from real experts of open source community governance. Joel and Siobhán didn’t focus on boundary between work and hobby in an individual’s participation, or other individual motivations for open source contributions, as Joel explained. They focused on investigating how sponsored communities differ from their autonomous counterparts identified three key design choices: the organization of production, community governance and intellectual property. I tend to agree with Joel saying that the “meat” of the paper is in Table 3, reporting the specific trade-offs made across the various independent and sponsored projects, but I warmly suggest you to read the whole paper.

Talking about the organization of the production of code, they say (bold emphasis is mine):

Overall, the degree of modularity, associated dependencies, and the quality of code documentation affected the ability of outside members to understand the code well enough to contribute. [..] In addition to the technical architecture of the code, the organization of production includes control of the processes by which individuals participate in the community’s production process. These social measures are not necessarily correlated to a project’s technical design: for example, highly modular code can still be tightly controlled by a single firm. Thus, a project’s technical architecture is one subset of a community’s participation architecture. [..] We identified three design parameters that provided contributors with transparency and accessibility to production processes:
1. Live code access provides transparency by offering the community the chance to review the most recent “live” version of source code on the community website [..] . 2. Public commit process refers to the opportunity for community members to become directly involved in the production process by earning (through demonstrated technical proficiency) the right to directly commit software changes to the community repository.[..] 3. Subproject creation is a mechanism by which a community based on the sponsor’s original code can grow to assume new functionality or new directions.

The production of code is key to a sustainable open source business model, that’s why some open source firms are shifting towards an hybrid production model and also why retaining an existing one is vital.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, community-driven, peer production, external participation, open source communities, JoelWest, SiobhánOMahony

Jacob Moorman, the Director of Operations for SourceForge.net has two open positions on his team for Systems Programmer/Analyst II’s. These positions are open to candidates located in the United States, and the salary range for this position starts at $65K plus benefits.

Job Description:
This role will support the ongoing maintenance and improvement of the SourceForge site backend and developer services.

Fill on line form if you are interested.

is looking for Systems Programmers Analysts individuals to play pivotal roles in defining he next generation of SourceForge.net, the world’s largest Open Source software development Web site.

Beyond the differences between community and sponsored projects, if it is true that buy an existing open source community is not easy (yet possible), retaining a sponsored one seems difficult looking at the Citrix versus the Xen Community case.

Wet open source ground by rupertsanfordscutt

Daniel Kusneztky reports that XenSource, struggling to find ways to appropriate returns from the commons, is embarking in a new direction, potentially harmful to other members of the XenSource community.

Tony Asaro, who recently joined Virtual Iron as Chief Strategy Officer, pointed out that the Xen technology is also the result of the efforts of others, therefore the results are not owned by Citrix.

Acquiring a virtualization company is easy, especially if you can pay an high price for it, retaining its community maybe a more difficult task, though.

Sun Tzu said there are six kinds of terrain, open source communities are an entangling ground: ground which can be abandoned but is hard to re-occupy. Traditional IT vendors buying small open source companies have to mind their steps, open source is a different ground, definitely.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, XenSource, Citrix, DanielKusneztky, open source communities

OSCON 2008 - the biggest open source convention in the world run by O’Reilly, celebrating this year its 10th anniversary, - will take place in Portland next week, bringing together more than 2500 professionals from all over the world.

The convention includes 40 technology tutorials and over 400 sessions focusing on many different topics, ranging from business to security and Web Applications, along with a new event dedicated to open source mobile (Open Mobile Exchange).

Only few people from Europe will join OSCON 2008, among them Cedric Thomas (OW2 consortium), Stefano Maffulli (Funambol Community), Pierre Baudracco (Linagora) and Francesco Cesarini (Erlang Training and Consulting).

I am looking forward to follow the Participate 08 session, aimed at exploring the issues and opportunities presented by community development, in particular the themes of hybrid models. On Tuesday I won’t miss Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, and I am definitely sorry that I’ll fly away before Chris DiBona’s google open source update talk, on Wednesday.

If you are planning to stay at OSCON on Wednesday don’t miss Open Source Software Economics, Standards, and IP in One Lesson by Stephen Walli, and Open Source / Open World on Thursday, moderated by Danese Cooper. Last but not least I suggest you to follow Does Open Source Need to Be “Organic”?, a session following the now famous Theodore’s post on the subject.

I will be covering the event writing articles for Italian ICT magazines, see you there!

Technorati Tags: OSCON 2008, OSCON, Portland, open source conferece, DaneseCooper, StephenWalli, TheodoreTs’o, ChrisDiBona, MarkShuttleworth, FrancescoCesarini, ERLANG, PierreBaudracco, Linagora, StefanoMaffulli, Funambol, CedricThomas, OW2

Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, announced the availability of the beta of CloudStatus, a tool providing an independent view of how works the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Stacey Schneider, senior director of marketing, after being interviewed introduced me to Jeremy Hogan, who just joined Hyperic as Director of Community Management. Since recently I started speculating on community and sponsored projects, I asked him to talk a little bit about Hyperic’s approach to open source communities.

Hyperic at this point falls into the bee keeper model, where the majority of the code comes form the company, but I also have a few years of experience at Red Hat, where the bulk of the code comes from the upstream so I can talk about that model as well.

Really, the community is still a community whether you have corporate interests or commerce driving innovation. Just like the wild west was eventually tamed and settled. Saloons became four star hotels and a rocky chunk of desert became LA.

I am likely to meet Jeremy at OSCON, so I’ll keep all my questions about how lucrative coopetition can boost Hyperic’s business and his opinion about GroundWork’s attitude to be involved in the coordination of some inter-projects collaborations.

Technorati Tags: Hyperic, Open Source Management, sponsored project, Jeremy Hogan

On the 25th of June IDABC organized an Information Day on the novelties of the new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and now the dispute is open: BSA representatives call for “own goal”, while open source evangelists explain why standards on a RAND basis are discriminatory towards open source software.

Dispute about Europe-wide definition of open standards

A dispute has been sparked in Brussels about the definition of open standards to promote the interoperability between eGovernment services. According to drafts for a revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which were recently presented by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Informatics, the specifications of open standards have to be made available either free of charge, or for a specified nominal fee. If a standard, or parts of it, are protected by patents, the revision stipulates that these parts have to be “made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis” for third party use. This has caused protests by IT business associations like the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which counts Microsoft and Intel among its members. [..]

Jan Wildeboer is an open source evangelist at Red Hat in Europe who supports the plans for the revised EIF version. He explained, in an interview with heise online, “Particularly the stipulation that presumed intellectual property has to be made available without the payment of license fees in open standards complies with a fundamental requirement for open source developers and providers of open source solutions.” He said open standards are generally a “vital component of modern IT infrastructures”, and was surprised that the BSA renewed its call for license fees to be paid for HTTP and DHCP. Wildeboer said this argument has already proved redundant in the debate about software patents.

Read the full article.