Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

Focusing on iPhone - Raven after 2.5 years as the Open Source Research Director for The 451 Group is now focusing on the iPhone. I knew about his passion for the iPhone (he is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp) and I wish him all the best as iPhone advisor.

Google Code reverses open-source licence ban -  Google changes its mind about MPL and EPL, reversing the decision to not host programs released with those licenses on google site. Chris Di Bona explains why, AGPL remains banded.

Open Hack 2008 - Hack is back, September 12-13 at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale. Over 30 web services and APIs. Search, geo, music, mobile, and more. If interested request an invite at: hackday.org.

Paris Capitale du Libre - FNILL, the French National Federation of Open Source Software Industry, is organizing the third edition on September 24-25.  During the event on the 24th will be held the first European Opensource Lawyers Event.

The Open Source World Conference - Malaga will be hosting from October 20 to 22 the sixth edition of OSWC.. I will attend to give a speech on open standards compliance.

Having a seat on the Sourceforge advisory board, lately I have been thinking about who are the stakeholders of world’s most famous open source repository, and how Sourceforge might travel to accommodate their changing needs.

A possible taxonomy by recursion sees recursion

Searching for Sourceforge on Google the first three different results summarize different aspects of how people look at it (bold emphasis is mine):

The world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications
(source: sourceforge.net).

A media, services and e-commerce network that provides and promotes Open Source software downloads, development, discussion and news. (source: sourceforge Inc., NASDAQ LNUX).

SourceForge.net is a source code repository and acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. SourceForge.net is operated by Sourceforge, Inc. (formerly VA Software) and runs a version of the SourceForge software, forked from the last open-source version available. As of August 2008, SourceForge.net hosts more than 180,000 projects and more than 1.9 million registered users, although it does contain many dormant or single-user projects
(source: wikipedia).

Some stakeholders’ point of views in regards to what Sourceforge is are implicitly represented by those definitions, a taxonomization of all Sourceforge’s stakeholders is probably needed to better define how better support all of them.

Let’s start from the developers.

There are three different subcategories of developers interested in Sourceforge: newbies, experienced and professionals.

Newbies can’t access any resource to easily jump start a development project. SF.net is definitely not aimed at them.

Experienced developers’ needs are well matched by SF.net, offering them an integrated web platform to build software, centralizing development management for no cost and helping project visibility.

Professionals, people making a living of it, needing to accurately track donwloads or willing to have full control of their repositories, today can’t easily migrate their projects in and out of SF.net, and they often choose to run their own forge.

But if it is true that they don’t need a software development platform, many of them are happy with an high ranked page referring to their project. Guerilla marketing’s fans maybe also interested in selling services through the SF marketplace, but the presence of competitors at (less than) a click away could be a problem.

Peer-to-peer network users.

All they need is an easy access to downloading their favorite file-sharing tool. Even if they can hardly seen as part of the SF developers community, since they pay little (if any) interest in free software, they are a very significant part of the whole users base.

Public and Private Organizations.

Organizations using SF facilities to build communities, are open and interested to a wide collaboration, probably going beyond the peer production of code, maybe willing to find an answer to the open source conundrum. Public administrations willing to share open source code are likely interested in sharing also solutions and experiences.

End users.

End users look for software to fulfill their idiosyncratic needs. Often their ability to conduct an effective software selection process is little, as is scarce the probability to find a solution to their unique problems in few clicks.

Next I will cover the competitive landscape and opportunities in front of Sourceforge.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, long tail, sourceforge, open source mediation, open source marketplace, commons peer production

DNI Open Source Conference 2008, September 11-12, 2008 in Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC - The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announces that the “DNI Open Source Conference 2008″ will be held on 11-12 September in Washington DC. Read also their blog (via Kent’s blog). Agenda and break-out sessions are on line.

Linux Plumbers Conference -  16-19 September, Portland, Oregon. Have a look at the program.

Openmind 2008 - COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, organizes the 5th Openmind conference in association with the MindTrek conference, on Tuesday October 7th, in Tampere, Finland. I will moderate the Open source - fully integrated with business? session. I am looking forward to talk again with Martin Michlmayr and all the others.

Groundwork, the provider of the open source based IT management and network monitoring solution, is getting momentum in financial services environments.

Mary Knox of Gartner Research, says that the adoption of OSS is most notable in the financial sector because “they are impacted by escalating transaction volumes and data processing requirements as well as cost pressures”.

I asked David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, to tell me if his experience confirms Mary’s ideas on why adoption is arising in the financial sector.

Earlier this year, GroundWork conducted a survey of the GroundWork Monitor user community, including both users of the free, Community Edition and the subscription-based Professional and Enterprise versions. There were 361 completed surveys, a large enough sample size to be statistically significant.

One of the questions asked was “Please indicate the importance of the following attributes of open source software when evaluating systems management technologies.” In order of ranking, the top answers were:

1. Continuity of technology support over time
2. Access to a wide community of experts
3. Ability to combine OSS tools together more easily
4. Less expensive
5. Higher quality product
6. Easier to customize
7. Avoiding vendor lock-in
8. More secure code
9. Access to the source code
10. Compliance with organizational mandates to use OSS

I agree with Davids saying that the cost savings doesn’t appear to be the most important factor, since commercial and extensive support sounds definitely more interesting to customers (along with integrating different OSS tools together).

How about the percentage of your subscriber base upgrading (nearly 30%)?

While GroundWork does have an increasing number of customers who use GroundWork Monitor Enterprise from the very beginning, the upgrade percentage is a reflection of customers who have moved from either GroundWork Monitor Community Edition or GroundWork Monitor Professional to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. These are deployments that are expanding their use of GroundWork Monitor, looking to add some of the capabilities GroundWork Monitor Enterprise can offer. Namely, support for distributed topologies, standby servers for high availability, or extended network management functions. GroundWork’s largest deployments are now above 10,000 managed servers, split across multiple geographic locations.

Thank you David, I see the increase include also customers upgrading from GroundWork Monitor Professional to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, and not only users becoming customers. Even if you didn’t find yet the philosopher’s stone I believe that running similar surveys can help Groundowork and other open source firms to better understand your market.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, groundwork, open source monitoring

Nokia and the Symbian Foundation Opportunity - Part I - Stephen Walli first part of his analysis of what the Symbian Foundation can represent for the mobile market. A must read.

An open-source approach to tracking stolen laptops - an open source approach to the problem.

On the Culture of Free Software - an interesting interview with Cristopher Kelty, I need to read his Two Bits, The Cultural Significance of Free Software book.

The Belly and the Members - “Aesop” on Free Standards (via Jon Udell), excerpted from The Myth of Free Standards: Giving Away the Farm. I totally agree on the importance of standards sales revenue, since eliminating the fee-based system has definitely a cost:

Otherwise, standards publishers, purveyors and purchasers might begin to see “For Sale” signs affixed to the “homesteads” of many SDOs and third-party standards providers — to the detriment of us all.

Thoughts on Richard Stallman and Free Software - James McGovern wonders why Richard Stallman never talk about the economics of software development. While I have been critical of  other Richard’s decisions, I am fine with his decision to almost not talk about it.

Economic clustering and Free Software release coordination - Mark Shuttleworth believes that for a stronger impact of open source on the global software market we need to coordinate the releases of major pieces of the free software stack.

A group of FFII activists have decided to set up big European petitions targeting national legislators of the members of the European Patent Convention to clarify the limitations of patentability.

We are aiming to collect at least 1 million signatures, which implies the support of a large number of associations.

We would like, as the first phase, to collect the names of local associations which will probably support the petition to stop software and business method patents. We are going to contact them for the details on a second phase.

For this we need your help - please go to http://stopsoftwarepatents.eu/

and fill in the data of any organisation of your country which you think would probably support the petition.

Thanks in advance,
Iván Villanueva and Miernik, activists of the FFII and former board members

In Italy Italian Linux Society and Associazione per il Software Libero have already signed the petition, I hope more will support the initiative soon.

In the latest software Tech News from DACS an article from Emma McGrattan, SVP Engineering at IngreS, entitled Preparing for Open Source.

Groundwork: Bringing IT Operations Management to Open Source and beyond - Groundwork sponsored an IDC analyst report. I can’t reproduce any content here, and I think IDC should consider a different approach when talking about open source.

Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development - Michel Bauwens reports some quotes of an interesting article along with the definition of Gated Source Communities.

Pentaho Corporation: OpenMRS and Pentaho Collaborate to Enhance Open Source Health Management - Via Mysyndicaat this news about, learn more about how to build ETL functionality into OpenMRS.