Commercial Open Source Software

A couple of days ago I happened to meet my old friend Idel Fuschini on the street, and we have been talking about things happened ten years ago or longer when working in the mobile VAS sector, when WAP was still to come.

Idel over the last ten years has been working on implementing mobile-based services using proprietary products like Volantis (nowadays pretty open source), Mobileaware, and Oracle Portal to go. More recently he started to use also open source platforms like WURFL, eventually ending to be fascinated by the open source side of software development.

What follows is not a research, neither an investigation including a quantitative evidence, but just a reportage of a programmer’s life and how open source can make a change.

Continue reading ‘The Case for Open Source Development, a Personal Case Study’

The Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue last week hosted a conference entitled “Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance: The Next Four Years”, gathering IP lawyers and economists from all over the world.

What should the US and EU governments do in terms of international norm-setting on copyright, in terms of patent reform, R&D, and standards is covered by policy recommendations from the speakers.

Continue reading ‘Intellectual Property Harmonization: TACD Recommendations, a Difficult Convergence’

Sean Hull, founder and senior consultant at Heavyweight Internet Group in New York, on January 22 will introduce you to MySQL Replication.

MySQL replication is fairly easy to set up, but in the real world many obstacles can get in the way of keeping it up and running smoothly. One problem that seems to bog down a lot of DBAs is the slaves getting out of sync with the master.

Register on line.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Writer Guide Available - The OOoAuthors project has recently released the OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide at Lulu.com. A 552-page manual for $20, or download the PDF file for free at the OOo Documentation Project site.

Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org Writer Guide, OpenOffice.org fonts and tools, User Surveys, Reports and Comments: OpenOffice.org links, 17-01-2009′

Olliance Group, the open source strategy firm, and DLA Piper, one of the largest legal service providers in the world, are organizing the 4th Annual Think Tank.

The Open Source Think Tank 2009, the leading invitation-only commercial open source brainstorm and networking conference, as usual will be held at the Silverado Resort in Napa (California) on March 1-4.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Think Tank 2009: Registrations are now Open’

Marketcetera - the open source company providing open source software for automated trading systems - on the 14th of January released its new Automated Trading Platform 1.0.

Open Source at Wall Street is getting momentum. The official 1.0 release, originally tentatively scheduled for the last quarter of 2008, has already been adopted by 20 financial institutions, proving that open source can do a lot for the hedge fund industry.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Trading: Marketcetera Platform 1.0 now Available’

The Friends of GNOME website is live! The Friends of GNOME program is a way for individuals to help the GNOME Foundation to pursue 2009 goals.

Back in 2000 the GNOME project established to start the foundation to provide a structure and support to achieve project’s goals in a timely manner, to effectively integrate new citizens into the community and to publicly voice the decisions of the GNOME project.

Continue reading ‘GNOME Foundation: Friends of GNOME Program is Live!’

EU: Call for Tender - Economic and social impact of software and software-based services - The European Commission has opened a call for tender on “the economic and social impact of Software and software based Services”. The submission deadline is 2 February 2009.

Continue reading ‘European Call for Tenders, European Browser Barometer, CDT Confident Next FCC Chair: links 14-01-2009′

Scaling MySQL Leveraging Sun Systems - Michael Avis and Carl Ray will cover MySQL scalability combining Sun servers, storage and software. The webinar will take place on Thursday, January 20th 2009.

MITRE offers recommendation-tracker software and free one-day course - MITRE released on SourceForge Recommendation the Tracker (RT) software, a program aimed at facilitating the development of automated security benchmarks. MITRE offers also a one day course on on January 26, January 27, February 12 or February 13, 2009.

Upcoming Webinar: “OSGi and SOA” - Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at WSO2, will introduce the OSGi framework on the 20th January 2009.

OpenOffice.org : What was done in 2008 - One year in review. About incoming issues in IssueTracker.

12752 issues were reported in sum, Defects are 9388 (74%) issues, Feature and Enhancements 1981 (15%) issues and the rest are patches and tasks with 1383 (11%) issues. (More about integrated patches you can find in this blog).

These numbers say that 25% of all reported defects and 52% of all reported features and enhancements aren’t addressed until now. In sum more than 3000 issues (~27%) aren’t addressed. If this is a good or a bad number, I cannot say. I do not have the comparison with other bigger products until now. But I know that with OOo 3.0.1 and OOo 3.1 the quality will and should be increased. So stay tuned for these releases.

Read the whole post.