Commercial Open Source Software

The First Word Processor to Spell Correctly in Portuguesa - Tne new orthographic agreement for Portuguese speaking countries went into effect on the 1st of January, luckily the Brazilian OpenOffice.org community was there to help.

OOoLilyPond : Using music notation in OpenOffice.org - OOoLilyPond simplifies the integration of music notation in OpenOffice.org Writer, Impress and Draw. It needs some time to get familiar with the LilyPond language. Try it.

Interview with Non-Sun OpenOffice.org Contributor, Charles-H. Schulz - Interesting interview, even if what Charles says about third parties’ contributions is inaccurate. As a matter of fact it has been a nightmare to find a way to get included the Italian dictionary and thesaurus. Simon Phipps did his best to help us, but it wasn’t enough to make it a reality, though.

Creative Commons Italia and SIAE - an Italian private organization that acts as the Italian collecting society for authors and publishers - on the 23th of December created a legal working group comprising members of both organizations.

Deborah De Angelis (Creative Commons Italia, lawyer) will take part to all meetings along with another CC member and SIAE’s representatives. Meetings will be held every second week, the took place yesterday in Rome.

Italian authors adhering to SIAE to protect their works and interested in use CC licenses are recommended to follow the future progress via Creative Commons Italia blog (Creative Commons Italia is a Nexa’s project).

Barcode - Barcode is an OpenOffice.org extension for creating UPC-A, EAN-13, ISBN and JAN barcodes in OpenOffice.org Draw. Barcode has been created using EuroOffice Extension Creator, a PYthon frameworkto easily create OpenOffice.org extensions (screencast).

Fast Mail Merge Open Office extension - OpenOffice.org extension to make mail merges easier, read more at Linux.com, or just download it.

Enhanced export options for bitmap files - OpenOffice.org extension adding a new options dialog when you export slides or selections from OpenOffice.org Impress or OpenOffice.org Draw to either PNG, JPG or GIF bitmap files. Pixel size, JPG image compression factor and other settings become adjustable. This extension requires Java.

Gartner’s 2009 predictions have been widely commented over these days, leaving space and opportunities to rediscuss the open source mantra “we cost less”.

Migrate to open source seems the cheapest solution, at least on an individual basis, but enterprise migrations are not an easy game to play, and TCO doesn’t look like the ultimate answer.

Any similarity between the Fermat’s theorem and the cost benefits of open source?

Continue reading ‘Open Source TCO: Total Cost of Ownership and the Fermat’s Theorem’

The Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue - a forum of US and EU consumer organizations - is organizing the “Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance: The Next Four Years” conference in Washington, 12-13 January 2009.

Europe, WIPO and USA are all discussing IP policies, TACD now that the new US Administration is about to take place in Washington wants to bring some interested parties at the table.

Both the United States and the European Union are facing demands to modify policies on patents, copyrights and other forms of intellectual property protection, coming from different perspectives. There are high profile right-owner lobbying efforts directed at higher standards and tougher enforcement of intellectual property rights, and growing interest among consumer groups, academics and many innovative businesses to protect the public domain and retain or even expand user rights. There is also much interest in exploring newer approaches to the support of creative and inventive communities, that do not rely on notions of exclusive rights.

With the organisation of this event, the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue calls for two days of discussion on the assessment and on the prospective of the American and European political and policy Agenda on intellectual property practices and policies.

Registration available on TACD’s website (Facebook group also available).

Scaling Up, Out or Virtually with MySQL - Ivan Zoratti, Sales Engineering Director for MySQL EMEA, will help you to understand which of the MySQL scaling options is best likely to meet your needs. The webinar will take place on Thursday, January 15th 2009.

WEBINAR: Scaling a PHP Application - This Zend presentation will focus on PHP software design techniques, and tools and software that help in building a high throughput. The Webinar will take place on January 28th 2009.

Reduce Your ECM Costs by 90% - This Alfresco webinar will review publicly available pricing information, and look at the cost of a typical basic system. The Webinar will take place on January 15th 2009.

OpenOffice.org Conference 2009 OOoCon 2009 - The new call for location, let’s see if it will take place in Europe this year (via Simon Phipps).

1115 giorni con OpenOffice (eng.: 1115 days with OpenOffice) - The latest version of OpenOffice 3 Soluzioni a raccolta - an Italian OpenOffice.org FAQ built with the help of the community - is available for download. It covers 2089 different topic (only Italian).

New Toy or Best Friend? (talkback on Linpus) - Useful tips from a reader. Linpus servers are too slow and software, OpenOffice.org included, is not updated unfortunately.

The New Year historically is a time for self improvement, and the commercial open source side of the world should be no exception to that.

Open Source thought leaders have expressed opinions and discussed the state of open source, here are my takes on some challenges and opportunities for the new year.

Continue reading ‘Commercial Open Source 2009: Challenges and Opportunities’