Commercial Open Source Software

First Monday - the famous peer-reviewed journal - recently published an interesting paper on open source collaboration in the US Public Sector, resulting probably one of the first research covering open source governance in the public sector.

Before commenting its findings and see how and if they could be applied to the Italian situation, I wish to end to recap issues raised during the “Open Source Governance” held in Rome last October.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Governance: State of the Art and Lesson Learnt in Italy (part II)’

Free Software Foundation Europe one year ago introduced the Document Freedom Day, and also this year a global day for document liberation is scheduled for 25 of March.

The initiative promotes only ODF, other open standards, like the Portable Document Format (PDF), are ignored.

Continue reading ‘Open Standards: Document ‘Freedom’ Day is back, some thoughts’

LCA: The Business of Open Source, Australia, January 2009 - FOSSBazaar is hosting videos of the “Business of Open Source” (DevBiz) mini-conference at Linux.conf.au (LCA). Among many I watched Arjen Lentz speech and Ross Turk presentation.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Business Videos, OpenOffice.org Extensions and Download Counters, Mandriva 2009: Open Source links, 14-02-2009′

OpenOffice.org Annual Conference 2009 will be held in one of the following locations: Alexandria (Egypt),Budapest (Hungary), Guwahati (India), Orvieto (Italy), Quezon City (Philippines), Reykjavik (Iceland), Riga (Latvia).
OOoCon 2008 has been held in Beijing, read the details of each venue carefully and vote for the ‘right’ one: Ovieto! The voting closes on Friday 27th, vote it now!

Packt - the publishing company specialized in books on software that have developed vibrant online communities - published ”Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions”, yet another book on the 2008 Open Source CMS Award Winner.

Continue reading ‘Open Source CMS Books: Drupal 6 Sites Builder Solutions, by Packt’

Volantis Systems few days ago announced the availability of Volantis Mobility Server Community Edition version 5.1. The new release aims at bringing the power of Web 2.0 to the mobile world, including optimizations for the iPhone.

Volantis Mobility Server was released under the GPLv3 almost one year ago, so I asked Mark Watson, Volantis Systems CEO, about how things are going, and how going open source helped.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Mobile: Volantis Mobility Server 5.1 released, an interview with Mark Watson’

Groundwork, the provider of the open source based network management software, announced  the availability of GroundWork 5.3. The new platform increased scalability, the number of devices managed by a single subscription, and avoids per-node licensing. 

Reading the press release few questions came up in my mind. I asked David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, more about GroundWork’s customer base, how GroundWork keeps pace with open source innovation and how GroundWork benefits from using the BitRock Network Service.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Monitoring: GroundWork 5.3 released, an interview with David Dennis’

Matthew Aslett few days ago answering a Tarus Balog’s comment reopened an old issue about what defines an open source vendor.  Savio Rodrigues picked up the ball and Matt Asay joined the football game.

Matthew says that ”even if the lines between open source and proprietary continues to blur it - as originally stated by Brian Fitzgerald in his “The Transformation of Open Source Software” - is more important than ever for these 100% open source vendors to define who they are and what they stand for”.

What about customers’ perspectives?

Continue reading ‘Open Source Vendors: Resolving the Name Confusion in Favor of Customers’

While Obama asked about the benefits of open source , the actual Italian Government shows little interest in open source, and it is time to talk back about the importance of the open source software governance.

The “Open Source Governance” conference - organized by the Italian Institute for advanced information technology at the end of October 2009 - an Italian event dedicated to the future of open source procurement, usage and management within the Public Sector.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Governance: State of the Art and Lesson Learnt in Italy (part I)’

Viviane Reding, European Union Telecoms Commissioner, on Tuesday in a meeting in the European Parliament said that a European law to reinforce freedom on the Internet is unnecessary and put operators in a difficult position.

Read the full transcript.