Commercial Open Source Blog: Another Year in Review

Commercial Open Source blog few days ago has completed another year of life, a good excuse to make another write-up about the past year.

Over 300 posts covered many open source related topics, ranging from open source convenience to open source marketing andwhat really matters to customers, included the importance of firm-community relationships and open source governance.

Blogging was instrumental to put ideas together into every day use. Reasoning around the open source whole product concept, arguing that all open source is commercial or covering Openoffice.org migrations’ issues, I made my mind about what to suggest to startups, experienced open source mobilists and customers.

Talking about ODF interoperability, I launched the idea to run a Plugfest and made it a reality. Orvieto eventually proved to be the perfect venue to held the second ODF Plugfest.

Discovering more about eu-funded open source projects was key to elaborate a practical methodology for open source qualification and selection, something very recently I presented at the annual FIDA Inform conference.

After having been a judge for the Jolt Awards for two years, this year I enjoyed to be part of the international jury of experts who awarded the Open Innovation awards (see my write-ups covering two winners: BonitaSoft and Kaltura). This year I was also invited to join the judge panel of the Open Source CMS award, having a concrete chance to test my tool for assessing the sustainability, industrial strenghtness and strategy of an open source product (more on this later).

Blogging was also helpful to be invited to speak and chair conferences and symposia, which have included PiùBlog (Rome), Open Source offering in Italy (Venice),  BetterSoftware (Florence) , Free Open Source License Insight Conference (Seoul), ForumPA 2009 (Rome), SFCK09 (Kosovo), TBiz (Naples).

Many thanks to my webmaster Matteo Ionescu, who keeps helping me with his talent and patience.