Commercial Open Source Software

The next Focus Group Open Source meeting will focus on how to select open source software and the case for Joomla!

After a walk through topics like Social Media and Open Data, it’s time to get back to our roots. This time to talk about Joomla! we invited Ryan Ozimek, one of the leading world Joomla! experts, former President of Open Source Matters and CEO and founder of PICnet Inc, a company that develops innovative solutions for public and nonprofit organizations around the world.

The event will feature also Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona’s keynote about how to evaluate and select open source software. Barahona is Professor at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid and founder of Bitergia, a startup that specializes in the development of open source projects.

For more information and to sign up for the event, see the Focus Group Open Source blog.

The Apache OpenOffice.org project announced the availability of OpenOffice.org 3.4, see the new features and improvement in the Release Notes. You might get the gist of some of the new features looking at the Apache OpenOffice SourceForge video, featured also on FeatherCast.

Continue reading ‘Apache OpenOffice.org 3.4: Download it Now!’

SourceForge just a forge? Not quite, not anymore. SourceForge is investing time and resources to help open source projects to grow, and we do that through numerous ways. Take our recent collaboration with one of the most famous open source projects: the OpenOffice project, now incubated at the Apache Software Foundation.

SourceForge helps the Apache OpenOffice by serving downloads for the Extensions and the Templates sites, as well as the shortly upcoming Apache OpenOffice 3.4 Release.

Read the full article at SourceForge blog.

Over the last few days I have been reading Eric Sink’s “Version Control by Example“, a book providing all relevant, amusing and pragmatic information about both centralized (Subversion) and decentralized version control systems (Git, Mercurial and last but not least Veracity).

I really enjoyed reading it, it explains the nuts and bolts of all these (Distributed) Version Control Systems, in a simple and effective way. It’s worth reading if you’re deep into any of them, and you want to know more about other ones too.

The eight ODF Plugfest will take place on April 19th and 20th 2012 in Brussels (Belgium). Continue reading ‘ODF Interoperability: Brussels ODF Plugfest, 19-20 April 2012′

SourceForge just a forge? Not quite, not anymore. SourceForge making public its partnership with BerliOS has just inaugurated its first collaboration agreement with other open source players.

Having just completed a couple of important partnership agreements, it’s probably a good time to look back and see where we have been and where are we going. Let me start by telling you more about our first agreement. BerliOS - probably the second oldest open source public forge after SourceForge - has recently signed a collaboration with SourceForge, to serve all its downloads via our global mirror network.

Want to know more about where are we at? Read the full blog post at SourceForge blog.

ForumPA has video-interviewed me about the past and upcoming Focus Group Open Source meet-ups. I wish to publicly thank Gianni Dominici, ForumPA General Manager, to both promote and join our events, bringing his knowledge and understanding of Italian Public Administrations. Since we enjoyed his talk about the Italian Open Data state of the art, we look forward to have him opening the next event that will be held on the 14th of March.

If you plan to come, don’t forget to sign up by sending an email to our host.

The next Focus Group Open Source meeting will focus on Social Media and Citizenship 2.0, and it will take place on the 14th of March 2012 in Rome, at IBM’s office (sponsor of the event). Among invited speakers Gianni Dominici (ForumPA), Paolo Coppola (Comune di Udine), Stefano Epifani (Università di Roma), and Alessandro Chinnici (IBM).

For more information and to sign up for the event, see the Focus Group Open Source blog.

The next Focus Group Open Source meeting will focus on Open Data, and it will take place on the 25th of January 2012 in Rome, at IBM’s office (sponsor of the event). Among invited speakers Gianni Dominici (ForumPA), Federico Morando (Apps4Italy), Salvatore Marras (dati.gov), Ernesto Belisario (Italian Association for Open Government),  and Guido Vetere (IBM).

For more information and to sign up for the event, see the Focus Group Open Source blog.

Commercial Open Source blog has passed its fifth year, and as every year it is time to zoom a little back once more, and maybe tell how things will work from now on.

SOS Open Source has still been my primary focus for a large part of this year, you may want to have a look at articles about  metrics, Open Source Application Lifecycle Management tools, white-papers and surveys. More will come, but definitely at a slower pace. So said, today you’ll find online the latest, about Zentyal.

Conferencing. Over the last year I have been charing Red Hat, SUSE and Google events, organizing a second series of events around open source for IBM (here the last of the year), giving speeches at few Cloud events and Open Data meet-ups.

The Open Source Road ahead has been a frequent theme for a while, maybe I’ll look into OSI’s future again, especially if the new appointed board will come up with interesting news.

EU-funded open source projects. After years spent talking about EU-funded projects it’s time to give them a try: I’m finally working on some proposals, plus I’ll be evaluating and reviewing projects.

About the future of Commercial Open Source blog. I’ll be writing blog entries time by time, but I’ll hardly doing it on a regular basis, though. My actual job is filling up my days nicely, and all my spare time goes to my family and especially to my lovely baby girl that makes my days and nights!

PR Agencies, open source vendors and projects with a commercial aim are highly invited to provide me with news, I’ll make this blog more open to external inputs as far as related to open source and business.

I wish to thank again my webmaster Matteo, best whishes for your WordPress-based SuperThemes venture!