Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

IBM Italia on Thursday hosted a conference on open standards, introducing the audience to standards’ risks and opportunities, in order to accelerate open standards adoption in the public sector. IBM Italia invited Italian stakeholders to meet up with Bob Sutor, IBM Vice President Open Source and Standards, along with representatives of Italian Central and Local public administrations involved with open standards’ policies and dissemination.

Rome in a glass by Geomangio

The event was held on the 8 of May at the IBM office in Rome. Bob Sutor’s keynote speech - Twelve Industry Challenges for Open Source and Standards - introduced the audience to the importance of global standards in relationship to current policies around formal International Standards Organizations. He invited attendees - from Italian public administrations like Consip, CNIPA, ISTAT - to adopt open standards policies that emphasize technical work developed by a community of stakeholders, encouraging them to deprecate de facto standards.

Besides open standards Bob spoke also about open source governance, inviting Italian public administrations to develop common models of FOSS use and governance, making use of FOSS as much as possible easy as proprietary software. In this respect he suggested also to consider developing more open source software, saying so he reported about Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework project as an example.

Last but not least Sutor spent few words about the importance of making new open source leaders and developers, a goal addressed by professor Roberto Di Cosmo working at the university of Paris on the idea of resumes FOSS ready. Evangelizing users on the availability of open source products like OpenOffice.org and Eclipse, eventually teaching children to let them learn the FLOSS value, was highly recommended in his closing remarks.

Flavia Marzano (Province of Rome), Vittorio Pagani (CNIPA Open Source Observatory) and myself (PLIO association) have been talking about open standards’ policies by Italian public administrations from different perspectives, giving the audience a broad view on the subject.

Technorati Tags: open standards, open source conference, IBM Italy, BobSutor, Eclipse, openoffice.org, openoffice

OpenLogic just announced three webinars on best practices for open source governance.

How to Inventory Your Use of Open Source Software webinar will cover topics like how to use OSS Discovery software to take inventory and how to implement an ongoing audit of open source usage.

How to implement an Open Source Policy and Approval Process for Open Source Compliance webinar will disclose potential risks associated to open source usage, and how open source policies can help enterprises to manage open source licenses.

Understanding Open Source License Obligations in the Enterprise webinar will cover most common licenses’ obligations, and how to comply with them.

Register on line.

North-by-South, is an open source company based in San Francisco and Sao Paulo (Brazil), is getting work from the Bay and organizing teams of open source programmers from Central & South America to do the jobs.

North-by-South, officially started in July 2006 in Sao Paulo at a developers get-together organized for open source veterans, currently have about 30 programmers in its open source developers network and it is planning to expand to 100 developers by January 2009.

Barbie made in Brazil by wagner_arts

I asked Ryan Bagueros, formerly head of engineering at Tagged, is the North-by-South founder, and co-founder of San Francisco Community Colo, how do they commercialize their services.

We’re in touch with the marketplace through local innovations like Craigslist but mostly we get work through the extensive contacts of our San Francisco team. We have 4 people working in San Francisco on getting jobs, organizing them, etc and we’ve all been working in SF through the first dot-com bubble and now in the “web 2.0″ resurgence. So, we commercialize via word of mouth, web, local conferences, local internet gatherings, etc. It would be much more difficult to get work if we were not located in San Francisco and hadn’t been working here since the mid-90’s.

Brazil and South America as a whole have an absolute advantage over USA in producing open source software, and as a matter of fact what is going on with the free software movement in Latin America is pretty peculiar.

I wish Ryan and his latin American friends happy hacking!

Technorati Tags: open source developers, latin america, brazil, ryanbagueros, northbysouth

Nextanalytics , a business intelligence company based in Ottawa, announced the availability of the Nextanalytics 3.0, a business analytics platform with a proprietary analytic engine and an open source tier needed to integrate it with third parties’ applications and solutions.

In a marketing move, nextanalytics claims to be open source while making source code available only partially.

Marketing claims by Domenico Sav

Reading some posts on the subject I found Ward Yaternickh, Nextanalytics founder and CEO, saying:

We’re actively soliciting a community of third-party consultants, ISVs, and sole proprietor developers to offer services and products that employ nextanalytics to do their data integration and processing. We have great technology and now, with our new open-source inspired, community-driven Web site, we have made it easy to work with nextanalytics. Now, any dev shop can distinguish themselves with our software as their analytics engine. Through this strategy, we hope to be the next MySQL, but with a focus on business analytics.

The developer zone doesn’t look community driven at the present stage, as honestly recognizes Ward who told me that the ROI to create a proper forge is still uncertain. Nextanalytics has clearly also very little to do even with new MySQL’s approach (where some add-ons could be eventually distributed as proprietary pluggable features), so I asked some clarifications.

How open source you are?

For a nominal, (interpret “fair”) annual fee, people can get some analytic functionality to improve what they use to make business decisions, and as much open source code as they need to integrate into their environments. If they can find something useful in our list of features, then the cost-benefit is obvious. If we don’t have what they need, then they have to go up-market and pay a lot more. That is why nextanalytics exists, to sell to that market.

Nextanalytics is aiming at making programmers’ lives easier, providing them with open source reference implementations and documentation to do things faster and easier. So far, so good.

Does it make them an open source company? I don’t think so.

Technorati Tags: open source business, open source business intelligence, business intelligence, nextanalytics, wardyaternick

Sun’s open source strategy overshadowed by legacy businesses - (via google alert) Larry Dignan is skeptical about the possibility that open source will turbo charge the rest of Sun’s businesses.

Managing Toward Open - Sam Ramji writes about how the interrelationship between Microsoft and open source is changing. Matthew Aslett commented Microsoft’s move to jump into cross-platform system management.

Last June the former Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, announced the creation of the second Italian Open Source Commission, and last week the commission coordinated by professor Angelo Raffaele Meo released a first draft of the report (Italian).

The Neapolitean coffee is finished. Any more coffee? Valpopando (LYJR)

The commission, composed of sixteen members and supported by the National Center for Information Technology in Public Administration and the Department of Innovation, would have probably needed more time to define procurement policies for IT Public procurement of open source software.

Will also the next Italian government take good care of open source?

Technorati Tags: open source government, open source procurement, Italian government, open source report

Savio Rodrigues reported that Black Duck Software, an intellectual property management firm delivering services to identify risks and vulnerabilities in an enterprise’s open-source code, acquired Koders, a free on-line search engine for open source software.

Interesting times by Zesmerelda

Today I asked Doug Levin, BlackDuck CEO, some feedback:

Black Duck acquired Koders, Inc. because we have broadened our offerings and now help companies find, approve, validate and manage open source components in their software development environment. Koders.com and Koders technology will play a key role in Black Duck’s future as a code search engine tightly integrated into future versions of our products, especially Code Center.

BlackDuck is willing to tap deeper into the market of open source library/directory. Savio commented the acquisition:

The Koders acquisition makes sense because more and more developers are developing by reusing code from external code repositories like Koders. Being able to tap into this source of code (pun intended) will help improve Black Duck’s code scanning capabilities. As a result, this acquisition will improve the level of information (and protection) that companies using OSS have at their disposal, whether the source being leveraged is from a traditional OSS project or an online code repository such as Koders.

Just like OpenLogic also BlackDuck is taking advantage of the absence of a Corporate actor to develop new services, not based on code production. Open Source Governance it’s an (open) issue, and I think we are seeing just the top of the iceberg at the present time.

We are going to live in interesting times, no doubt.

Technorati Tags: BlackDuck, DougLevin, SavioRodrigues, Koders, OpenLogic, commercial open source, open source business, open source directory, open source library, open source governance

OpenLogic, an open source provider offering software and services for open source governance, announced that OpenLogic Certified Library surpassed 400 certified open source packages available. In addition, OpenLogic broadened functionality of OLEX adding a Comparison Matrix service.

An Open road.. by informaplc

Very few open source projects are managed by a specific corporate actor marketing its products, tracking the production process, partnering with other vendors, offering indemnification protection and a fair software warranty. Players like OpenLogic are taking advantage of the absence of a Corporate actor to develop new services, not based on code production (while participating to open source communities).

I asked Kim Weins, Senior VP of Marketing, how did come out the idea of the comparison matrix?

The reason we are coming out with the comparison matrix is that we have heard from customers that it is often difficult to figure out which open source package is best for a given situation. Since there is often limited documentation and marketing materials (except for the relatively few open source projects backed by commercial vendors), companies often pick open source based on reputation or by having developers do in depth research on open source package. The comparison matrix is a starting point that will help companies select the right package or set of packages to evaluate based on their particular need.

The cost of free, namely the cost associated with open source software selection, is the reason behind OpenLogic’s decision to build such resources. OpenLogic started covering Application Servers, Databases and Web Application Frameworks three categories.

Kim, how did you choose the first three categories?

We’ve started with Application Servers, Databases and Web Application Frameworks because they are some of the open source projects used most frequently by enterprises. We will be adding more areas going forward.

I see a sea of opportunities here. Magic Quadrants are just beginning to cover also open source products, but many categories like open source network management probably need similar attention.

Few months ago Matt Asay argued that OpenLogic’s success could have been achieved at the expense of the projects that made it possible, Kim replied on the subject explaining how OpenLogic gives back. As a matter of fact open source software is a proper free market, where appropriating returns from commons is challenging.

Kim, which is OpenLogic strategy about partnerships?

We partner with vertical players whenever possible. For most open source projects in our library, there is no commercial vendor. For the handful where there is a commercial vendor, we prefer to partner with them.

It makes perfect sense, and I am looking forward to report future steps in this direction.

Technorati Tags: OLEX, OpenLogic, KimWeins, MattAsay, commercial open source, open source business, open source comparison, open source library

The second edition of the Italian Conference on Free Software will be held in Trento from the 16th to the 18th of May.

The ConfSL 2008 has multiple working sessions, addressing different point of view about Free Software (Open Session, Academical Session, a brokerage event and a mapping party).

1. Open Session
Dedicated to the widest audience, it aims to disseminate basic concepts around Free Software, with a special accent on  well (and less) known aspects about its practical usage.

2. Academic Session
The primary scientific goal is to catch the state of art of Free Software; seminars and workshops will afford to give an all-around survey about it in a multi-disciplinary fashion.

3.  Open Source 2008 - brokerage event
It is a partner event of ConfSL (managed by Trentino Sviluppo) member of European IRC (Innovation Relay Centre) network. It will be held friday afternoon and it will offer specific opportunites to exchange and transfer knowledge, know-how and experiences between Enterprises, Technology Providers, Associations, and Public Administrations. The main goal is to create concrete partnership opportunities, both commercial and technological, between participants.

My speech on standards conformance has been accepted, and I am glad to join the event both to talk about the importance to prove that software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications and to do some networking. See you there!

Technorati Tags: confSL, Italian conference, open standards, Trentino Sviluppo, European IRC

The SEMIC.EU event, scheduled for June 17, 2008 in Brussels, will feature the official launch of the SEMIC.EU website.

In November 2007, the Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe (SEMIC.EU) opened its virtual doors to the public and can now be accessed through the new website www.semic.eu.
The SEMIC.EU project aims to build a European platform for interoperability assets and services available to the public sector and its stakeholders in Europe, focusing on semantic - ie. content -interoperability.

The communication platform will facilitate the creation of expert communities, and will provide a public web repository on semantic interoperability issues.

Some month’s news on the IDABC Open Source Observatory:

FR: Marseille to switch to OpenOffice

DE: Hospital cuts costs with Open Source

EU: Europarlement testing Ubuntu, OpenOffice and Firefox

NL: Use of Open Source software requires no European IT tenders

Read them all.