Microsoft today has announced that its Mobile Technologies will eventually be released as open source soon. While there are no details yet about the license of their choice, that’s a great news!
I’ve been hoping for a similar choice since 2008, I just hope that is not a loss-leader strategy, considering that only yesterday Microsoft has admitted that Microsoft Mobile isn’t their focus this year.
Kudos to Microsoft for such a bold choice!
Now that the sales of Slashdot Media has been completed I am moving from my role as SourceForge’s Head of Community and Sr Director of Biz Dev. I’m now working on the creation of an open-source industry consortium
to back Hermes Center‘s GlobaLeaks, the open source whistleblowing framework.
I’ll also be helping open source ventures succeed by:
I’m looking forward to working with even more open source projects and communities in the coming year. If you think we’d be a good fit, please drop me an email at info <at> robertogaloppini.net or contact me via LinkedIn.
Wish to publicly thank @bitergia for having sent over this nice handmade portrait, I like it!
Stay tuned for knowing more about Bitergia, post FOSDEM @jgbarah will tell us more about how the software development analytics company is doing.
Recently a number of people from open source communities I work with or that I’m just aware of, happened to die. I’m thinking of Ian Lynch, of the Ingot fame, Ian Murdock Debian founder and John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead.
It has been sudden and sad, and my thoughts go to their families out there.
Whatever they have been doing – either if it was an assessment model, a Linux distro entirely composed of free software or marketing the first and most used open source office suite – the results of what they did are here to stay.
Thank you guys for all you have done, it will never die.
Over the last 4 years I’ve been lucky enough to be paid for volunteering for Apache OpenOffice, and I wish to take a moment to thank SlashdotMedia and Geeknet, to allow me to turn my passion in my daily job. It has been a long journey getting to this point and I have learnt so much. Understanding and eventually embracing ‘the Apache Way’ was key to engage with the Apache OpenOffice community, and not only for that.
Now, getting back to the original topic, let me share with you some news about Apache OpenOffice Extensions and Templates sites.
The new Extensions home has a strong focus on the search box, a brand new logo and overall a redesigned look and feel where all menu items have icons for better readability.
The new Templates home. Similarly to Apache OpenOffice Extensions site we have redesigned the look and feel of Apache OpenOffice Templates site. Different colors are used to highlight to which application a given template might be applied.
The new administrative interface. We have been thinking of Extensions’ authors too, and we added a bar at the top that links to the most common actions. We also improved the GUI, making it more intuitive for uploading extensions.
The search has been completely redesigned too. It worth to mention that there are other changes here and there, including an alert for outdated extensions that provides an easy way to contact the original author.
Being part of the Estonia e-Residency community – a community that counts over 8,000 members from around the world interested in administering a location-independent business online – I’ve just received their newsletter that tells that from February 1, 2016 the application fee for e-Residency will rise from 50€ to 100€.
Big kudos to the Estonia government for the initiative. I remember me reading Balaji S. Srinivasan‘s tweet about Estonia’s citizenship-as-a-service, and since then I kept a close eye on that was advancing. A reading I would definitely recommend to people interested in this matter is “The Ultimate Guide to Estonian E-residency, Banking and Taxes.”
I don’t know yet if I’ll ever use my Estonian e-Residency, but I’m sure Estonia did the right thing, it’s something other countries should consider too.
About e-Residency: e-Residency does not confer citizenship, tax residency, residence or right of entry to Estonia or to the European Union.Â
The last year I wrote only one blog post, the year before six, seventeen in 2013 and twelve in 2012.
Over the last years my blogging frequency went down the drain, for a number of reasons, some of which don’t really apply anymore.
Try to write more often didn’t really work for me, though.
“Just trying” was not enough, I suspect Yoda was right.
I’ll shoot for at least one post per week as a minimum viable schedule, and I feel like starting the first day of the year sounds like a good enough special date.
I’ve also decided to move to a more modern theme for the occasion, a classic, I would say: Automattic’s P2.
I’ll keep writing about open source, either commercial or not, but I’ll definitely spend more time on things I do. As such I’ll talk about companies I’m an advisor to, open source projects I’m involved with or those I occasionally help to be more visible.
See you on Sunday to talk about privacy, censorship and whistleblowing
. Learn more about the event at the Official site.
Update: see full videos at Radio Radicale website.
I am so happy to say that finally SOS Open Source methodology and tools are now open source!
The EU-funded initiative PROSE re-engineerined and enhanced my original tools, making them now available as open source.
If you need to run an open source software procurement process give it a try. Read more at SOS Open Source.
Airbnb, Uber and many other centralized sharing approaches are collecting big money from investors and opening every day new markets. The problem with ‘Sharing Central‘ is that there are business reasons to hide negative feedback, put strong ID system in place, push people to write comments using quid pro quo strategies and more.
Sharing Central is not evil per sé, but its main focus isn’t to provide end-users with full access to knowledge and reduce asymmetry of information. Goal is to maximize returns. And this happens also in other social media, as seen with Twitter’s recent “mistakes” for example.
Ad-free social media like Ello are hitting the news, but how long they’ll stay ad-free?
The so-called “shared economy” is just replacing the existing and often inefficient and/or ineffective intermediaries, with a new set of powerful intermediaries. While the companies backing all the share-central initiatives are somehow failing to see their true social potential, they introduced many people to the collaborative economy.
Will these new intermediaries harder to disrupt? Maybe, or maybe not.
The Blockchain‘s biggest promise is still yet to be fulfilled, but it will soon allow us to share knowledge in a trust-less network removing or replacing the middle-man and his desire for control.
Let’s discuss briefly some possibilities:
1) P2P Purchasing Groups. People interested in a product or service category might collectively buy something. There are actually few ways to get this done:
2) P2P Direct Selling. The blockchain would make easier for potential buyers to check out sellers’ honesty and products’ pros and cons. Sales’ traceability would make possible to implement either single or multi-level marketing approaches in a error-prone fashion.
3) P2P Word of Mouth. Manufacturers and Service providers could engage with their customers and get them to talk about their products by incentivizing advocacy with gift cards, discounts and prize. Basically doing that Puma has been doing with its employee.
I’ll be covering this topic more and more consistently, bringing examples of how Bitcoin (the protocol) can change the digital world in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
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