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

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.

The OpenOffice.org Italian Association is proud to announce another record: the Italian release of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite has experienced a surge in demand for its last version, OpenOffice.org 2.4.

OpenOffice.org experienced more than 16,900 downloads per day over the last 23 days, for a total of more than 370.000 downloads!

Davide Dozza, PLIO’s president commented the result:

While we were working on our april foul, downloads were running furiously, doubling the 2.3 rate, and quadrupling last year’s downloads. Likely the availability of new Italian linguistic tools, along with the support for PDF/A, are bringing more and more people to try OpenOffice.org, and learn about free software value.

Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, openoffice, davidedozza, PLIO, PDF/A

I’ve been using OOo for quite some time now, more then four year, started using it around 2003, if I recall.

Last year I needed a feature in OOo index generation I quickly found out it wasn’t available, there were workarounds, but I didn’t like them.

Etched Rock by (sam)

Being OOo available in source code, I started digging into it until I found the code responsible for index generation. Built a patch for myself and solved the index generation problem, at least at my end of the line.

Then I proposed the change to OOo community.

As you can see in that thread, what came up was that ODF 1.0 didn’t support the index structure description needed to completely implement the feature.

So the discussion continued until I was suggested to post a comment to the relevant OASIS list to describe the proposed modification to ODF standard.

I did so, and after some discussion my proposed change was integrated in current ODF 1.2 specification draft.

Unfortunately that meant that the new feature would be implemented in OOo in the next main release, since it implied changing the ODF document format.

That’s the reason why you’ll find it in 3.0 release.

So I waited until the 3.0 source code was ready, when it was ready I implemented that new feature which is now part of the 3.0 functionality.

It was fun, actually.

You can find another comment in Mathias Bauer’s blog.

What’s the moral? A truly public specification can be upgraded by the public at large, provided the suggestion is a sound one.

Technorati Tags: open standards, OASIS, ODF, ODF 1.2, MathiasBauer

I am a citizen of the EU, and I want the European Parliament to adopt the use of open standards and to promote interoperability in the ICT sector.

The signatories of this petition, representing a Community for Freedom of Choice and Market in the European Union, draw the attention of the Members of the European Parliament to the current situation where the institution’s ICT systems are locked into the products of one vendor, warns about the implications of this for participative democracy and for fair competition, and calls for action to promote Open Standards and Interoperability.

Read and sign the petition.

Technorati Tags: open standards, open parliament, petition

PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project association, announces the availability of OOoCrackz, an Extension that allow users to use the free and open source suite in a “crack mode”. The extension aims at answering the needs of 51% of the Italian market, that is in the hands of pirates.

We fund organized Crime by dontaskme

Davide Dozza, PLIO’s President, explains why the Italian association decided to develop OOoCrackz:

Reading “The Economic Benefits of Lowering PC Software Piracy“, an IDC research sponsored by the Business Software Alliance, we understood that OpenOffice.org license represents an obstacle to the adoption of he suite for about half of the Italian population, actually using mostly pirate software.

OOoCrakcz takes away three out of four freedoms, making illegal the access to the source code, the freedom to modify the code and redistribute it, just as every other proprietary software.

OOoCrackz has been developed by a PLIO’s member, Paolo Mantovani, one of the most known expert on OpenOffice.org macros and extensions expert:

The first release of extension allows only the activation of the “illegal mode”, but we are working on an evolution of the extension that will prevent you from releasing documents under Creative Commons licenses. The risk to manage is that the user could inadvertidly respect the copyright law.

To provide you with a real experience of using a pirate software, OOoCrackz prevents the registration and block all possible updates. The idea behind such choice is to make soon your copy obsolete, eventually exposing the user to security problems as happens with illegal copies.

Italo Vignoli, PLIO’s Marketing and Communication Manager stated:

The PLIO annual assembly announced marketing initiative to improve OpenOffice.org penetration in the Italian market. With this announcement we are targeting the illegal software market, a segment not yet addressed by our offer. This will reflect in our coverage of the market, and therefore we foresee an increase of our market share.

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice, DavideDozza, PaoloMantovani, ItaloVignoli, OOoCrackz, Piracy Market, IDC, BSA

  The Novell team thought that, what with the next OOoCon being in Beijing and the cost of travel there (etc.) and of course the broad focus of that conference; that it would be good to have a very hacker-focused event in Europe. So, we’re inviting all hyper-technical people (with or without long hair) to join the Novell go-oo team for part of their annual team face-to-face in Prague (GoOO0Con 2008).
To re-iterate, this is not an attempt to undermine OOoCon - if you can only afford to go to one conference (money, time, spousal -patience / whatever); go to OOoCon.

Well done Michael Meeks, you at OpenSuse are giving us poor European an option!

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice, OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice Conference, OOoCon,

The next OpenOffice.org Annual Conference 2008 (OOoCon) will be held in Beijing, China. Bratislava, Budapest, Dundalk  and last but not least our beloved Orvieto, have lost.

Beijing by harukwan

Despite the biggest concentration of developers appears to be in Europe, the OOoCon will take place in Beijing, since 597 persons voted for the Chinese location.

Asking my Linkedin contacts to vote for Orvieto I got many positive feedback, and as a matter of fact Italy is the second best, with 126 votes.

I wish to thank all OpenOffice.org users who vote for Italy, maybe we’ll manage to win next year..

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice Conference, OOoCon 2008, Orvieto, Beijing

The next OpenOffice.org Annual Conference 2008 (OOoCon) will be held in one of the following locations, and it is up to you to choose which one: Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Beijing, China; Bratislava, Slovakia; Budapest, Hungary; Dundalk, Ireland; and Orvieto, Italy.

Orvieto (Duomo) by Mirjam75

The biggest concentration appears to be in Europe, as far as John McCreesh - Marketing Program Lead of OpenOffice.org - himself reported. Holding the OOoCon in Beijing could bring the China-based developers into the fold, but it sounds pretty expensive for many of us.

Today I asked my Linkedin contacts if they would vote for Orvieto, and I wish you all vote for us.

John McCreesh writing about the different options stated:

[..] I believe one European bid this year stands above the others, which is the bid from Italy. I believe the combination of an experienced organising team, a delightful warm location, and a thriving local community would be hard to beat. I would urge anyone wanting an OOoCon in Europe this year to unite behind Orvieto.

Remember that voting closes on Friday 29th, vote it now!

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice, OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice conference, OOoCon, Italy, Orvieto, JohnMcCreesh