Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

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

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.

Russian Ministry on Information Technology and Communications published recently a document entitled Concept of development and usage of Free Software in the Russian Federation (Russian). It is a 29-page text, which is by far the most detailed roadmap of government involvement in Free Software. The legal status of this document is not very strong: in the recent Russian governmental tradition a ‘concept’ is a kind of a detailed policy declaration, which may not be fully observed or may even be rejected or forgotten after a short period of time. However, it may serve as groundwork for future projects and more specific policy measures. Thus, even though a concept document does not create anything by itself, its availability is necessary for creation of good things.

Russian Development by mosdave

The concept contains a detailed list of the proposed projects divided into three groups: legal, infrastructure and R&D and is scheduled up until 2010.

The first positive thing about the document is that operates the term Free Software (Russian is one of the languages where you cannot confuse ‘free beer’ with ‘free speech’).

The concept aims to strengthen the local software development industry and increase involvement of Russian programmers in development of software for government and municipal needs. The latter aim may be viewed as an acknowledgement of the fact that there are not enough Russian developers building software for the local needs and that the government demand is higher than supply.

The primary directions of government involvement are: improvement of the legal framework, help in creation of the market infrastructure, R&D projects and wide-scale training.

The legal block

Russia is one of the countries where the American FLOSS licenses do not always look applicable. The particular problems targeted by the concept are:

• the ‘written form’ of the copyright agreement required by the Russian Civil Code (there is a special exception for software, but the status of Free Software documentation remains unclear)
• applicability of foreign law and court jurisdiction in international lawsuits
• individual applicability of FOSS licenses
• copyright management in government software-related contracts (both the state as a customer and the executor of a state contract must have sufficient rights)

Development infrastructure

This might be the most surprising and contradictory part of the document. The government plans to build a reference package building environment, a unified software repository for different platforms (including operating systems, basic development tools, middleware etc.), tracking of all the software titles used in government and tools for automatic certification of software that corresponds to particular standards.

This ‘infrastructure’ is viewed as the platform for community participation in development of FOSS for Russian government and a multi-featured tracking and management tool for various kinds of software used throughout the government. The specific infrastructure actions include conduction of government-sponsored development competitions, definition of priority projects, maintaining of an up-to-date list of recommended standards and specifications etc.

R&D priorities

The following projects are the top priorities for software development projects:

1. full-featured office solutions for public sector users
2. common software packages for educational supplements
3. software packages for collective Internet access points
4. software for government services websites
5. integration platform for e-government
6. secure solutions for critical deployments
7. development of service-oriented model of software distribution

There is much to criticize about the concept. In particular, the whole legal block seems not very important to me, and it is difficult to tell who will do the necessary development for the R&D projects taking the lack of established FOSS vendors in the country into account.

Nevertheless, FOSS has got very official acknowledgment, the government has set very ambitious targets, and the whole document, its structure and language show that it is built upon the Russian experience and is not a product of bare creativity or a borrowing of other countries’ policies. Hopefully, this progress in policy development will help to grow the local FOSS production, which is by far not as large as the government (and all of us) would wish.

Technorati Tags: open source government, Russia, Russian Federation, free software, FOSS vendors

Bob Sutor, IBM Vice President Open Source and Standards, invited the IBM Italian subsidiary to organize an event aimed at public officers or those who have an interest in the public sector.

IBM Italia recognizing the importance of open standards, and knowing that open standards in IT are critical to allow new entrants to participate, invites stakeholders to meet up with IBM open source and open standards pioneers.

The event will be held on the 8 of May at the IBM office in Rome. Giovanni Aliverti, IBM Italy Institutional relationships, will open the session. Then Bob Sutor will give his keynote speech talking of open source trends for the next 12 months. Vittorio Pagani, CNIPA Open Source Observatory, and Flavia Marzano will cover respectively open standards’ issues by central and local public administrations. I will eventually give my presentation on standards conformance, hilighting the importance to prove that software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications.

Last but not least Gianfranco Cesareo will introduce the audience to IBM software products compliant to open standards.

If you wish to join the event send me an email, the event is invitation-only.

Technorati Tags: open standards, open source conference, IBM Italy, GiovanniAliverti, FlaviaMarzano, VittorioPagani, GianfrancoCesareo, file format

PAAL2008, Open and Free Public Administration, will be held this week on the 17th and 18th of April in Pula (Cagliari).

The second conference on FOSS in public administrations has a rich two days program, if you are in Sardinia this week and you have good command of Italian consider join the event.

For further information contact them.

Technorati Tags: open source conference, PAAL2008, Sardinia, Pula, Cagliari

100 Italian candidates signed Assoli’s letter engaging themselves to promote the use of free software.

The Italian association asked Italian candidates to work to promote the use of free software and open standards, Assoli’s President Paolo Didonè commented the result:

The success of our initiative is clear: in a week, without any substantial media coverage, one hundred candidates signed the letter engaging themselves to promote free software and digital rights. Two thousands voters indicated that they would be more likely to vote for candidates supporting the campaign.

Candidates from all parties backed Assoli’s campaign, Paolo Didonè emphasize the result:

It is important to notice that candidates from all major parties signed our letter. This is a good sign, we are looking forward to get involved together with politicians in sustaining politics in favor of free software, in country’s interest. The day after the election we’ll contact politicians for pragmatic actions.

Technorati Tags: free software, italian elections, assoli , PaoloDidonè

Smart cards and digital signatures are presented as among the most important components of e-government in Europe, but they are still far from being an effective, Linux-friendly solution to reduce administrative and business costs. But the same tools may become a way to make the general public use or support Free Software.

Almost 10 years ago, European Community directive 1999/93/Ce stated the principle that, in certain cases and under certain conditions, a digital signature can be just as reliable and legally binding as one on paper. “Qualified electronic signatures,” which are generated with a secure device and validated by an official certificate, belong to this category. For this reason, digital signatures and identification through smart cards are considered one of the main tools to reduce costs and increase efficiency in European e-government and public administrations. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported in March that Italian economy as a whole saved €260 million since some procedures to create a new company went entirely digital, and that, country-wide, online tax filings cost €90 million less every year than doing them with paper documents.

Back in 1997, Italy was the first EU country to acknowledge the legal validity of electronic documents. The Code of Digital Administration that followed in 2005 laid down the official rules for using digital signatures and smart cards in the country. As a result, as of June 2007 Italy was also the EU country with the highest number of smart cards — almost three million — released for official purposes. In the coming years this trend will grow, due both to the need to comply with national and EU regulations and, above all, to reduce costs.

In spite of all this, however, inertia, as well as lack of information and coordination, still limit the benefits of smart cards in Italy, especially for GNU/Linux users. Many procedures and tools are either redundant, obscure, or far from being technically and legally interoperable, even when they are open source.

Read the full article, by Marco Fioretti.

On the same topic read also the report on the 12th Porvoo group meeting, by Bud Bruegger.

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

IDC prepared a document for the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency (NITA) describing a methodology to evaluate Standard Setting Organizations (SSO) with regard to the degree of openness of the organization and thereby the degree of openness in their deliverables, i.e. standards.

IDC starting from the ten rights that enable open standards mentioned before, evaluated ten organizations -  CEN, Ecma, ETSI, IETF, ISO, ITU, NIST, OASIS, OMG, and W3C - and all organizations had the opportunity to review and comment on the evaluation of their organization. NITA specified 9 of Krechmer’s criteria, where the exclusion of “Open World” stems from the re-purposing of “Open Interface”, extended to covering both and accordingly renamed “Open Interoperability”.

IDC in conclusion states that there are differences between standard setting organizations in terms of “openness” and is implemented, concluding that it is difficult to make a distinction of which form of “openness” is the most appropriate. (Read on …)