Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

SourceForge Community blog announced OpenID support, following Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo! decision to join OpenID Foundation board.

OpenID logo by protimegallery

OpenID - the open source decentralized framework for user-centric digital identity - is getting tremendous traction and it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins (among many also Free Software Magazine).

I asked Scott Kveton , Chairman of the OpenID Foundation board and VP of Open Platforms for Vidoop, to tell us something about the importance of big companies’ support and how it reflects on the business case for OpenID.

Having more and more big companies supporting OpenID has been fantastic for the technology. Let’s not forget that OpenID is nearing its 3rd anniversery of its inception. We’ve covered a lot of ground in such a short time. The fact that organizations both large and small are moving to this technology is a testament to the necessity of it.About the business model of OpenID, that’s an interesting question. Just like my mom didn’t get SMTP, she got email the same will be true with OpenID. The magic isn’t in the technology, its in what the technology enables and the real world solutions it will create for users. This is akin to RSS and Feedburner. Users of Feedburner don’t know they are using RSS but its what powered that company and they found a unique way to monetize that. What are the specific ways that people will do this with OpenID? I don’t have a good answer for that.

Why OpenID is getting included in more and more open source stacks?

OpenID has been added to more and more open source stacks for the same reasons that technologies like PHP, Linux and others have been adopted. OpenID is built in the same “open” fashion as many other technologies on the Internet and a such I think open source developers trust this technologies over other ones. In addition, OpenID solves a problem set for developers that takes away from their “main thing”. If I have a CMS, managing user accounts isn’t my “main thing”; its secondary. Finally, we were very lucky with OpenID and other open source projects in that we launched the OpenID Bounty program which has helped folks like Drupal and Plone see a reward for integrating sooner rather than later.

The consistent increase in adoption of OpenID will tell about OpenID business case. To track the take off of OpenID I asked Ross Turk some feedback about the recent decision to use it.

Our decision to undergo this project was simple. There was a strong community interest, the engineering resources required were modest, and the benefit to our users could be substantial. My dream for SourceForge.net is for it to be a truly open architecture that allows integration with a wide variety of tools and frameworks, and I think my dream is shared by many of us over here. This brings us a step closer.

This was probably the most straightforward thing we’ve done in a long time. Hats off to the OpenID folks for designing something that’s easy to integrate! If it were hard to do, we might not have done it. Of course, that’s the key to the success of anything like OpenID: if it’s not easy to take advantage of, nobody will.

Easiness of integration is key to OpenID success, apparently. I am looking forward to tell about how and if someone will eventually take economical advantage of it.

[tags] OpenID, RossTurk, SourceForge, Identity Management, ScottKveton, OpenID Bounty program[tags]

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.

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

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

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the debate about the best open source business model is still open. We are done with licenses, finally. However, the question on how we make (more) money, while keeping our open source soul clean, is still there. And it might not go away soon…

Latest debate: MySQL alleged idea of having non-open source components in its Enterprise Edition. Whooo, scary…

Marten and Zack might have made a marketing mistake: leaking the news out at the end of their conference, where they did not talk about it, was probably not done on purpose… In particular, just after the Sun acquisition, with all eyes focused on how opensourcey they still are.

Nevertheless, this move is clearly into the right direction.

Read the full post, I will comment later Fabrizio’s post.