Commercial Open Source Software

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before that SourceForge has been acquired by Dice Holdings back in Septmeber 2012. As a result the name of our parent company has been changed in Slashdot Media. As you could easily guess the name comes from the heritage of Slashdot, one of the three Geeknet media properties bought by Dice (namely FreeCode, Slashdot and SourceForge).

So said, SourceForge is still dedicated to being the most trusted source for Open Source, and will continue to provide free hosting for your Open Source project, and you’re welcome either if you need the full set of tools or just a way to distribute your program.

If you didn’t check it out yet, take a moment to look at our brand new Enterprise directory (beta).

If you want to know more about our new corporate entity, you can read all about it at slashdotmedia new website.

SourceForge just launched a new Enterprise Directory, a sub-section focused specifically on Enterprise projects. These are the projects that are geared specifically for use within a company, ranging from office suites to ECM, backup software and more.

Either enterprise-grade projects developed at SourceForge or at other forges would benefit from being enlisted in the new directory, now enriched with a resource center containing useful information about partners, add-ons, books and upcoming events.

Over 40 million unique visitors per month come to SourceForge looking for open source software, and enterprise-grade products is a big part of it. The Enterprise directory is just aimed at making IT Decision Makers’ lives easier, by gathering projects’ relevant information in one single page.

Hope you’ll enjoy, stay tuned!

Having been writing about commercial open source for years, I finally decided to start a new blog category at SourceForge blog to cover the business side of open source. I’ll be posting on SourceForge blog interviews to people who can tell us stories about how they combine open source and business at SourceForge blog, and I’ll comment on them here. Continue reading ‘Company-led Projects: Liferay’

Few days ago I happened to re-read an excellent article written by Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona about the history of the FLOSS term.

I recommend you to read it all if you’re curious about that.

I’m lucky enough to be able to do the job I love.

As part of my job I dedicate almost 20% of my time to projects related to the SourceForge core business, and this includes advising few open-source-related companies. Among them a special place goes to Bitergia,  a company focused in the area of software development analytics.

Let me tell you first more about how I came across this company.

Continue reading ‘About Advising Bitergia with My SourceForge Hat’

I have received a few questions asking why I’ve been blogging less frequently, and it is easy to admit I had little time because of my two new jobs, namely my role as SourceForge as its Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge (US time-zone) and my full-time job as Fatherhood!

Now that Vanessa enjoys so much the Day Care, I’ll do my best to restart my habit of blogging, though.

For my first “post-daycare” blog post I’ll shortly recap what’s happened over the last year at SourceForge.

Continue reading ‘About Blogging Less’

Commercial Open Source blog has passed its fifth year, and as every year it is time to zoom a little back once more, and maybe tell how things will work from now on.

SOS Open Source has still been my primary focus for a large part of this year, you may want to have a look at articles about  metrics, Open Source Application Lifecycle Management tools, white-papers and surveys. More will come, but definitely at a slower pace. So said, today you’ll find online the latest, about Zentyal.

Conferencing. Over the last year I have been charing Red Hat, SUSE and Google events, organizing a second series of events around open source for IBM (here the last of the year), giving speeches at few Cloud events and Open Data meet-ups.

The Open Source Road ahead has been a frequent theme for a while, maybe I’ll look into OSI’s future again, especially if the new appointed board will come up with interesting news.

EU-funded open source projects. After years spent talking about EU-funded projects it’s time to give them a try: I’m finally working on some proposals, plus I’ll be evaluating and reviewing projects.

About the future of Commercial Open Source blog. I’ll be writing blog entries time by time, but I’ll hardly doing it on a regular basis, though. My actual job is filling up my days nicely, and all my spare time goes to my family and especially to my lovely baby girl that makes my days and nights!

PR Agencies, open source vendors and projects with a commercial aim are highly invited to provide me with news, I’ll make this blog more open to external inputs as far as related to open source and business.

I wish to thank again my webmaster Matteo, best whishes for your WordPress-based SuperThemes venture!

At SourceForge we just launched an online Women in Open Source Survey, based on the ubiquitous mentioned FLOSSPOLS survey. If you are wondering about what’s the state of art now you can help yourself and spend 5 minutes to fill the survey, we’ll share our findings as soon as possible.

The Zentyal Summit 2011 will be held on the 11th and 12th of November in Zaragoza, Spain. The event offers a meeting place for the Zentyal Linux Small Business Server community. The Summit is the best place to join hands-on sessions, discuss the Zentyal roadmap, get certified or just meet up with the Zentyal team and the whole ecosystem of partners, customers and community members.

Many thanks to the Zentyal team and the sponsors to have invited me to keynote at this event.  In my talk “From Projects to Products” will take a look on how open source projects can turn in to commercially viable products and how SourceForge can help in the process.

Registrations are open, see you there!

About Zentyal: (formerly eBox Platform) is an open source unified network server software package (or a Unified Network Platform) for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Zentyal can act as a Gateway, Network Infrastructure Manager, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Unified communications Server or a combination of them. Besides, Zentyal includes a development framework to ease the development of new Unix based services.

SUSE Italia celebrates Linux 20th birthday on the 15th of November 2011 in Rome, and on the 17th of November in Milan. The event is aimed at unveiling SUSE Italia’s new structure and the distinguishing features of SUSE Linux.

The event is tailored to the interest of actual and potential partners.