Commercial Open Source Software

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.

NGINX - the company born earlier this year to turn the NGINX project success into a commercial open source product - just announced  the closure of a $3 Million  series A funding round. Given the impressive results of NGINX, that according to Netcraft may soon overtake Microsoft, it comes with no surprise that 3 different VCs have decided to invest on it.

Andrew Alexeev, who recently joined the author of NGINX Igor Sysoev to take care of business development and marketing, told me more about company’s business strategy and the road ahead.

Continue reading ‘NGINX Go Commercial, a Promising Open Source Business Case’

Dana Blankenhorn few days ago wrote an article saying that RackSpace maybe the next open source winner. Is he right? Let’s have a quick look at RackSpace’s OpenStack, and how this open source project is evolving before driving any conclusion.

Continue reading ‘OpenStack is getting more and more attention…’

I learned about Acquia in early 2008, at the Open Source Think Tank, sipping some wine and talking about how to appropriate returns from the commons with its co-founder, Jay Batson. At that time Acquia’s business strategy was still in its infancy,  and it is interesting to look at how it has evolved with time.

To learn more about their business strategy when Acquia launched their social business software Commons 2.0 I posed few questions to Bryan House, VP marketing at Acquia.

Continue reading ‘Acquia keeps going 2.0: Commons in place’

Red Hat Italia organized its fifth open source day last week in Rome, and it was quite a success by the numbers:  700 people subscribed to the event, about 500 attendees, 6 talks in the plenary session and 12 speeches in the parallel sessions.

I have been following the whole event before running the final round-table, and I wish to share here some notes from the event.

Continue reading ‘Notes from Red Hat Open Source Day 2011′

I had already interviewed Luca Passani - the inventor and maintainer of WURFL, the Wireless Universal Resource FiLe - a few years back, but now that his new venture ScientiaMobile hit the market it is time to talk to him again.

I asked Luca to tell us about the new company, its licensing and business strategy.

Continue reading ‘WURFL Goes to the USA: ScientiaMobile is Born’

I’m keeping the course “Information & Communication Technology” at the Link Campus University of Malta, and beyond computer basics and how to use office suites I’ll do my best to provide students with all technology skills they might need for a career in business administration.

Time by time I’ll use my blog to share tips and hints about open source tools and applications we’ll be using at the course.