Archive for the 'Commercial OSS' Category

Open Source TCO: Total Cost of Ownership and the Fermat’s Theorem

Gartner’s 2009 predictions have been widely commented over these days, leaving space and opportunities to rediscuss the open source mantra “we cost less”.

Migrate to open source seems the cheapest solution, at least on an individual basis, but enterprise migrations are not an easy game to play, and TCO doesn’t look like the ultimate answer.

Any similarity between the Fermat’s theorem and the cost benefits of open source?

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MySQL Scaling Options, Scaling a PHP Application, Reducing ECM Costs: Open Source Webinars links 06-01-2009

Scaling Up, Out or Virtually with MySQL - Ivan Zoratti, Sales Engineering Director for MySQL EMEA, will help you to understand which of the MySQL scaling options is best likely to meet your needs. The webinar will take place on Thursday, January 15th 2009.

WEBINAR: Scaling a PHP Application - This Zend presentation will focus on PHP software design techniques, and tools and software that help in building a high throughput. The Webinar will take place on January 28th 2009.

Reduce Your ECM Costs by 90% - This Alfresco webinar will review publicly available pricing information, and look at the cost of a typical basic system. The Webinar will take place on January 15th 2009.

Commercial Open Source 2009: Challenges and Opportunities

The New Year historically is a time for self improvement, and the commercial open source side of the world should be no exception to that.

Open Source thought leaders have expressed opinions and discussed the state of open source, here are my takes on some challenges and opportunities for the new year.

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GNOME Foundation: Open Source Collaboration at Work!

Sugar Labs - the no-profit foundation behind the sugar educational software platform running on the OLPC - joined the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board.

The GNOME Foundation after welcoming on board the Mozilla Foundation, and more recently Motorola and Google, keeps bringing on board third parties.

Reading the press release it looks like if the GNOME Foundation wants to explore the economics of technological clubs.

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OpenOffice.org Success: Homesteading the OpenOffice.org Noosphere

Measuring the true Success of OpenOffice.org - Michael Meeks wrote a long post about OpenOffice.org success, mostly from a development point of view. Being Michael a Novell’s employee his perspective might be considered biased, but I totally agree with his recipe:

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Open Source Business Intelligence Webinar: Best of Breed, by Jaspersoft and Talend

Jaspersoft and Talend invite to a joint free webinar “Be Open: Best of Breed Solutions“.

Attend to this one hour webinar you will know more about Jaspersoft and Talend work together, the advantages of using open source for BI, Data Integration, and Data Quality.

The webinar will be held on Tuesday, Jan 20, 10 am - 11 am (CET), register on line.

Open Source Business Models: Opinions and Predictions from few Thought Leaders

Open source business models must be voluntary says Dana Blankenhorn, disagreeing with Dave Rosenberg, who predicts open source becomes paid in 2009.

Dana believes that open source business models must be voluntary, and I can hardly disagree on this (all in all every business shouldn’t be based on compulsory buys). But open source code is not a commodity, and there is a lot of economic value behind it. Code, open source or not, is not enough.

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Open Source Cloud Platforms, Open Source Security, Microsoft’s Customer advices to do not believe in Open Source: commercial open source links, 25-12-2008

Cloud platforms of the future: Hadoop and Eucalyptus - Dave Rosenberg says that Eucalyptus and Hadoop are two of the most interesting open source software of 2008. Even if David is an advisor to Eucalyptus, cloud computing is gaining traction, but apparently Italian legislators are still paying little attention to this phenomenon.

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OpenOffice.org Migrations: Easing Medium-Large Companies’ Migrations

The market opportunity for OpenOffice.org Migrations topic took over after turning OpenOffice.org migrations into a business post, with a variety of views and perspectives.

Savio Rodrigues points out that top 2000 companies will likely end up closing a deal with Microsoft, but out of that niche he sees a business opportunity for ISVs, System Integrators and also Microsoft’s partners. Leif Lodahal, project coordinator in the Danish OpenOffice.org project, sees Sun’s absence from the Danish market as an opportunity.

The most important barriers to OpenOffice.org adoption by medium to large enterprises are the lack of system management tools, the scarce availability of enterprise applications’ integration, and the burden associated with the migration of custom applications.

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OpenOffice.org: About Turning OpenOffice.org Migrations into a Business

The OpenOffice.org Italian Association announced that OpenOffice.org in Italy broke the five million mark this year, yet another record for the Italian release of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite.

Davide Dozza, PLIO’s president commented the result:

Back in 2006, when we started counting OOo downloads, 800,000 downloads per year was an astonishing result to us. At that stage we couldn’t even imagine that the number would have grown to 1.780.000 in 2007, and beyond five millions in 2008.

Even if the number of downloads is not an accurate measure of the market share, it definitely shows the trend.

So said, there is still a lot to do, especially in the business arena. OpenOffice.org has recently started a Business Development Project, managed by Alexandro Colorado, who recently posed questions about how to set standards for OpenOffice.org professionals.

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About Roberto

Roberto Galoppini on Open Source Software
I am a specialist in Commercial Open Source Software, consulting on marketing and business strategy. I help organizations to build new business strategies for the open source economy. I speak widely on open source and open standards throughout the world.