Commercial Open Source Software

EXPO COMM Italia 2011 - the Italian edition of the International exhibition event dedicated to the latest in Information & Communication Technology - will take place in Rome from March 30-31, 2011.

I have been invited to join the Virtualization & Cloud panel along with many IT professionals, included Giuseppe Maria Armenia (ICE), Alessandro Musumeci (ferrovie dello stato), Pierfrancesco Gaggi (ABI Lab).

See you there!

Simone Cicero, Mobile Services Engineer at H3G and blogger, interviewed me about free software and open source, below a small excerpt of his article.

Roberto Galoppini is an information technology industry insider of 20 years standing.

Roberto has a tremendous amount of “hands on” experience: he has been involved in research, have founded a company, and participates to the works of various organizations and associations dealing with free software and open source as the well known Sourceforge or the OpenOffice.org Italian Association.

In addition to consulting to companies and organizations involved in the process of designing and implementing their own open source strategies around the world- among its clients IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Poste Italiane and Telecom Italia - Roberto has developed SOS OpenSource, an automated methodology to find, assess and select open source software.

Read it all at Meedabyte.

The brand new Master in Procurement Management - a master by the University of Rome tor Vergata, faculty of Economics - and CDTI, the Association of IT Professionals based in Rome, are co-organizing the conference “cloud computing procurement: potentialities and risks“, to be held in Rome on the 10th of March 2011.

I’ll be giving a speech in the afternoon’s roundtable talking about European SMEs perspectives  on cloud computing and terms and contracts’ for clouds terms and conditions.

“Office Automation Suites, Interoperability and Migrations” event was eventually held last Friday in Rome at IBM’s office (sponsor of the event), presentations have been uploaded at the website.

Alessandro Chinnici (IBM) gave an introductory speech to explain IBM’s approach to open source and open standards, followed by David Pearson’s (IBM UK) keynote about migrations. David pointed the audience to some freely available resources, like the Free Office Suite ROI Calculator and the Visual Basic Macro Scan Tool.

Andrea Pescetti, mantainer of the Italian Native Lang project OpenOffice.org, gave an interesting talk around OpenOffice.org procedures and practices for QA, explaining what volunteers do and which tools they use (some created by Andrea himself and now maintained by the community). Andrea spoke also about interoperability theory and practices.

Fabrizio Marchesano (Frame) shared some practical advices and tips to run migrations.

The new Italian Law on Digital Administration (codename CAD) has been presented and thoroughly discussed yesterday afternoon at LUSPIO university with Andrea Simi, consultant of the Italian Minister of Innovation, Gianfranco Pontevolpe (DigitPA, formerly known as CNIPA, the National Center for IT in Public Administration) and Fabrizio Bianchi (Assinform, the Italian association of ICT companies).

As anticipated in a previous post, in my opening greetings I made a very brief to the modifications made to reuse’s articles, eventually gathering feedback from the speakers.

Continue reading ‘The Italian Law on Digital Administration and Software Reuse’

At the center of today’s event - organized by LUSPIO and Inforav in collaboration with the CDTI- will be the new Italian Law on Digital Administration (codename CAD).

The new text law brings improvements in many areas, and some interesting ones in reuse’s articles (art.68, 69 and 70). In fact the new text talks about policies to maximize software reuse, something the Italian public administration worked on also in the past, but with very limited results.

As promised we are finally organizing an Open Source Focus Group meeting to talk about office automation suites, interoperability and migrations.

The event, aimed at companies and organizations from the Public Sector, will be held at IBM’s offices in Rome on the 11th of February 2011. Among speakers David Pearson - Solution Architect at IBM Lotus Software Services Centre of Excellence - and Andrea Pescetti, mantainer of the Italian Native Lang project OpenOffice.org.

On the 1st of January 2011 has been celebrated the Public Domain Day, an initiative aimed at celebrating the wealth of knowledge, information and beauty that becomes freely available to humankind this day.

Rome and other Italian cities will host events next Saturday.

Take a moment to read the Public Domain Manifesto and sign it if you wish, Creative Commons and other organizations are already supporting it.

The Europen edition of the Open Database Camp 2011 will take place in Sardinia, hosted by the Sardinia Technology Park, a local scientific and business institution with international links.

Mark your calendars: the Open Database Camp will be held in Sardinia on May 6-7-8, 2011.

Continue reading ‘Open Database Camp 2011 in Sardinia: Combining duty and pleasure’

The legacy of OpenOffice.org and office migrations will be at the center of the next Open Source Focus Group meeting, to be held in Rome in January 2011.

In the meantime you might want to have a look at previous events - ranging from open source licensing to tenders and marketplaces - and presentations, all available on the new Focus Group Open Source blog hosted on WordPress.com.