Commercial Open Source Software

Alan Shimel Should Stop Talking About Snort’s Licensing - Thomas Ptacek and Alan Shimel keep discussing about GPL compliance.

Open source is bad for vendors - Yet another Dana Blankenhorn suggestion.

Unisys shows acceptance of open source in biz application - It is still the Open Source Economy, System Integrators!

OpenOffice.org in Education: A Roundup - a roundup into a set of references that could easily and quickly be investigated, by Ross Brunson, Linux Solutions Specialist at Novell.

The Japanese government looks to go open source - The Japanese government said it wants to decrease its reliance on Microsoft as a server operating system platform.

FSF still working to achieve Apache license compatibility for GPL 3 - The Free Software Foundation is working hard to establish compatibility between GPLv3 and Apache License.

Technorati Tags: Apache, Commercial Open Source, FSF, GPLv3, Japan, OpenOffice, Snort

Steven Yaskin, Queplix Chief Technology Officer, asked me to review his recent creation, an Open Source Customer Care web application named QueWeb Customer Care, made available also for download (requires registration) under an MPL + attribution license (QPL license).

To boldly go by Cadigan

Queplex was announced on the 23th of April, and apparently is the first commercial software built on Google Web Toolkit - an open source Java framework designed to deploy AJAX applications - chosen for the following reasons:

Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

I went through the live demo available on line - just in case I suggest you to read the brief guide for the demo, it might help - and it looks fancy, but I didn’t go much further than having a look at it.

Queplix adopted the product specialists model, selling value added services for data conversions and it looks like if it is going to start a partnership program based on a new upcoming product:

QueWeb Professional (scheduled for Q3 2007), for IT consulting companies and Value Added Resellers (VARs) serving customers with verticalized or specialized solutions. Features a QueWeb OS download along with a set of proprietary development tools, including: QueDesigner to more easily customize, configure, integrate and build additional functionality; and QueCrawler to “crawl” through company legacy metadata and extract business objects for the replication of existing business processes and GUIs.

Queplix involving VARs might start its own marketplace, and opening to a Split OSS/Commercial products business model, who knows.

About Commercial Open Source, I disagree with this pretty bold statement:

Queplix is the only enterprise-level commercial open-source vendor

As far as I can see they still have to work on creating and leveraging their own community - as others like MySql and at some extent Alfresco are trying to do now - but… is Queplix willing to abandon the corporate production model?

Technorati Tags: Queplix, commercial open source, google web toolkit

The European Training Centre for Social Affairs and Public Health in collaboration with Free Software Foundation Europe is organizing in Milan on 21-22 June 2007 an International Conference entitled “Free/Libre Open Source Software: A Valuable Opportunity for Public Administrations“.

FSFE Fellowship initiative by Stefano Mainardi

Project leader of the conference is Giampaolo Amadori, formerly European Manager of Large Accounts and Application Server Providers at IBM.

The Conference is designed for Civil servants, Senior Civil Servants (Directors & Unit Heads), lawyers and politicians in EU Member States and countries surrounding the EU who are involved in the procurement of IT solutions and in strategic decisions about innovation and eGovernment, and who provide legal advice on copyright and patents. Also the IT responsibles/Specialists providing strategic and technical advice to the Public Administrations could be extremely keen of attending.

The participation fee is 490 €. The number of participants is limited. You can also register online.

Technorati Tags: Free Software Foundation Europe, Public Administration

A living diary gives Senokian Solutions, an open source consulting firm based in UK, a powerful and risky voice to let the IT decision makers know about how do they cope with migrations to Open Source.

Diary by Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedel

Mercian Labels, a UK security label printer, has told to have commenced its migration, supported by Senokian Solutions, because of reliability and upgrade cost concerns, and they are keeping a blog to tell us daily about their journey.

Mercian Labels has commenced its migration away from Microsoft to Open Source software because of reliability and upgrade cost concerns. Supported by Senokian Solutions, the company is blogging its experiences of moving a whole small business IT infrastructure to open source, offering a vital case study resource for SMEs considering a similar move.

Googling around I sorted out that Mercian Labels is not new to represent a case study, and considering that last time they managed the following results, I am looking forward to see what will happen now with this migration.

Results

Lead-time improved from 70% of orders being dispatched in 5 days to 80+% orders being dispatched in less than 3 days, with no extra staff or infrastructure. This also led to a 50% increase in goods delivered within target time.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, migration, senokian solutions, mercian labels