Commercial Open Source Software

“Bringing Cloud Computing down to earth“, an event organized by the Italian Cloud Solution Provider ScubeNewMedia in partnership with Google, will take place in Rome on the 24th of March 2011.

The event is aimed at showing the benefits of cloud computing to the Public Sector.

I will give a speech around cloud computing procurement and I’ll be moderating the Q&A session.

Online registration is now open.

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.

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.

Orvieto Food Festival - a gourmet happening that will be held from 18-21 November in Orvieto, with wine, food, culture and fair trade initiatives - invited me to give a speech about how to mix proprietary and open source.

Continue reading ‘Food Combining and Free Software’

Consip - the Italian public stock company owned by the Ministry of the Economy and Finance and responsible for the rationalization of Public Purchases - is hosting an event about electronic purchase of open source services.

The event, that is part of the Open Source Focus Group for Public Administrations series, will be focuses on how the award-winning Italian Public Administration Electronic Marketplace (MEPA) can ease open source procurement processes.

I look forward to moderate the final round-table to stimulate a discussion about ongoing actions and perspectives.

The upcoming European Commission Future Networks concertation meeting next week will host an “Open source & Research” panel (agenda), and I’m honoured to have been invited to join it.

Having been writing about EU-funded open source research for a while now - sometimes interacting with running projects, other times helping them to be more visible, but also criticizing some for not being effective or to produce poor deliverables - I am very much willing to address the sustainability aspects of open source projects and the commercial viability of open source from framework programme projects.

Continue reading ‘EU-funded Projects and Open Source’

Legautonomie - the Italian league for local autonomies (municipalities, provinces and mountain communities) - is organizing a seminar about the impact of the national digital reform on local governments.

The event will be held in Pisa, on the 25th of October, I’ll give the closing speech talking about cloud computing and open source.

CDTI - the Association of IT Professionals based in Rome - and the Italian biweekly newspaper “Corriere delle Comunicazioni” are organizing a one day event around cloud computing on Wednsday 13 October, at the National Central Library. Continue reading ‘Cloud Computing Conference: Rome, 13 October 2010′

Open source licensing compliance will be at the center of the next conference of the “Focus Group Open Source” series, an initiative  sponsored by IBM Italy to promote open source among Italian public administrations. (disclosure: IBM Italy is a client).

Marco Ciurcina, lawyer and Vice-President of the Italian association devoted to the promotion of free software (Assoli), will introduce the legal aspects of free software and open source licensing. Sebastiano Lomuscio, Consip, will give a speech around open source licenses and public administrations, while Carlo Vaccari will close the round-table talking about how ISTAT found its way to the EUPL.

A question and answer session and a public discussion will follow the round table.