Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

The third Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting will be held at Hyderabad on the 3-6 December 2008, a draft programme is available and open for discussion. Comments submitted to the IGF Website by 1 May will be reflected in a revised version that will be issued as a conference room paper at the consultations on 13 May.

1 Introduction

This paper aims to provide an input into the open round of consultations on 13 May 2008 to discuss programme and agenda for the third meeting of the IGF in Hyderabad. It gives a first draft programme outline, focusing on structure rather than content. The draft programme outline tries to make best possible use of the facilities that are available a..t the conference venue. It also takes into account the fact that participation at the first meetings in Athens and Rio de Janeiro exceeded expectations and that as many, if not more, people are expected to attend the Hyderabad meeting.

The paper is conceived a rolling document. Comments submitted to the IGF Web site by 1 May will be reflected in a revised version that will be issued as a conference room paper at the consultations on 13 May.

2 Basic structure for the Hyderabad meeting

The proposed meeting structure builds on the successes of the Athens and Rio de Janeiro meetings and takes into account the comments made in the stocktaking process, both on-line and at the meetings in Geneva on 26-28 February. As was the case in Rio de Janeiro, the Hyderabad meeting will not be merely repeating the structure of the inaugural meeting, but will have its own character and will go beyond the formats used previously. The informal, interactive multistakeholder format was generally seen as one of the key factors of the success of the first two meetings and should be maintained as a guiding principle. Participation will follow the format used at the previous meetings and all entities and persons with proven expertise and experience in matters related to Internet governance may apply to register as participants.

The basic format of the previous meetings, with main sessions and workshops, should be maintained. The five broad themes – access, openness, security, diversity, and critical Internet resources – will be retained but not necessarily as themes for the main sessions. The point was made that the general issues had been effectively covered during the previous two IGF meetings and that the sessions in Hyderabad should be more focused.

Technorati Tags: IGF, Internet Governance Forum, Hyderabad

It is widely known that despite many significant advantages, “explicit” use of OSS is still not as widespread. One of the many approaches designed to help in overcoming the adoption gap is the creation of “OSS competence centers”, that provide support and knowledge to facilitate open source software adoption.

Creating a competence center may take years, especially when it is necessary to create everything from scratch. But as I wrote in a recent presentation, it may be more efficient to “piggy-back” on top of existing IT incubators or IT districts, leverage what has already been produced in other projects and especially offer mediation as a service, because it is clear from the many surveys that companies need significant hand-holding when performing the first open source migrations. We will test this approach (after several trials) at the FutureMatch event colocated within CeBIT,

After a quite successful meeting in Rome, (where Roberto was so kind to join and help me) the OpenTTT project will be hosting a matching event within the CeBIT FutureMatch.

Meeting Point by Varf

From the CeBIT website: “The EU project Open TTT is supporting enterprises in finding, applying and developing the right Open Source Software to fulfill their specific needs. By collaborating with Open TTT the IRC Future Match 2008 has expanded its breadth to include the Open Source Software sector and thus offers a mediation platform for innovative Open Source Software offers and requests.”

In the past event, FutureMatch organized more than 1200 one-to-one meetings between companies, and it is my hope that a significant number of those in the next edition will be for open source services between OSS providers and end-users. I would like to invite any interested company willing to be there to register at the FutureMatch site; please choose “Open TTT” as “Assisting Organisation” during your registration to receive free entrance tickets for the CeBIT 2008.

The OpenTTT project is evaluating a novel approach to help in the OSS adoption process, by “industrializing” the matching process between the demand for software with the necessary functionalities and the offer (the whole set of suitable OSS packages). The mediation process is designed to find the best selection of tools and projects that can best match the expressed needs, and then we try to create one-to-one (or many-to-one, when more than one company is interested in paying for modifications or updates) business exchanges between the potential customers and the OSS-based companies that provide support or services on the selected packages. This approach has been tested in several workshops, held in France, Germany, Italy and Bulgaria and will be refined with the results of the FutureMatch event; we plan to leverage our experience to create a standardized approach to OSS mediation, eventually creating a “blueprint” for competency centers based on the OpenTTT model. Maybe this may be the basis for improving existing marketplaces?

The fourth Roman barcamp - Piublog 2007 - took place today within the event “Più libri più liberi” (eng.: more books, more freedom), the annual fair of the independent Italian publishing houses, held since 2002. A good chance to meet again old friends or why not make new ones on a gloomy, raining day in Rome.

Leo Sorge was a very nice host, embarrassed because the venue actually wasn’t totally appropriate for a barcamp, being just a single room and lacking of Wi-Fi facilities. Fabio Masetti opened the barcamp, later Riccardo Cambiassi - who originally “imported” the barcamp in Italy - impressed me with a cool slideshow on barcamping.
In the afternoon I enjoyed Nicola Mattina on corporate blogging, and Piergiorgio Lucidi introduction to microformats and Semantic Web.

I spent also time talking with people, among others Antonio Pavolini, Andrea Martines,  Feba, Giulio Gaudiano e Stefano Epifani. I met for the very first time Dario Salvelli and I suggested Nicola Risitano (LSLUG, OpenCamp) to have a look at the Open Source Guide for SMEs. Andrea Genovese was supposed to talk about his coworking project, but eventually Fabio Masetti spoke on behalf of him.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, piublog

The second Internet Governance Forum (IGF) hosted by the United Nations is officially over.

The IGF, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 12–15 November 2007, was aimed to advance discussion on issues related to Internet governance, mainly on the following five themes: Openness, Access, Security, Diversity, and issues related to the management of Critical Internet Resources.

The best part of IGF 2007 was undoubtedly the various workshops, “dynamic coalition” meetings, and best practice sessions, which were independently organized by the meeting’s participants. The level of quality of the dialogue in many of these sessions was outstanding, with diverse stakeholders coming together to engage on a common topic and present different viewpoints. All of the new ideas discussed at this year’s forum — indeed all discussion of “emerging issues” — came from the independently organized workshops and best practice sessions. As IGF Chairman Nitin Desai put it during the 2007 closing session: like the Internet itself, all the real action at this forum was at the edges.

In addition to the robust quality of the non-main session discussions, IGF-Rio offered an incredible number (84) of meetings on a broad range of subjects – indeed so many that participants had to choose between several interesting sessions that were scheduled concurrently. But don’t fret: you can still watch or listen to all missed sessions for years to come via the Internet.

Read the full report at IP Justice Website.

Technorati Tags: IP Justice, IGF, Internet Governance Forum

RIO DE JANEIRO - Intellectual property-related issues were a topic avoided by governments during the 2003-2005 World Summit on the Information Society, which gave way to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). But at the second IGF in Rio de Janeiro last week there were several IP-related workshops.Organisers of the dynamic coalitions on open standards, access to knowledge and the newly formed coalition on digital education said they were satisfied with the attention IP issues drew.

David Gross, the United States delegation lead, said he had been interested to see how much IP issues had come up. “IP issues of course are always an important issue,” said Gross, the US coordinator for international communications and information policy. “But there are many other places devoted to that topic, like WIPO [the World Intellectual Property Organization] or WTO [the World Trade Organization]. The fact that people think that the IGF is a place for these issues was interesting to me.” But Gross called it a misused opportunity that issues of the free flow of information had not come up more instead.

Read the full article at the Intellectual Property Watch.

The Government of Brazil is hosting in Rio de Janeiro the second Internet Governance Forum meeting. The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF.

HELOISA MAGALHÃES: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to talk in Portuguese. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am a Brazilian journalist from the “Valor Econômico,” and I am deeply honored to take part in this meeting. For us journalists in economics and finance, this issue is of utmost
importance. And for me as a Brazilian, there’s special appeal to this. We are a country full of inequalities, and the Internet has proven to be a means of overcoming the challenge. First, I would like to call upon Mr. Ronaldo Lemos, who will chair the session. However, before, I’d like to remind all of you that our intention is to promote a debate. This is to be an interactive session.

Questions and answers — questions from the audience. I would like to invite those who are sitting at the back of the room to come up closer so that we can have a true interactivity, so that we can have a more joyous interaction. First of all, Mr. Ronaldo, I give you the floor.

Read the full transcript.

Yesterday SELF - a community-driven platform for the production and distribution of educational materials sponsored by the EU IST programme  - has been officially launched by the Free Software Foundation Europe in the Netherlands during a conference on Free Software in Education.

The SELF platform aims to bring together educational institutes, training centres, software companies, publishing houses, government bodies and Free Software communities to centralise, create and disseminate educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards.

From linuxelectrons:

The SELF Platform has been developed by a global team of non-profit organisations, universities and volunteers engaged in the SELF Project, an initiative for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards. Users, primarily learners and teachers, are enabled to assemble selections of learning contents and create custom-made learning material for lessons in their language. The Platform is launched in beta stage to involve the growing community in optimising the tool.

All SELF materials are available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), materials from third parties are licenses under various similar licenses.

Let’s see now if  students and teachers will join the effort..

Technorati Tags: Free Software Education, FSFE, IST, SELF

A recurring debate discussion among FLOSS-supporters and detractors is related to the estimation of the real number of active FLOSS projects. While it is easy to look at the main repository site (sourceforge.net) that boasts more than 100.000 projects, it is equally easy to look in more depth and realize that a significant number of those projects are really abandoned or have no significant development. How many active and stable projects are really out there?

Too many cereal choices by PartsNpieces

For the purpose of obtaining some unbiased estimates in the context of the FLOSSMETRICS project, we performed a first search among the main repository sites and FLOSS announce portals; we also set a strict activity requirement, stately an activity index from 80 to 100% and at least a file release in the last 6 months. Of the overall 155959 projects, only 10656 (6.8%) are “active” (with a somehow very restrictive definition; a more relaxed release period of 1 year shows an active percentage of 9.2% or 14455 projects).

However, while Sourceforge can rightly be considered the largest single repository, it is not the only potential source of projects; there are many other vertical repositories, among them BerliOS, Savannah, Gna! and many others, derived both from the original version of the Sourceforge code and many more based on a rewritten version called GForge. That gives a total of 23948 projects, to which (using a sampling of 100 projects from each) we have found a similar number of active projects (between 8% and 10%).

The next step is the estimation of how many projects of the overall FLOSS landscape are hosted on those sites, and for performing this estimate we took the entire FreshMeat announce database, as processed by the FLOSSmole project and found that the projects that have an homepage in one of the repository sites are 23% of the total. This count is however biased by the fact that the probability of a project to be announced on FreshMeat is not equal for all projects; that is, english-based and oriented towards a large audience have a much higer probability to be listed. To take this into account, we performed a search for non-english based forges, and for software that is oriented towards a very specific area, using data from past IST projects like Spirit and AMOS.

We have found that non-english projects are underrepresented in FreshMeat in a significant way, but as the overall “business-readiness” of those projects is unclear (as for example there may be no translations available, or be specific to a single country legal environment) we have ignored them. Vertical projects are also underrepresented, especially with regard to projects in scientific and technical areas, where the probability of being included is around 10 times lower compared to other kind of software. By using the results from Spirit, a sampling from project announcements in scientific mailing lists, and some repositories for the largest or more visible projects (like the CRAN archive, that hosts libraries and packages for the R language for statistics, that hosts 1195 projects) we have reached a lower bound estimate of around 12000 “vertical” and industry-specific projects. So, we have an overall lower bound estimate of around 195000 projects, of which we can estimate that 7% are active, leading to around 13000 active projects.

Of those, we can estimate (using data from Slashdot, FreshMeat and the largest Gforge sites) that 36% fall in the “stable” or “mature” stage, leading to a total of around 5000 projects that can be considered suitable for an SME, that is with an active community, stable and with recent releases. It should be considered that this number is a lower bound, obtained with slightly severe assumptions; just enlarging the file release period from 6 months to one year nearly doubles the number of suitable projects. Also, this estimate does not try to assess the number of projects not listed in the announcement sites (even vertical application portals); this is a deliberate action, as it would be difficult to estimate the reliability of such a measure, and because the “findability” of a project and its probability of having a sustained community participation are lower if it is difficult to find information on the project in the first place; this means that the probability of such “out of the bounds” projects would probably be not a good opportunity for SME adoption in any case. By using a slightly more relaxed definition of “stability”, with an activity rating between 60% and 100% and at least a release in the last year, we obtain around 18000 stable and mature project from which to choose- not a bad result, after all.

Technorati Tags: open source metrics, sourceforge, flossmetrics, flossmole

In the context of the joint research work with Roberto, I would like to present a small update in the OpenTTT project. OpenTTT is a EU-funded project (SSA-030595 INN7) that aims at bridging the separate worlds of technology transfer and open source software (OSS), by introducing novel methodologies for helping companies in the take up of technology.

As part of the project, we are collecting examples of non-source code projects where collaboration or open licensing are critical, and prepared a listing of such activities. Such listing will be extended in the next weeks, also including previous work like the “Open Source Gift Guide” or a list of non software open source goods.

As already discussed a large portion of work in OSS projects goes into non-code aspects, and as such should be investigated probably with the same interest that OSS commands today.

Technorati Tags: openttt, EU projects