Commercial Open Source Software

Bradley M. Kuhn, FLOSS Community Liaison and Technology Director of Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), asks if contributing to FLOSS is becoming a social cause, as he received a phone call from someone involved with a socially responsible investment house.

Social Responsibility by Casallart

My friend Stefano Maffulli wonders if free software is closer to be perceived as a social clause, suggesting that we might need a way to measure how close the actions of corporations are to the values of the Free Software movement.

While I am not convinced it is feasible to measure what he calls the “Free Software Fairness Index”, I see that Jonathan Schwartz in 2007 published the first Sun’s Corporate Social Responsibility report, while corporate/social responsibility advocates asked the Oracle board to issue an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders.

Are we really entering an era where FLOSS issues are on the socially responsible criteria list for investors, as Bradley hopes?

Technorati Tags: social responsibility, BradleyKuhn, Stefano Maffulli

epractice.eu, the portal created by the European Commission offers a service for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners, reported about Lazio e-Citizen, a digital inclusion project.

The programme responded to European directives on the Lisbon Strategy and its objectives were to increase the residents’ awareness of the importance of digital literacy, the benefits that e-skills bring to their personal and professional lives, and to fight against social exclusion. The project developed a strategy to bridge the digital divide based on specific criteria: gender, age and skill levels.

Don’t be a secret keeper by *Drangongly*

I asked Alessandra Devitofrancesco (ECDL foundation), author of the Lazio e-Citizen case reported on epractice to tell me more, and she kindly put me in touch with the AICA (ECDL member) responsible of the initiative, Pierpaolo Maggi.

He explained me that the project has been developed using the open source course management system Moodle, and that the portal is accessible also through Firefox and Netscape. On the contrary the article on epractice and also e-citizen FAQ report (bold emphasis is mine):

The schools, universities and Permanent Territorial Centres which were involved in the Lazio e-Citizen project were chosen according to different technological requirements:
- Availability of one or more rooms with at least 12+5 desks and Internet access (ADSL or wireless)
- LAN network among all desks and shared printer
- PC Pentium 4 (or superior) or equivalent (i.e. AMD)
- Windows 2000 or later versions
- Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 or superior
- Accessories: audio set and headphones: CD ROM reader, minimum video resolution SVGA 800×600

It is time for outing, I publicly invite project’s promoters to disclose the specific technology choice (moodle), how it has been used and, last but not the least, telling people that the portal is accessible to open source.

eAccessibility and eInclusion are definitely also about allowing open source users to access information.

Technorati Tags: eAccessibility, eInclusion, digital literacy, digital divide, moodle, lazio e-citizen, course management system, epractice, Lazio

The European Legislative Observatory sends to subscribers a list of changes, I found interesting the Commission’s report on the application of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

Read the Commission Staff Working Document (PDF). Oddly Italy is mentioned just once, while as far as I know we are having a “sophisticated” approach to the copyright matter.

Technorati Tags: European Legislative Observatory, Copyright Harmonization, Italian Copyright law

ForumPA, the greatest Italian event of and about the Public Administration taking place in Rome from the 12th to the 15th of May, today hosted the Creativity Forum session, chaired by Fiorello Cortiana, representative of the Italian delegation at the WSIS.

Trying to grasp that idea by El Buen Matador

ForumPA, the Italian exhibition to meet up representatives from central and local Public Administrations, this year is running also some unconferences, freely inspired by the barcamp phenomenon.

Unfortunately I couldn’t join the unconference from the very beginning, but I really enjoyed Renzo Provedel speech about open innovation, as I liked Stefano Quintarelli gave a very interesting talk on the network infrastructure as a commons. I also enjoyed Guido Scorza telling the audience how difficult is to share creative commons in Italy.

I started my very short speech speaking of the big “news”: free software exists and there is a lot of it. While open source is doubling every year, a very tiny fraction of it is known from the public. Despite Linux or OpenOffice.org are well known - don’t miss my round table tomorrow if you want to know more about OpenOffice.org Italian success - many people totally ignore the existence of a number of valuable open source packages. I mentioned Clam Anti Virus, an effective open source anti-virus whose performances are widely unknown, as resulted also from researches conducted by a student I was advising for his thesis.

Considering the existence of funds to sustain open souce innovation, the new Italian government might consider to launch a “pubblicità progresso” campaign in order to let people know about open source software.

Am I a dreamer? I hope not!

Technorati Tags: open source government, open source dissemination, Italian public administration, pubblicità progresso, guidoscorza, stefanoquintarelli, fiorellocortiana, renzoprovedel

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.