Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

The Boston Summit. The Boston Summit is GNOME’s annual event in the United States. This primarily technical event will be held at MIT Sloan over Columbus Day weekend, October 11-13. The Boston Summit has no fixed agenda but focuses on getting developers together to “get things done”; most of the non-coding events will focus on interactive discussion and planning of new features and releases. There will be several hackfests held at the same time around GNOME technologies like the desktop GUI, introspection, etc. For more information see http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008.

GNOME.Asia. This is our first annual GNOME event in Asia and we are very excited to announce that we are expecting 300 people to attend in Beijing China the weekend of September 19-20. This event will serve as an opportunity for our developers in Asia to get together as well as an opportunity to introduce more people, especially students, to the open source world and the GNOME community. For more information see http://www.gnome.asia/.

The PLIO Association (Italian OpenOffice.org Native-Lang Project) is pleased to invite everyone involved in the Native-Lang Confederation to join the meeting that will be held in Bolzano/Bozen (Italy) on October 3rd, 2008.

Goal of the meeting is to prepare the discussion topics that will be brought to Beijing: some European Native-Lang project members won’t be able to take the great opportunity offered by OOoCon 2008 and this way they can delegate someone to bring their opinions to Beijing.
Native-Lang issues will also be discussed in greater detail than it is usually possible during OOoCon. Attendance to the meeting will be free.

Specific topics to be discussed during the meeting will be decided on the native-lang mailing list. At the moment, ideas include: localization, QA, documentation, marketing, all from the point of view of Native-Lang projects. Other proposals are welcome.

Bolzano (Bozen in German) is the capital city of South Tyrol, the German speaking region in northern Italy. Thanks to its excellent services and a wonderful landscape, it is constantly ranked among the first cities when it comes to quality of life. Bolzano hosts major free software deployments: more than 2500 computers in local schools were recently upgraded to GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.org, and OpenOffice.org has been installed since 2005 on all computers in the local institutions.

Bolzano is well-connected, being a major hub of the railway system in Central Alps. It also has a small airport (BZO) with scheduled flights provided by Air Alps to Rome and Hannover; other nearby airports are Verona and Venice, and PLIO might organize transfer or pick-up services from those airports to Bolzano. Highway A22 (Autostrada del Brennero,
Brennerautobahn) leads to Bolzano from South and North: Bolzano is about 280 km from Munich, Venice and Milan. The city and its metropolitan area are well developed for tourism and you can find all kinds of accommodation with a price range from 30 to 96 EUR for a single room per night.

Technorati Tags: openoffice, bozen, bolzano, OOoCon 2008

ITPUG, the Italian PostgreSQL association, is inviting everybody to join the PostgreSQL Day 2008 in Prato (Italy), on 17th and18th of October by the Monash University Prato Centre.

Prato, S. Stefano Cathedral by Vygotskij - The Fool on the Hill

The second edition of the Italian PGDay, thanks to the collaboration between ITPUG and PostgreSQL Europe association, is a European event.

About ITPUG.
On Saturday 17 November 2007, the Italian Community of PostgreSQL has finally founded a non profit organization for the promotion of the open source RDBMS in Italy. Gabriele Bartolini, ITPUG President, was present at FOSDEM 2008 gave a speech about the association.

Technorati Tags: PostegreSQL, PgDay, Prato, Gabriele Bartolini, Open Source Communities

The launch of the Open Source Observatory and Repository for European Public Administrations will be held in Màlaga on the 20th of October during the Open Source World Conference, one of the most important FLOSS event in Europe.

The draft agenda, available at the IDABC website, starts at 9.15 with a an hour workshop on FLOSS procurement, a very hot topic at least by Italian public administrations. Marco Battistoni, Unisys OSOR Technical Manager, will later introduce the audience to the new European repository, talking about the platform and its services.

In the afternoon a round table moderated by Karel DeVriendt, IDABC Head of Unit, will give highlights on a selection of European open source projects. Among them Wollmux and the Qualipso project.

Technorati Tags: OSOR, Open Source Repository, IDABC, MarcoBattistoni, KarelDeVriendt

Yesterday I walked through Sourceforge end-users’ needs, trying to figure out how Sourceforge might travel to accommodate their needs. Today we’ll look at what organizations and developers might want, keeping a closer eye on competitors’ offering and how to possibly stay ahead of them.

Portrait of a software developer by zakq100

Organizations.

Let’s start from local and central public administrations. Forges like the European Open Source Observatory and Repository cost a lot of money, helping IDABC and other national or regional organizations to allocate their resources to better help dissemination of practices in using open source software. To enter this market Sourceforge should likely spend some effort to provide users with projects migration tools and also to be compliant with European interoperability standards. Public administrations might well be interested in reaching Sourceforge’s audience, targeting local SMEs and PAs through specific newsletters, taking advantage of Krugle to search code, or more advanced features like a method to rate developers and contributors, etc. I think in this area Sourceforge could really make a difference. Competitors like Collabnet probably simply can’t reach 30 million of users a month, and are probably more focused on the enterprise market. All in all Sourceforge could even provide public administrations with a free service, retaining the possibility to sell advertisements or sponsorship to local IT vendors.

Fixing the “open source mediation conundrum” - namely the fact that any given customer has a component distribution that falls everywhere on the long tail - is more of an opportunity than a challenge to Sourceforge. Stormy Peters rightly says that developers involved with open source projects in the long tail are reachable by forums and email. That is just how OpenLogic maintains relationships with developers on 400 projects. Other organizations, either IT consumers or producers (system integrators included) might need help with that. Sourceforge could commercialize value added mediation services for projects not covered by OpenLogic, whose support probably doesn’t scale beyond a few hundred components, as Domic Sartorio said. Similar speculations stand for stacks not supported by SpikeSource, though. Sourceforge in order to answer the open source mediation conundrum should stretch its ears, going beyond making audience and eventually enabling users/customers collaboration through its community. Moving from group forming networks aimed at distribute software (one-to-many communications) and enabling intra-project transactions among peers to fostering inter-projects communications, creating affiliation, is a strategic decision. Exploiting the power of networks to this extent, forming and fostering inter-projects collaborations, could allow Sourceforge to compete also with organizations like the Collaborative Software Initiative.

Developers.

Launching a “Geek for hire” program would be a great thing. Starting by asking developers to opt in to the service, collaborating locally with employment service providers like Manpower, and finally taking advantage of the deep knowledge about Sourceforge users’ skills. Sourceforge today has access to likely the largest global network of talent, and could deliver a pretty unique permanent or temporary recruitment service. Ohloh is already providing information about Sourceforge’s developers, and it is time to offer similar or better services. Now.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, business models, ohloh, sourceforge, manpower, spikesource, openlogic, collabnet, dominicsartorio, idabc, osor, forge

Having a seat on the Sourceforge advisory board, lately I have been thinking about who are the stakeholders of world’s most famous open source repository, and how Sourceforge might travel to accommodate their changing needs.

A possible taxonomy by recursion sees recursion

Searching for Sourceforge on Google the first three different results summarize different aspects of how people look at it (bold emphasis is mine):

The world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications
(source: sourceforge.net).

A media, services and e-commerce network that provides and promotes Open Source software downloads, development, discussion and news. (source: sourceforge Inc., NASDAQ LNUX).

SourceForge.net is a source code repository and acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. SourceForge.net is operated by Sourceforge, Inc. (formerly VA Software) and runs a version of the SourceForge software, forked from the last open-source version available. As of August 2008, SourceForge.net hosts more than 180,000 projects and more than 1.9 million registered users, although it does contain many dormant or single-user projects
(source: wikipedia).

Some stakeholders’ point of views in regards to what Sourceforge is are implicitly represented by those definitions, a taxonomization of all Sourceforge’s stakeholders is probably needed to better define how better support all of them.

Let’s start from the developers.

There are three different subcategories of developers interested in Sourceforge: newbies, experienced and professionals.

Newbies can’t access any resource to easily jump start a development project. SF.net is definitely not aimed at them.

Experienced developers’ needs are well matched by SF.net, offering them an integrated web platform to build software, centralizing development management for no cost and helping project visibility.

Professionals, people making a living of it, needing to accurately track donwloads or willing to have full control of their repositories, today can’t easily migrate their projects in and out of SF.net, and they often choose to run their own forge.

But if it is true that they don’t need a software development platform, many of them are happy with an high ranked page referring to their project. Guerilla marketing’s fans maybe also interested in selling services through the SF marketplace, but the presence of competitors at (less than) a click away could be a problem.

Peer-to-peer network users.

All they need is an easy access to downloading their favorite file-sharing tool. Even if they can hardly seen as part of the SF developers community, since they pay little (if any) interest in free software, they are a very significant part of the whole users base.

Public and Private Organizations.

Organizations using SF facilities to build communities, are open and interested to a wide collaboration, probably going beyond the peer production of code, maybe willing to find an answer to the open source conundrum. Public administrations willing to share open source code are likely interested in sharing also solutions and experiences.

End users.

End users look for software to fulfill their idiosyncratic needs. Often their ability to conduct an effective software selection process is little, as is scarce the probability to find a solution to their unique problems in few clicks.

Next I will cover the competitive landscape and opportunities in front of Sourceforge.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, long tail, sourceforge, open source mediation, open source marketplace, commons peer production

Dr. Dobb’s Journal in September will throw its 19th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards, aimed at recognizing innovative products, books and web sites that have “jolted” the software development industry in 2008.

Nominations for the 19th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards are going to be open before the end of September. The deadline for nominations will be November 12, 2008.

The more participants we have the more fun the award will be by jc_iverson’s

There are 16 categories, and last year it has been a tough job fully participate and judge the products in all my chosen categories, maybe I should concentrate only on a few of them this year.
Technorati Tags: Jolt Awards, Dr Dobb

Olliance Group and InitMarketing, the Open Source Marketing company, will co-lead a workshop on Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy at OSIM, on the 19th of September in Berlin.

Building Balance by mr.Mark

Today open source is being leveraged by hundreds of vendors to varying degrees of success with more entering the arena every day.This workshop will address the core elements of building and implementing an effective open source strategy.Attendees will learn how to identify open source opportunities and challenges, understand resource issues and come away with an idea of how to determine if their existing or planned open source strategies will help them meet their business objectives.Among the open source topics to be addressed are: mapping open source into your business model, licensing, marketing, building a sustainable community and partnering.The workshop will be conducted through a series of presentations and business case examples with a focus on industry best practices.

Basically I will cover topic ranging from open source governance, included open source licensing, to managing open source communities, analyzing pros and cons of choices like building your own or tapping into an existing one.
I will also speak about open source business models, giving also details about open source franchising and open source network marketing.

Talking about open source marketing I will tell you about what’s special about it, how to position an open source product and company, and how to develop a strong open source brand.

Andrew Aitken Stephen Walli and Sandro Groganz will help me to prepare materials for the different sessions.

See you there!

Post Scrittum:  I got some spare discounted pass to attend this event, feel free to contact me directly by email if you are interested.

Technorati Tags: OSIM, OSIM Berlin, Open Source Workshop, InitMarketing, Olliance Group, StephenWalli, SandroGroganz, Business models, Open Source Marketing, Commercial Open Source

Sourceforge 2008 community awards‘ nominations this year were open to all open source projects, even to projects not enlisted within SourceForge.net repository. The SourceForge.net community’s members massively vote for OpenOffice.org, who actually won three different award categories (Best Project, Best Project for Enterprises, Best Project for Educators).

I agree with Matt Asay, saying that he doesn’t see OpenOffice.org fitting the Best Project for Enterprises, at least until enterprises will start using it significantly, something we are still missing to see for a number of reasons. My suggestion indeed was to vote for it in the “Most Likely to Change the World” category, eventually won by Linux.

Technorati Tags: SourceForge, Community Awards, OpenOffice.org, openoffice

Sardegna Ricerche, in cooperation with CRS4 is carrying out a project for a DistrICT Camp, within the activities of the program “Sardegna DistrICT”.

The Summer DistrICT Camp program, hosts young people from all Europe aiming at fostering the co-operation between enterprises and innovation and research system.

Diving in the Sardinian Open Source sea by paolofusco

Summer DistrICT Camp is dedicated to 25 young people from all Europe, interested in developing innovation projects, applied to the many technological laboratories, among them an “Open source software” Lab. The Open Source Lab will create a group of developers experienced in management and creation of open source projects, to be applied in the fields of school, public administration and Italian companies.

Read the full Set of Rules and join the program before the 29th of August (via Arturo di Corinto).

About the Sardinian ICT District.
Located in the area between Cagliari and Pula, the Sardinian ICT District has developed around a group of scientific, technological and entrepreneurial specialists, experienced in the field of Information and Communication Technologies and Internet advanced applications.
The project for the development of the District, aims to create nine “technological laboratories”, where scientific and technological activities and experiences of Universities and Research Centres can merge, with the precise intent to start research and development projects at the service of the entrepreneurial world.

Technorati Tags: Sardegna Ricerche, CRS4, Summer DistrICT camp, ArturoDiCorinto, Open Source Lab, open source, precompetitive research