“equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism”
The second ODF Plugfest will eventually take place in Orvieto (Italy) on the 2nd and 3rd of November, and I want to personally thank all people who helped to make my dream a reality. The event will be held at the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio Di Orvieto and everyone is invited (below the original invitation).
Continue reading ‘Second ODF Plugfest: Everyone is invited!’
The Italian association Concreta-mente for the second year will held the Open Source in Public Administrations conference, on the 1st of April 2009 in Rome, at the LUISS Guido Carli university.
Four different case studies of Italian public administrations using open source software and open standards will be presented. Carlo Mochi Sismondi, Forum PA General Manager, will moderate a round-table discussion with representatives from public and private sectors.
Free Software Foundation Europe one year ago introduced the Document Freedom Day, and also this year a global day for document liberation is scheduled for 25 of March.
The initiative promotes only ODF, other open standards, like the Portable Document Format (PDF), are ignored.
Continue reading ‘Open Standards: Document ‘Freedom’ Day is back, some thoughts’
Two InitMarketing Customers Win Open Source Business Award - Two Initmarketing customers won prizes. I was partially involved with Stephen Walli to write todoyu business plan, and I really enjoyed it!
The New Year historically is a time for self improvement, and the commercial open source side of the world should be no exception to that.
Open Source thought leaders have expressed opinions and discussed the state of open source, here are my takes on some challenges and opportunities for the new year.
Continue reading ‘Commercial Open Source 2009: Challenges and Opportunities’
Today the OMAT conference hosted the “Standards and Interoperability“ session, and for the second time this year Adobe, Microsoft and the Italian OpenOffice.org community were discussing about interoperability and conformance.
The first OMAT conference was held just when Microsoft was enjoying OpenXML approval, while today they publicly announced the decision to join the OIC TC, the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance technical committee.
The Italian OpenOffice.org community already welcomed Microsoft’s decision to support ODF. Now that they decided to join the OIC TC accepting Rob Weir invitation, we are looking forward to see IBM and Microsoft cooperate for a real interoperability.
Sun along with IBM announced the availability of the ODF Validator - a tool that validates files against ODF ISO/IEC 26300, ODF v.1.1 and ODF v1.2 - as part of a broader initiative that goes under the name of ODF Toolkit Union.
The ODF Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project namely aimed at making document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business. At the present stage are available for downloads two SDKs, two tools for processing ODF documents and a conformance tool.
Declarations of conformity to open standards are a self-certification processes, and tools like the ODF Validator (available also in source code form) can help users and consumers to make better informed choices, at least. Public administrations choosing products that are implementing different “flavours” of a standard, can drammatically affect interoperability. That’s why public administrations should ask Standard Setting Organizations to make conformance testing part of the standardization process.
Getting back to the ODF Toolkit Union, as a matter of fact two members don’t make a union. Actually not even the IBM Press room mention the news, despite Michael Karasick, Director of IBM Lotus China Development Labs, gave the announcement at the OOo Conf 2008 in Beijing, spreading also the word about how good is Symphony.
Will the club welcome other vendors?
OMAT conference, a landmark in Italy in electronic document, content and corporate process management will be held in Rome this year, on the 12-13 of November.
On the second day will be held the “Standards and Interoperability“.
For the second time Adobe, Microsoft and members of the OpenOffice.org community will be sitting at the same round table to constructively talk about how to better satisfy users’ needs, bringing some ideas and hopefully future actions.
The conference is a follow up of the previous edition, held just when OpenXML was approved by ISO. I will talk about the importance of being called an open standard, putting it in perspective also with the evolution of standards.
Technorati Tags: OpenOffice, OpenOffice.org, ODF, OpenXML, interoperability, data accessibility, public administration policies
ESIIG 2, the Second European Summit on Interoperability in the iGovernment, represents an unprecedented occasion to develop new synergies and create contacts with representatives of the European Commission, of the national and regional governments of Europe, of the research field, the Academia and experts of the ICT sector.
Regione Lazio, Regional Ministry for Consumer Protection and Administrative Simplification, is organizing the Second European Summit on Interoperability in the iGovernment with the aim of:
Promoting Interoperability as the key enabler for the development of the iGovernment among European regions
Analysing the state of the art of Interoperability in Europe and the regional best practices
Involving international, national and European stakeholders active in the field of Interoperability for the definition of the new priorities and the development of more and more efficient and innovative eServices.ESIIG 2 is an event organized with the patronage of Mrs Viviane Reding, member of the European Commission for the Information Society and Media.
Join the facebook group or participate in the forum if interested.
The Open Source World Conference, taking place in Malaga (Spain), from October 20 to 22, is one of the most important FLOSS event in Europe.
The aim of the Conference is to demonstrate that free and open source software is a consolidated reality worth investing in, and not just a powerful, solid and safe solution.
Malaga in my open source heart by Trébol AzulI have been just informed that the paper I coauthored with Flavia Marzano entitled “The importance of being called an open standard: standards compliance and the role of European public administrations” has been accepted by the Open Source World Conference Technical Committee.As I mentioned before today IT vendors are not asked to prove that their software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications. Since there is no organization that assess standards compliance, citizens have just to rely on implementors’ statements of compliance. We believe that T this issue need to be openly addressed, and Public Administrations can play an important role.
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