Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

Black Duck Software is an intellectual property management firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts delivering services to identify risks and vulnerabilities in an enterprise’s open-source code.

Doug Levin, Black Duck’s CEO, today was available for a phone call to tell me more about how they help organizations use open source software and third-party code components while managing software licensing obligations and other business risks.

Firms offering intellectual assets giving “horizontal” support, meaning companies that sell services not related to a specific package and not related to software development, could play an important in the European market.

While Asia and USA are historically more acquainted with buying his services, Doug claimed that the European market would develop in the near future and he cited several open source project (Mandriva, ZEA and Alfresco among others) that the company has already worked both directly and indirectly. SourceSense among others is already partnering with them in three different countries, while other two medium sized IT German firms are also Black Duck customers.

Software patents are not central to business accelerators for Black Duck; copyright and 3^rd party and OSS license violations are central to Black Duck’s services, products and training.
Talking about takers of GPL Doug stated:

So far small gpl projects associated with FSF were the first to go. We are seeing GPLv3 adoption in relatively small numbers and not being adopted by large projects. SugarCRM and Samva were exceptions in this respect.

Doug and I agreed on the fact that SugarCRM made the best decision by not abiding to the OSI “badgeware approved license, and instead choosing the GPLv3, a license which is much closer to the community.

I am looking forward to meet him soon in Europe, and let you know more about how Black Duck is going to help the European open source ecosystem.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, Open Source Risk, Open Source, Intellectual Property Management, Black Duck, Doug Levin, Software Patent

Microsoft withdrawn two remaining appeals before the European Union’s Court of First Instance against European Commission antitrust decisions.

As reported by Slashdot an article in Australia’s IT News mentions that under its antitrust agreement with the European Union:

Microsoft will publish an irrevocable pledge not to assert any patents it may have over the interoperability information against non-commercial open source software development projects.

Of course you can, if you stay in the green area! by Lateefa

While I understand that Erich Andersen, European General Counsel for Microsoft, said that:

We believe it’s important at this stage to focus all of our energies on complying with our legal obligations and strengthening our constructive relationship with the European Commission.

I don’t understand why Neelie Kroes, EU’s Competition Commissioner, said that:

I have always said that open source software developers must be able to take advantage of this remedy: now they can.

Despite Georg Greeve (FSFE President) seems happy about the news, and Dana Blankenhorn believes that open source developers found a greater protection in Europe, I am concerned.

Answering a Dana’s post, I stressed the importance of the real meaning of the expression RAND, Reasonable And Not Discriminatory.

As a matter of fact even if you have to ask a single dime for each copy of a software, that it simply can’t be free software. In this respect perspective any (open) standard and protocol has to be royalty-free, unless you want to keep out open source. I totally agree with John McCreesh, the EU has worked for three years to produce a mouse, and no one is really taking advantage of if it. Did interoperability win? I am afraid not.

I see FFII, Stefano Maffulli sharing my concerns, and I really hope that the Samba Team will soon take a position on this matter. Benjamin Henrion, FFII representative said:

Kroes has ensured that EPO software patents - which the EU rejected in 2005 - will now strengthen the monopolist’s grip for years to come.

I totally agree with Benjamin, a patent covenant for non commercial open source developers is a small blanket. At the end of the day “free software” might cost a lot to end customers and open source firms, from now on.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Non Commercial Open Source, FFII, StefanoMaffulli, DanaBlankenhorn, HenrionBenjamin, NeelieKroes, JohnMcCreesh, RAND, Europe, FSFE, GeorgGreeve

What enterprise software can learn from community sites: Gary Little - Don Marti interviews Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures to talk about VCs investments in open source firms.

2007-10-18 | Open source VoIP being slowly accepted - Apparently Kerravala from Yankee Group thinks that at the current time Open Source VoIP is still immature..

Catching up with Terracotta: Transition to Open Source, Adoption, Hibernate Support - Ari Zilka Terracotta’s CTO says that with open source your number one competitor becomes yourself, and to find more creative value-adds than just support.

Social Responsibility Advocates Demand Open Source Action From Oracle - At the November Oracle Social Responsibility initiative two corporate/social responsibility advocates will likely require the Oracle board to “issue, at reasonable expense, an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders by April 2008 that discusses the social and environmental impacts of Oracle’s existing and potential open source policies and practices.” Is Social Responsibility the ultimate weapon?

Software Patents: Innovation’s Quicksand - Jeff Kaplan reports that Professor Maskin researches showed that strong patent protection produced less R&D spending, and slowed productivity growth.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Open Source VoIP, Software Patents, Terracotta, Oracle, Social Responsibility

The ‘Warrior’ within Jonathan Schwartz - interesting article on Schwartz life, via James Governor
Tips: Firefox and OpenOffice document handling - easy instructions to see ODF document within your favourite browser

Patent infringments Lawsuit Filed Against Novell& Red Hat - Jeremy keeps us updated on the patent infringment issue. Read also Luis Villa’s post.

OSS Venture Capital and M&A - Savio Rodrigues wonders about the Open Source market

The Court of First Instance found Microsoft guilty of preventing rivals in server software and products such as media players. In the next two months Microsoft could appeal at the European Court of Justice.

Prevent..by jasoneppink

Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Competition Policy, said:

So what does this judgement mean for the future?

First, and most importantly, it sends a clear signal that super-dominant companies cannot abuse their position to hurt consumers and dampen innovation by excluding competitors in related markets.

I asked also my friend Simo Sorce, Samba developer and the Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer his opinion, and he told me:

This sentence is extremely important, it finally establish as a fact the abuses of Microsoft in the market. I think that this is a remarkable result, and I hope that now Microsoft will provide documentation so that interoperability can be achieved in a more timely and open manner, without blocking development of Free/Open Source Software solutions.

Carlo Piana, FSFE’s legal counsel, in the same vein:

FSFE and the Samba Team welcome the decision of the court. This is a milestone for competition. It puts an end to the notion that deliberate obfuscation of standards and designed lock-in is an acceptable business model and forces Microsoft back into competing on the grounds of software technology.

So apparently it is a great day for Open Source advocates, but I believe FFII is pretty right saying Microsoft might trump EU competition with (European) software patents, as results from Pieter Hintjens statement:

The decision seems positive but it is five years out of date. During that time, Microsoft has lobbied for software patents in Europe and bought patents on many trivial concepts. It has claimed patent violations against Linux, put patent timebombs into its formats and interfaces, and turned fear of patents into a core part of its business strategy. It will now open its formats, because that lets it extend its software patent franchise even further.

I would suggest Italian and European IT firms, especially medium to big ones, to invest some money to help natural born lobbyists, or accept software patents will affect their business, either open or proprietary.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, FSFE, EU, software patents, FFII, SimoSorce, CarloPiana, NeelieKroes, PieterHintjens

Few months ago I wrote about the need of open source lobbyists, just after
Dana Blankenhorn post, and I eventually ended reporting Florian Mueller and Simon Phipps opinions around software patents war.

Florian Mueller, “No lobbyists as such” author and founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has recently announced to take his blog offline in about a month, because he retired from the patent policy debate, and I took the chance to ask Florian two more questions.

Talking about the role of interoperability, you wrote me that also Google played a role, so which is their position, in your opinion?

As for Google, I’m quite sure there are lots of people inside Google (well, even inside Microsoft) who are anti-swpat personally but the company position isn’t really clear. The only thing they really cared about in the final days before the EP’s 2nd reading vote 2 years ago was interoperability, just so they can continue to analyze PDF documents without infringing Adobe’s related patents etc.

Are you about to leave for good the patent policy debate? Why?

I still care about the software patent issue and a competitive software market, and I believe that my long-standing concerns over their impact have been validated by Microsoft’s Novell-type deals and its announcement to collect royalties from FOSS users. But after my recent and successful project to defend certain strategic interests of Real Madrid in the context of the EU’s ongoing sports policy initiative, I’m at least ten times more likely to take on another football-related assignment than to get involved with patent policy again.

I just don’t see that companies with an interest in fighting software patents would make the level of resources available that I would consider to be a reasonable basis. In other fields that’s a lot less of a problem, if any. That’s just a market reality.

Florian Mueller by duncandavidson

In Europe we are still facing very talented lobbyists working hard on this controversial political issue, and despite patentability of computer-implemented inventions is not yet legal in Europe, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Interoperability matters, but software patents do matter even more: the file format war is not the ICT market panacea. I invite medium to large IT European companies to think about it, and invest money to lobby. Now.

Technorati Tags: google, software patent, lobbyists, mueller

The first edition of the Festival of Innovation, held in Rome from the 7th of June to the 10th, yesterday guested the Commercial Open Source Software conference.

I introduced Bruce Perens saying that the expression Commercial Open Source is far from being an oxymoron, considering that commercial means either something oriented toward profit or pertaining to public trade or dealings.

Festival dell’Innovazione

Bruce was scheduled to deliver the opening keynote speech, and despite he was almost voiceless because of many previous events, he brilliantly managed to introduce the audience to Commercial Open Source. He started giving some background information on his life and works, and then invited people to consider the economic Function of software. As a matter of fact only 30% of US programmers are working by software companies, so most of the companies involved with software development are not in the business of software manufacturing. In other words Enabling technology, in other words, in his opinion it is not the profit-center, but a cost-center.

There are two main forms of enabling, cost-center technology: differentiating, and non-differentiating. Differentiating technology is what makes your business more desirable to your customer than your competitor’s business. [..] So, for Amazon, the “recommendation” software is a business differentiator. Obviously, it would be a mistake to Open Source your business differentiators, because then your competitor’s business might use them to become as desirable to the customer as your own business. [..] Perhaps 90% of the software in any business is non-differentiating. Much of it is referred to as infrastructure, the base upon which differentiating technology is built.

On friday afternoon Bruce raised up the same topic by FIDAInform, the National Federation of the Associations of Information Management Professionals, where he had an argument with a member, a Microsoft employee. Their discussion, while not lacking of mutual criticism, was of great interest to the audience, and Bruce eventually reported the differences existing between the two different business models also on Saturday.

Generally the initial development is done by a single entity as in the in-house and contract development paradigm, and the software is released to the public as soon as it is useful to others, generally before it would be considered a finished product and thus much earlier than a retail product would be released. [..]

The cost and risk of developing the product is distributed among these developers, and any combination of them can carry on the project if others leave. Distribution of cost and risk begins as soon as the project is mature enough to build a community outside of its initial developer.

On a different line Gabriele Ruffatti, Engineering’s legal representative in the ObjectWeb Consortium and a member of the SpagoBI & Spago projects board, gave a speech describing a different approach. Engineering is a large Italian IT firm employing about 3700 people - consider that only 0.4% of Italian IT firms employ more than 500 people and about 97% employ less than 10 people - and the System Integration represents more than 50% of their business.

In his opinion a commercial open source product is:

a solution claiming to be open source, claiming to have a community supporting it, but offering closed add-ons for enterprise adoption with a proprietary approach to the market.

He also added that Engineering have chosen the LGPL license, somehow implying that double-licensing doesn’t make much business sense to them. Bruce, that was totally voiceless at that stage, was disagreeing writing comments on his laptop, since he believes that double-licensing makes sense.

On behalf of the Italian Consortium of FLOSS firms, Carlo Daffara spoke about the importance of Open Source Selection, bringing the experience of well known European project like COSPA - the Consortium for Open Source Software in the Public Administration - and OpenTTT.

Emanuela Giannetta - Sun Microsytem Italia - started her speech mentioning OpenSolaris and Java, to eventually tell the audience about two Italian initiatives. JOB, an Italian portal created by her boss Franco Roman, and JikiBloom, a platform sponsored by Sun Microsystems Italia integrating a number of opensource projects, like Asterisk, Hylafax, Jboss, Pentaho, SugarCRM, Zimbra and others.

Pierpaolo Boccadamo - Microsoft Italia - gave a speech talking about the importance of Intellectual Property in the digital age - and he got few questions from the public in this respect - and eventually told that Microsoft is going soon to open its second Port25 Lab - the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab - somewhere in Italy.

Last but not least Bruce spent few words talking about Software Patents and Open Standards.

People from the public posed some questions to the panelists, ranging from Interoperability to patents, and among them Davide Gorini, Director of the first Italian Open Source Incubator, based in Rome, asked Bruce about Open Source Government policies. Bruce stated that in his opinion the law shouldn’t oblige to use open source software, but it has to be mandatory its evaluation. As he clearly explained, Public Administrations should make their choices considering technical merits and also valuating the impact of Open Source paradigm itself.

Many Thanks to LAit - Lazio Technological Innovation - for the perfect organization and for the gorgeous location chosen for the event!

Technorati Tags: Perens, Rome, Open Source Conference, Jikibloom, Spago, CIRS

Business as Usual - Bill Hilf on Port25: It’s not us versus the free world.

Three Minutes with Microsoft’s Open-Source Manager - Bill Hilf explains Microsoft strategy: to license and not litigate. Am I the only one thinking to the Cold war at this stage?

235 more reasons to love open source - Fabrizio Capobianco designed a funny and provoking t-shirt, and I guess he is going to bring along an XXL one for Bill Hilf next Monday!

Steve? Darl? All of the Above? - Billy Marshall asserts that Microsoft won’tl like the nature of the collateral damage caused by the 235 move.

(added on the 20th) Microsoft’s Patent Impasse - A lucid commentary by Cote’, really enlightening.
Organizing an Open Source Workshop!!! - A workshop entitled “Open Source, Open Ideas” will be held on Tuesday May 29th at the Politecnico di Bari campus sponsored jointly by Politecnico di Bari, OrgLab (University of Cassino), Syracuse University and IESEG School of Management.

Dell announces the models for Ubuntu - Jeremy discloses Dell’s Ubuntu models.

I’m Joining Adobe - Ryan Stewart joined Adobe as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist.

Carlo Piana is an Information Technology lawyer and a Free Software advocate, as Counsel to the Free Software Foundation Europe he advocates the adoption of free/open source software and interoperable systems by European Public Administrations.
I asked Carlo, who I personally met about three years ago when we were both involved with the FSFE Italian chapter, to tell us more about his interest for free software and licensing issues.

How did you get involved with Free Software?

Well, that’s a long story. Here’s the short version. During late 90s I was using OS/2 as operating system of choice, but I did see no future for it, so I decided to switch to GNU/Linux as early as year 2000. It wasn’t easy, and some help was found in the local LUG. There I met Stefano Maffulli, Vice President of Free Software Foundation Europe.

Then the Commission decided that Microsoft was abusing the market, and I was wondering whether the FSFE was somewhat involved. Stefano said something like:

We are already an interested third party, now we need a lawyer with enough expertise to prepare our application with the Court. But time is really, really short.

I thought it was just a couple of hours’ work, just to file the application, then I was supposed to hand over the matter to another lawyer, so I said:

Well, I can help you with this initial step, then you will decide.

It turned out to be slightly underestimated, as now we are turning the third year of litigation, and still do not see the end of the tunnel. So far I have invested thousands of hours in the case, and am still counting.

In order to be effective in the case, I had to learn quick, and I became very interested also all aspects and implications of Free Software. I started helping people around with legal issues, and almost without realizing it, I was an active advocate. The media exposure of the Microsoft case was incredible, and perhaps this is the reason why people, including you, think I am important: because they know my name.

Let’s talk about the Case now.

Being involved in the Case somewhat changed my professional life, because I have never been in a litigation of that magnitude and importance. Even from a side seat, the pressure is enormous and ramifications are endless, the paperwork simply unmanageable. We now have gone through one interim case, and one merit case (we are awaiting the final decision), while one further appeal is on its way and we have applied also to that. The merit case was huge: thirteen judges, the hearing lasted five consecutive days, the “grand salle” was half packed just of lawyers and experts, the floor was barely enough for the two main parties, the rest was journalists, and it was not even enough. I said “side seat”, but don’t be mislead.

Our role has been central in many occasions, thanks to the incredible work that those who back me have done. People of FSFE, but especially the members of the SambaTeam, have been incredible, these guys really rock! Jeremy Allison at the interim and Andrew Tridgell (Trdige) at the main case were outstanding and really, really credible, but also who worked behind the scene, like Volker Lendecke or another Italian, Simo Sorce, were incredibly helpful.

But the case is way more than just that in court. The Commission is trying to firce Microsoft into compliance, after the first decision has not been suspended. But for the first time in history, there have been not just one, but two procedures for non compliance with the first decision: we are right now discussing the second one. The first ended by adding some hundred millions on the top of the at-the-time largest antitrust fine, somewhere short of half a million euro.

Meanwhile, the Commission is cooking another case with a broader scope.
While the first was on interoperability and lack of disclosure, as well as on the tying practice of bundling Windows Media Player with Windows XP, the second is about five different abuses in the server, client and application sector. In fact, interoperability is not just with network protocols, but also with the application layer protocols and formats.

And the market has not been idle either: the ineffectiveness so far of the remedies has allowed the monopolist to double its share in the server operating system market, now well above 70%, the share in the client OS market has not lowered and many more fields have the windows logo on it.

We are silently involved in that second investigation too. It not difficult to discover with whom because it is public on the Internet, but nobody still realized.

What do you think is going to happen in the next future?

The future is threefold. Free Software is gaining momentum by the day, over are the days when some people used to say that it was a toddler’s game. Most of the industry, from IBM to Google, from Sun to Oracle has various levels of engagement, and the mobile is the next frontier.

Software as a service is probably the next step, which could shift the paradigm, but we are still far from maturity. In the middle lies the world of proprietary software and media companies, which will be eventually made irrelevant by the first two, but now they are fighting back with market power, DRM, software patents and the most dangerous weapon: people not realizing how much freedom they are losing any day.

Antitrust is a good weapon to reestablish equanimity, but antitrust is also a political issue: just consider the number of monopolization cases in the USA in the last six years: 0. So we are at a turning point: public opinion must react now, and the first step is to convey more and more balanced information on these topic.

Thank you Carlo, and please keep us updated!

Technorati Tags: Free Software Foundation, Piana, Software Patent

Microsoft takes on the Free World - Is Microsoft wondering to put it this way (patents’ infringements)? Microsoft mind your business: FON Abandons Microsoft, Adopts Ubuntu

Ooh, ooh, the bogeyman is gonna getcha with his stupid patents. Or maybe not.

Do Industry Analysts Matter? - It greatly depends on who they are!

What about open source in the emerging world? - Alex Fletcher is amazed by the lack of demonstrated initiative at the macro-level by the typically western-based organizations, foundations and companies directly involved with open source software.

The Top Ten Reasons To Work For MySQL -  Wondering to change your job? 29 open positions.

ConfSL is over - The Italian conference on Free Software is over.