Archive for the 'Random thoughts' Category

The Open Source Innovation Backbone for Startups

Open innovation is taking over in many areas, and open source plays an important role especially in software sequential innovation, where each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors. Foremost, for the most of us before anything else software (open source included) is a tool towards a goal.

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Open Source Business Strategy: Feedback on the Beekeeper Model Revisited

James Dixon - Pentaho Chief Technology Officer - about two years ago wrote the “Beekeeper model“, telling the word about how open source firms writing the majority of the code make business.

Now James released the first draft of the new version asking for comments, and I am glad to give him some feedback again.

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Open Source Vendors: Towards a Production Classification in Function of Firm-Community Relationship

Few days ago I joined the open source vendor debate remarking the importance of resolving the name confusion in favor of customers, and Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile shout-out saying that open core offers best opportunity for community and commercial Success.

Lines blurring between open source and proprietary vendors apparently invigorate the debate. I want to take the chance here to classify production model in function of the nature of firm-community relationship.

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Open Source Governance: State of the Art and Lesson Learnt in Italy (part III)

The lack of open source vision by the Italian government, along with attention paid by Obama to open source, brought my attention back to the importance Open Source Governance.

I want to strive for open source adoption by national and local governments. I want to take the opportunity here to share some thoughts about why a FOSS governance is needed, and how we could accomplish the goal to use open source software to develop innovative initiatives.

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Open Source Governance: State of the Art and Lesson Learnt in Italy (part II)

First Monday - the famous peer-reviewed journal - recently published an interesting paper on open source collaboration in the US Public Sector, resulting probably one of the first research covering open source governance in the public sector.

Before commenting its findings and see how and if they could be applied to the Italian situation, I wish to end to recap issues raised during the “Open Source Governance” held in Rome last October.

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Open Source Governance: State of the Art and Lesson Learnt in Italy (part I)

While Obama asked about the benefits of open source , the actual Italian Government shows little interest in open source, and it is time to talk back about the importance of the open source software governance.

The “Open Source Governance” conference - organized by the Italian Institute for advanced information technology at the end of October 2009 - an Italian event dedicated to the future of open source procurement, usage and management within the Public Sector.

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MySQL Open Source Heroes Leave Sun

Mårten Gustaf Mickos - formerly MySQL CEO and now open source strategist at Sun until the end of Sun’s fiiscal 3rd quarter 2009 - and Ulf Michael Videnius (aka Monty) - MySQL co-founder and CTO, now driving the development of Maria, the new storage engine Maria - both quit Sun Microsystems.

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Open Source Monitoring: Hyperic adds BI to IT Operation in an Open Core Cross-selling Fashion

Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, on Monday announced the addition of an advanced business intelligence platform (Hyperic Operations IQ) to its  web application performance monitoring offering.

After receiving growing attention in Europe, Hyperic lower the bar to systems management utility embedding the Jaspersoft Professional Edition into the Hyperic IQ framework, enabling executives to read web performance data.

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The Case for Open Source Development, a Personal Case Study

A couple of days ago I happened to meet my old friend Idel Fuschini on the street, and we have been talking about things happened ten years ago or longer when working in the mobile VAS sector, when WAP was still to come.

Idel over the last ten years has been working on implementing mobile-based services using proprietary products like Volantis (nowadays pretty open source), Mobileaware, and Oracle Portal to go. More recently he started to use also open source platforms like WURFL, eventually ending to be fascinated by the open source side of software development.

What follows is not a research, neither an investigation including a quantitative evidence, but just a reportage of a programmer’s life and how open source can make a change.

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Open Source TCO: Total Cost of Ownership and the Fermat’s Theorem

Gartner’s 2009 predictions have been widely commented over these days, leaving space and opportunities to rediscuss the open source mantra “we cost less”.

Migrate to open source seems the cheapest solution, at least on an individual basis, but enterprise migrations are not an easy game to play, and TCO doesn’t look like the ultimate answer.

Any similarity between the Fermat’s theorem and the cost benefits of open source?

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About Roberto

Roberto Galoppini on Open Source Software
I am a specialist in Commercial Open Source Software, consulting on marketing and business strategy. I help organizations to build new business strategies for the open source economy. I speak widely on open source and open standards throughout the world.