Commercial Open Source Software

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.

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

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.

Continue reading ‘MySQL Open Source Heroes Leave Sun’

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.

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

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.

Continue reading ‘The Case for Open Source Development, a Personal Case Study’

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?

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

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’

OpenOffice.org reached the ten millions downloads mark, a dramatic success that inspires friends and irritates enemies.

Despite converting users into customers seems still difficult for Sun, IBM started to recruit partners and raising PR interest. Savio Rodrigues, famous open source blogger and IBM employee, seems to prefer Microsoft Office 2007, just as Luis Villa does.

Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org, Today and Tomorrow’

Arturo Di Corinto and the Free Hardware Foundation invite everyone to join the second “Technology Tuesday”,  today 2th December at 9 PM by the Love&Dissent gallery, via Leonina 85, Rome (Underground line B, Cavour station).

If you have a genuine interest in technology, politics and media you are welcome. Bring a salami, or a bottle of wine, and just join the party. Write on the blackboard your name, profession, interests and email account and start to share your thoughts and experiences.

See you there.

Commercial Open Source blog has completed its second year of life, and it is now time for another one year in review post.

I want start saying thanks to my great friend Antonella Beccaria, who generously took good care of my blog for two long years, and my new appointed webmaster Matteo Ionescu, who is bringing my blog to 2.0 life. Last but not least I want to add also my mentor Robin Good to the list of persons I am grateful.

Continue reading ‘Commercial Open Source Blog: another year in review’

451 CAOS Group report “Open Source is not a business model” has been criticized in the blogosphere, saying that it overlooks vendors for which pure open source is providing a tidy revenue stream.

Dave Neary sees an (open source) future for small businesses, with few (happy) customers, explaining that since free software doesn’t get developed like proprietary software, the free software industry shouldn’t look like the proprietary one.

I totally agree with Dave’s last point, free software is a different thing, as formerly pointed out in
“Capability Coordination in Modular Organization: Voluntary FS/OSS Production and the Case of Debian GNU/Linux“.

Discovering knowledge differences or similarities and making use of them in order to pursue one’s ends is however not costless. Knowledge search is expensive. Because knowledge is dispersed, the organizational problem does not usually have a cheap and easy solution. Ideally – think of the market – the “first-best solution” to the problem would result in the coincidence (or collocation) of productive knowledge and rights to act on that knowledge in the same hands. As in the case of Mohamed and the mountain whereby Mohamed could go to the mountain or the mountain to Mohamed, there are two ways we could achieve a solution to this problem.

Now, what happens is that with free software actually Mohamed lives on mountain.  Think of Tobias Oetiker, RRDTool and MRTG author, and think of how many brilliant hackers make a living in the open source long tail. Life style companies, great programmers, but is it really their destiny to stay small?

The open source long tail is too long to be tucked inside trousers or a skirt, that’s why SpikeSource, SourceLabs or OpenLogic try to (partially) solve it.Those companies are appropriating returns from the commons in original ways, taking advantage of the (frequent) absence of corporate actors within many open source projects in the long tail.

The business side of open source is still a largely unexplored planet, and there is no evidence of the fact that small businesses have to stay so. Not yet, at least.

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