Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

My friend and supporter of free software movement and movements against software patents Fiorello Cortiana forwarded me a link to the “I wouldn’t steal campaign“.

Whenever you rent a movie, the multinational media industry forces you to watch their propaganda. They claim that [downloading movies is the same as snatching bags, stealing cars or shoplifting]. That’s simply not true - making a copy is fundamentally different from stealing.

The media industry has failed to offer viable legal alternatives and they will fail to convince consumers that sharing equals stealing. Unfortunately, they have succeeded in another area - lobbying to adapt laws to criminalize sharing, turning consumers into criminals. They argue that their laws are necessary to [support artists], but in reality all they’re protecting is their own profits.

The Greens in Europe and worldwide has been opposing these laws. We believe that consumers are willing to pay if offered good quality at a fair price. We also believe that sharing is expanding culture - not killing it.

To protest against the faulty propaganda from the industry, we made our own film. The difference is - you can choose whether you want to watch this one.

Please help to spread the word.

Will the opened stay unbroken? - Dana on “open” standards.

Microsoft’s Hilf Opens on Open Source Strategy - Bill Hilf on Microsoft’s open source strategy.

Are Wiki’s ready for Enterprises? - James McGovern is skeptical.

Tracking the emergence of open source community governance - Alex Fletcher says that a community should be handled with care. I totally agree, open source firms have to pay attention. More.

The Drupal Association and the Software Freedom Law Center - Dryes Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, announces that The Software Freedom Law Center agreed to provide legal representation to the project.

The Government of Brazil is hosting in Rio de Janeiro the second Internet Governance Forum meeting. The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF.

HELOISA MAGALHÃES: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to talk in Portuguese. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am a Brazilian journalist from the “Valor Econômico,” and I am deeply honored to take part in this meeting. For us journalists in economics and finance, this issue is of utmost
importance. And for me as a Brazilian, there’s special appeal to this. We are a country full of inequalities, and the Internet has proven to be a means of overcoming the challenge. First, I would like to call upon Mr. Ronaldo Lemos, who will chair the session. However, before, I’d like to remind all of you that our intention is to promote a debate. This is to be an interactive session.

Questions and answers — questions from the audience. I would like to invite those who are sitting at the back of the room to come up closer so that we can have a true interactivity, so that we can have a more joyous interaction. First of all, Mr. Ronaldo, I give you the floor.

Read the full transcript.

Few days ago I wrote my first post about migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, but I want to start it all over from the very beginning, step by step.

Andrea Trasatti after my post asked me more details over a skype conversation, and I decided to translate and share a slide-show about Migrating to OpenOffice.org.

The slide-show was originally produced by Davide Dozza - PLIO President and co-mantainer of the Italian Lang OpenOffice.org Project - in collaboration with Carlo Daffara, involved with COSPA project, and myself. I eventually used it at a Java Conference back in 2005, when I gave a speech on the subject.

There are many reasons to migrate to OpenOffice.org, ranging from cost savings - apparently still the most appealing reason for a change - to legal motivations or social ones. Last but not least the escape from vendors’ lock-in, considering that the choice is getting wider. To be honest there is even another reason why firms look into OpenOffice Migration: ask Microsoft a (big) discount!

Whatever is your reason, you should consider to have a look at “supposed problems“, things that people are going to mention as big (unresolved) issues. Among them it is worth to highlight that one of them - functions appear to be elsewhere - is not as critical as before. Why? Just have a look at Office 2007, and wonder how long will it take to bring your employees to be productive using it!

You’re not alone, many others have already traveled your road, so please take your time to look to successes and failures as well. Look at the Market share analysis, despite the difficulties due to the informal OpenOffice.org distribution process, they are meaningful and, at some extent, encouraging.

Every migration involving end-users has to cope with psychological issues, because people don’t like learning to use new tools, and motivations are needed to overcome inertia to change.

As matter of fact Communication is important, in terms of Internal Marketing, and customized version of OpenOffice, peer-learning and intranet tools could greatly help in this respect.

Despite Big-Bang migration could sound cool, they simply don’t work. So once you have done a deep analysis of the situation, analyzed your documents and identified homogeneous class of users, you’re ready to go. Step by step.

Outsiders, i.e. technlogical leaders also known as “champions” in the COSPA terminology, are those people to whom colleagues ask for hints and tips about software tools. Those people are key in a migration, both because they can help others or, if unhappy, prevent the migration to succeded.

Migration tools and Enterprise management tool are still few, so if you use applications integrated with Microsoft Office don’t look for “packaged services” and consider go alone. But, if you are an IT firm, keeping in mind that European companies are often SMEs, and that the Public Sector - where office suite are often used as an individual productivity tool - is seriously wondering about OpenOffice migrations, consider that there is plenty of space to run a business on OpenOffice migrations.

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, Open Source Migration

Despite the fact that many believe FLOSS of interest mainly for developers, I strongly believe that we are simply starting to see a rush of different projects that extend the collaborative development approach to non-software areas.

During the research activity in the OpenTTT project, we tried to find non-software projects that are developed or extended in a collaborative way, similar to the “bazaar” or moderated bazaar typical of most FLOSS projects; having restricted this to 65 examples, we have found many interesting facts:

• many large scale software projects are really mixed media projects, as exemplified by the map created by Matthias Mueller-Prove, that shows that the number of people participating in “ancillary” areas like documentation, promotion and such is as large as that devoted to development. KDE and GNOME has similar proportion of non-code participation.
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• whenever the software allows for mixed participation, such participation happens. It is relatively easy to see that simple Wiki-based tools seems capable to attract a large participation base, while cooperative schemes for music or artwork are less present. In fact, most non-textual forms are more oriented towards “remixing”, that is the leveraging of a digital artifact for integration into some other work, and not modification and improvement of it directly. I suspect that as more complete and complex “packaged” file formats (like those used by proprietary video editing suites, for example) become used by open source tools, we will begin to see a more interesting approach not only towards remixing but towards “reinvention” as well. A wonderful example is NineInchNails’ open source remix project.
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• the sheer scope if the phenomenon is amazing- collaboratively created prayer books? (see the open source judaism project, or the Open source Haggadah). The Multimachine tool is also amazing (an accurate all-purpose machine tool that can be used as a metal or wood lathe, end mill, horizontal mill, drill press, wood or metal saw or sander, surface grinder and sheet metal “spinner”. It can be built by a semi-skilled mechanic using just common hand tools; for machine construction, electricity can be replaced with “elbow grease” and all the necessary material can come from discarded vehicle parts)

I believe that as FLOSS demonstrated that software can be created with good quality and innovation in collaborative modes, this will show in many other areas as well.

Technorati Tags: non software projects, open source, openttt

Large enterprises embracing Open Source software need to to put some structure around their use, and they need tools - like search engines such as google code search, koders and krugle - to locate and manage these resource.

Krugle Open Source Search, a search engine managing 2.6 billion lines of code, 600 repositories and over 100,000 projects, allows web users to search for open-source code on the Internet.

Finding a needle by Marion A’s photos

Also Internal open source teams, responsible for keep a collection of things used internally, need to make them available for others in the organization, and here comes a need for internal code search engines, like Krugle Enterprise Edition.

I asked Laura Merling, VP, Marketing and Business Development of Krugle, to tell us more about this area.

As the number of languages increase, the number of development “platforms” increase, and the amount of code increases in the enterprise (and the public arena). There are these large “development silos” of products and tools that have been created by developers, and search driven development is an emerging need.

Is the Enterprise Edition easy to sell?

We have been brought in by senior developers, dev managers and architects the pain they have is things like impact analysis: I am changing this code, who else is referencing it?
We have not had to encounter the CIO yet. The great part is that typically the people that bring us in have already written use cases they want it for and have already sold it up as needed. Most of them have a budget to some level, our target is mid-level management.

Are you wondering to invite users to produce use cases, may be giving prizes?

Absolutely - we did this last summer and got great responses - we really want use cases for the enterprise!

How the company was conceived?

Ken Krugler was working on the Chandler project with Mitch Kapor and was looking for code to some stuff he figured the code had to be out there somewhere. So he began “searching” for it he used regular search engines, went to repositories and nobody had anything that would help him find. What he already knew was out there so he decided to fix the problem and build a code search engine.

As he started talk to other developers, there was a strong desire to not only have it to find open source code, but their own stuff in the enterprise. Imagine how much code a 20 year financial services firm or how much code a telco might have!

Besides the Enterprise arena, Krugle DevNetwork powers also SourceForge.net, Yahoo! Developer Network, developerworks and now Amazon Web Services Developer Connection. So may be you are already using it and you didn’t know..

Technorati Tags: Krugle, Source Code Search, Amazon, Yahoo, SourceForge, LauraMerling, KenKrugle, MitchKapor

Richard Stallman’s article “Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software“ has now been eported and commented by Robin Good.

Apparently my opinions didn’t convince Robin, that says:

In reality, as Stallman points out very clearly in the essay here below, open-source advocates have long stopped promoting the fundamental issues of freedom that are the roots of the Free Software movement in favour of peddling a more commercial and pragmatical approach which looks more at issues like costs, reliability, security, innovation, and at the ability to have access and modify the source code of any software.

As an outsider viewer, I think he is right.

So I took my chance to better explain my thoughts, I report here my comment on his blog:

I didn’t really want to counter attack Richard Stallman’s attack on open-source. I was trying to say is that also open source advocates are contributing to software freedom. It is a matter of perspective: while Richard takes care of users’ freedom, (some) open source firms also take care of software freedom.

I disagree with Richard when he points out that open-source advocates have long stopped promoting the fundamental issues of freedom. He infers from the behavior of some of them a general statement. A the some extent I might say that “free software” is not consistent term because half of “free software” google-alerts are just about freeware and other no Free Software items.

What I believe is important to say here is that a commercial and pragmatical approach can also take into great consideration software freedom. The importance of share and more to keep sharing-alike software (copyleft) for open source firms is synergic with free software advocacy, as it insist on the same values (but for a different reason).

Are all firms interested in Open Source willing to stress the importance of software freedom? Of course not, some of them don’t care, while some end up licensing their products with proprietary licenses.

Open Source firms (may be) are created equal, but some are more equal than others.. let’s keep them as Free Software’s good friends, as they are.

As usual, comments and opinions are welcome.

Free Software, RichardStallman, Commercial Open Source, Freedom , RobinGood

Today viable open source solutions are aivalble to manage a public library. By using them, the money can be used for other important resources, such as purchasing additional books, DVDs, etc.

Eric Hebert from DegreeTutor told me about his “How Open Source Software Can Improve Our Library“, a good start to become more comfortable using open source solutions in a Public Library.

Googling around I also found an old comparison of Open Source Software Library Management Systems, maybe Eric or others might update it a little bit.

Technorati Tags: Open Source Library Systems, DegreeTutor, EricHebert, Public Library

Yesterday SELF - a community-driven platform for the production and distribution of educational materials sponsored by the EU IST programme  - has been officially launched by the Free Software Foundation Europe in the Netherlands during a conference on Free Software in Education.

The SELF platform aims to bring together educational institutes, training centres, software companies, publishing houses, government bodies and Free Software communities to centralise, create and disseminate educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards.

From linuxelectrons:

The SELF Platform has been developed by a global team of non-profit organisations, universities and volunteers engaged in the SELF Project, an initiative for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards. Users, primarily learners and teachers, are enabled to assemble selections of learning contents and create custom-made learning material for lessons in their language. The Platform is launched in beta stage to involve the growing community in optimising the tool.

All SELF materials are available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), materials from third parties are licenses under various similar licenses.

Let’s see now if  students and teachers will join the effort..

Technorati Tags: Free Software Education, FSFE, IST, SELF

Entering their third edition, the ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ Awards 2007 are now open for nominations. In 2005 the prize went to the bogus Campaign for Creativity, a front group used by large IT companies to lobby for software patents and intellectual property rights.

This year you can nominate for two categories:

1. The ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ Award for the lobbyist, company or lobby group that in 2007 has employed the most deceptive, misleading, or otherwise problematic lobbying tactics in their attempts to influence EU decision-making.
2. The special ‘Worst EU Greenwash’ Award for the company whose advertising, PR and lobbying lingo is most at odds with the real environmental impacts of their core business activities.

It’s up to you who will be eligible for these two awards! Until 15 September 2007 you can submit your nominations, see also some examples.

For more information and the nomination form see the worstlobby website.

About the Awards.

The ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ Award is to be given to the lobbyist, company or lobby group that in 2007 has employed the most deceptive, misleading, or otherwise problematic lobbying tactics in their attempts to influence EU decision-making. This year’s event also includes a special ‘Worst EU Greenwash’ Award for the company whose advertising, PR and lobbying lingo is most at odds with the real environmental impacts of their core business activities.

Technorati Tags: worst EU lobbying, software patents, EU