Commercial Open Source Software

The Italian OpenOffice.org Association (PLIO), two years after its foundation yesterday - during the annual assembly - appointed the new board.

Italo Vignoli is now PLIO’s president, Paolo Mantovani is PLIO’s vice-president. I want to publicly thank Davide Dozza for his great job during these two long years, without his efforts and determinations we would not have been to start it all.

The Venice International University, the Digital Media Metadistrict and Sun Microsystems will host the “Open Source Offering in Italy: an Analysis of an evolving Sector” conference, on the 10th of March, in Venice.

At the VEnice GAteway for Science and Technologies (VEGA) will meet up Italian academic researchers, entrepreneurs and open source community members to discuss research findings and how they fit into field experiences.

Registrations are now open, see you there!

Measuring the true Success of OpenOffice.org - Michael Meeks wrote a long post about OpenOffice.org success, mostly from a development point of view. Being Michael a Novell’s employee his perspective might be considered biased, but I totally agree with his recipe:

Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org Success: Homesteading the OpenOffice.org Noosphere’

The OpenOffice.org Italian Association announced that OpenOffice.org in Italy broke the five million mark this year, yet another record for the Italian release of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite.

Davide Dozza, PLIO’s president commented the result:

Back in 2006, when we started counting OOo downloads, 800,000 downloads per year was an astonishing result to us. At that stage we couldn’t even imagine that the number would have grown to 1.780.000 in 2007, and beyond five millions in 2008.

Even if the number of downloads is not an accurate measure of the market share, it definitely shows the trend.

So said, there is still a lot to do, especially in the business arena. OpenOffice.org has recently started a Business Development Project, managed by Alexandro Colorado, who recently posed questions about how to set standards for OpenOffice.org professionals.

Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org: About Turning OpenOffice.org Migrations into a Business’