“equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism”
“Open Core is the New Dual Licensing Model” is the last of a chain of interesting posts against or in favor of open core, coming from different realm of experience: the analyst guy Stephen O’Grady, the free software evangelist Simon Phipps, the hacker Brian Aker and last but not least the entrepreneur Mårten Mickos.
Let’s dig now deeper into what is open core to business, and why it is not a business model. Continue reading ‘Open Core is not a Business Model’
Packt - the UK publishing company specialized in books on software running yearly the open source CMS award - published “Funambol Mobile Open Source“, the first ever book on Funambol server.
Stefano Fornari, CTO and co-founder of Funambol, wrote a book explaining step-by-step how to install and get started with Funambol (have a look at the Funambol mail sample chapter to get an idea). Either if you are a geek or simply interested in mobile technology, this book provides you with all necessary information about Funambol architecture, how to provide push e-mail and synchronization services or even how to develop extensions on your own.
Despite both the author and the reviewer, Alberto Falossi, are Italians, the book is written in English.
Funambol just announced the availability of Funambol v8, a redesigned AJAX version of the MyFUNAMBOL web portal, a proprietary product tailored for carriers based on their open source piece of software.
The differences between Funambol community and carriers’ editions is key to understand Funambol business model. Knowing the importance of external contributions I asked Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager, to tell me about how he passed the message to the Funambol community.
Continue reading ‘How Funambol Walks the Commercial Open Source Rope’
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.
Continue reading ‘The Open Source Innovation Backbone for Startups’
Funambol and JAJAH, the global IP communications company, today announced the world premiere of the new Go JAJAH service, to be launched exclusively in Italy.
The new service automatically updates a mobile phone address book, creating a local number for each international number, allowing callers to make international calls at local rates.
Continue reading ‘Funambol + JAJAH: Open Source SaaS in Action’
On my way back from the Open Source Think Tank I met my friend Fabrizio Capobianco at his office in Reedwood city, and he took the chance to show me his new MobileWe portal, the Funambol’s version of Apple’s MobileMe.
Funambol business model has always intrigued me, and I asked Fabrizio more about how Funambol manages the difference between the community edition and the carrier edition.
Continue reading ‘Open Source Mobile: Funambol’s Differences between Community and Carrier Editions’
Volantis Systems few days ago announced the availability of Volantis Mobility Server Community Edition version 5.1. The new release aims at bringing the power of Web 2.0 to the mobile world, including optimizations for the iPhone.
Volantis Mobility Server was released under the GPLv3 almost one year ago, so I asked Mark Watson, Volantis Systems CEO, about how things are going, and how going open source helped.
Funambol - the Mobile Open Source company - few months ago started looking for a community manager, as I learned from Fabrizio Capobianco while he was in Rome to join the VentureCamp.
A couple of days later I got a phone call from my friend and fellow blogger Stefano Maffulli, asking me for Fabrizio’s email. Below the full story.
Roberto’s blog has been a kind of a Monster: a good daily read but also a way to extend the reach of a social network. When I pitched my CV to Fabrizio (Funambol’s CEO) I learned that the selection process had been going on for a while already and other candidates were being evaluated. Nonetheless I was invited to speak with Hal Steger, Funambol’s VP Marketing: I liked his attitude and he liked my multidisciplinary background (architecture, technology and the upcoming MBA). Funambol has a balanced mix of the good hacker’s culture I love and the necessary strength on financial and marketing management, something that I want to learn (and have been missing in my past work experiences).
It wasn’t a long shot after all. It will be fun to work with Funambol’s growing community and the company.
Architect Stefano Maffulli at work by Stefano Maffulli
I am glad that the time I spent sometimes collecting open positions within open source firms and jobs was of some help. Few months ago I also started to display a widget on each job posted by considerati, that I happened to get in touch with via openbusiness, but unfortunately such distributed job site had a limited success.
Stefano, are you already thinking of how to get off the best from programs like Code Sniper and Phone Sniper?
We have some ideas on what has to be improved to help Funambol’s community but we are also open to suggestions. For example, our software is in many places and it’s not easy for newcomers to find what they are looking for. I’m interested in hearing experiences of Funambol’s users with the software, the mailing lists, the repository and the company: they can come to me and I’ll help if at all possible.
Funambol’s architecture of participation welcomes small contributions, allowing individuals to more easily participate, I am looking forward to ask Stefano how is he doing in six months from now.
For the time being I wish him and Funambol all the best!
Read Stefano Maffulli’s full profile on Linkedin.
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