Commercial Open Source Software

LibreOffice is born, and if it is true that every end is a new begin is too early to tell if this is a good or a bad thing.
Let’s start by looking at the foundations of this brand new Document Foundation.

The Steering committe, created by cooptation by eminent contributors and project lang mantainers, has already made some choices, and until now the ‘community’ behind OpenOffice.org had no chance to join the debate.

The FAQ page itself doesn’t say much about the governance model, while a number of open source thought leaders have been welcoming the news.

How many vendors beyond Novell will eventually join the foundation and put their money (time) where their mouthes are?

Ultimately an open source community is made of developers and users, and also the latter play an important role, especially for end-users applications.

How will users take to these changes?

The second Innovators barcamp - a meet-up organized by the Italian innovators group to pass from talking about innovation to do it in and for public administrations - was the perfect venue to share some ideas about “Open Source & Multi-sided Markets“.

My ignite talk was around on one of the most important value of open source, if not the only one that makes open source a “different thing”: the community. Having had the opportunity to share my thoughts with over 100 attendees in a bare 5 minutes talk, I want here to talk deeper about why the community matters, focusing on its different constituents and their relative interests.

Continue reading ‘The Quintessence of Open Source’

Sonatype, the Maven company founded by his creator Jason van Zyl, recently released “Maven: The Definitive Guide“, a book available for download as a PDF and as a print book through O’Reilly.

Mark de Visser, the new appointed Sonatype’s CEO, answered few questions about the book and how it helps to grow the Maven community.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Documentation Issue: “Maven, The Definitive Guide”, the Sonatype Approach’