“equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism”
Stephen Walli will held the “Commercial Open Source at Work” workshop at the next Open Mobility, in March in San Francisco. The workshop is part of a joint collaboration between Stephen and myself, of which I am proud and glad.
Below the workshop summary, if you plan to go you better know early bid discount expires in 14 days.
Continue reading ‘Open Mobility USA 2010: Open Source Workshop, by Stephen Walli’
Last week I held the “Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy” workshop at OSiM, the definitive industry event on Open Source in Mobile.
Stephen Walli and I this year worked out a richer workshop outline, aimed at covering open source software business and community issues, as well as IPR issues.
Continue reading ‘Effective Commercial Open Source Strategies Reloaded’
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’
| Sep ’09 |
| 14 |
I am pleased to announce details of my second “Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy” workshop, done in partnership with Stephen Walli.
The workshop will be held at the OSIM conference, on the 14th of September in Amsterdam.
James Dixon keeps updating his “Beekeeper model“, analyzing and discussing open source business strategies, now giving a closer view at the importance of the productization process.
Commercial open source, as James states, exists just to deliver software as whole product: an out-of-the-box, easy-to-consume, packaged-and-delivered, risk-free solution.
Italian whole organic product, by fensterbme
Continue reading ‘Open Source Business Strategy: About the Open Source Whole Product Concept’
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.
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’
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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