European Open Source Projects: Qualipso Conference (part I)

The First International QualiPSo conference – “Boosting innovation and growth by fostering Open Source Software trust and quality” – took place in Rome on the 16th and 17th of January, with international speakers from 30 different countries.

beginningRemember how it all began.. by .bradi.

IT executives from major players were joining industry round tables, and public officers and agencies presented their views, but there were no free software projects’ representatives, and only one open source vendor (François Bancilhon, take a moment to read his open letter to Steve Ballmer).

Unfortunately I missed the chance to meet the Minister Luigi Nicolais, who opened the conference emphasizing the role that Open Source can play in the society development. I really would have liked to ask him about the 10 millions euro open source funds.

Getting back to the conference, the first session I attended was “OSS in the world – implementing open source for innovation and growth: experiences and practices“. Diego Lo Giudice, Principal Consultant at Forrester, talked about future trends, basically telling things in the know: OSS becomes a major ingredient for “commercial software” – apparently he is missing that Commercial and Open Source are still not antonyms – substantially agreeing with Gartner; OSS puts downward pressure on “commercial software” license pricing, etc. The Forrester’s survey on open source usage in Enterprise and SMB in America and Europe was pretty interesting, though (slide 6-8 of his presentation).

Alfonso Fuggetta gave the same speech he gave at the VON Europe Conference. He concluded that embedded software and pervasive ICT are a huge opportunity, blue oceans are appealing.

Yuan Cheng, Deputy Director for Information Industry Bureau of Heilongjiang Province of China, talked about China’s long term evolution vision about open source, putting everything in a totally different temporal perspective (100 years!). He also said that he looks at QualiPSo as a good starting point, being a chance to broaden networking opportunity. In this respect I also believe QualiPSo is playing an important role in this respect, but this specific goal could be achieved without EU spending big bucks.

Roberto Di Cosmo gave a great speech, explaining why the OS industry need engineers and developers able to cope with communities (soon more on his idea of resumes FOSS ready) and briefing the audience about the Groupe Thématique Logiciel Libre, a French pole de competitivite (competence center) funding FOSS projects. He ended his speech saying:

FOSS is here now, let’s make sure it will scale up.

Stefano De Panfilis – QualiPSo project coordinator and Research and Development Laboratory Director at Engineering Informatica – closed the first day talking about “Leveraging OSS“. He said that we should move from rebellion to industrialized practices, keeping the freshness and enthusiasm tradition of free software projects. I totally agree with the statement, and I am looking forward to see more contamination at the next meetings, maybe inviting selected speakers from different communities. (to be continued)

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, open business, oss, qualiPSo, RobertoDiCosmo, DiegoLoGiudice, AlfonsoFuggetta, YuanCheng, François Bancilhon, StefanoDePanfilis, System@tic, Forrester

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