Linux Day -  ILS, the Italian Linux Association on Saturday October 24 will runs its ninth annual Linux Day all over Italy, in 122 cities.
Mark Radcliffe on Thursday 29 at 9 AM (PST) will lead the “The Top 10 Issues Confronting Users of Open Source” webinar. DLA Piper and FOSSBazaar are co-hosting this one hour event aimed at discussing major mistakes companies make in managing the use of open source as well as best practices.
Mind the Bridge Gymnasium - the initiative started by Italians living in Silicon Valley to help Italian entrepreneurs to go to Silicon Valley, raise capital and bring it home - invites you to the “Presentations Skills Workshop“. The workshop will be held in Milan on the 20-21 of October by Elisabetta Ghisini and will teach the audience on how to deliver business presentations.
This event is for payment and  it costs 500 euros.
To keep updated with Mind the Bridge initiatives follow Mind the Bridge blog.
OpenOffice.org development switches to Mercurial – Come to the OpenOffice.org conference in Orvieto to learn why OpenOffice.org development switched to Mercurial.
How to export OpenOffice presentations to PDF – Learn how to manage notes page and eventually print them.
Burton Group’s “Short List†of Productivity Suite Leaders Goes Beyond Microsoft – -Burton Group says that the productivity suite market is in the midst of a rebirth.
Although Microsoft remains the market leader, it is being challenged by suppliers on Burton Group’s ‘Short List’ including IBM, OpenOffice.org, and Sun.
The second ODF Plugfest will eventually take place in Orvieto (Italy) on the 2nd and 3rd of November, and I want to personally thank all people who helped to make my dream a reality. The event will be held at  the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio Di Orvieto and everyone is invited (below the original invitation).
Tomorrow at 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM EDT will take place the “Unraveling the Complexities of the GPL” Webinar. Mark Radcliffe (DLA Piper) and Karen Copenhaver (Choate, Hall and Stewart) will cover the three main issues regarding GPL license use and obligations:
– What constitutes a derivative work?
- What constitutes a separate and independent work?
- What constitutes distribution?
The webinar won’t cover the basics of GPL.
Since last week I started to cover the “Open Innovation Awardsâ€Â winners, assigned at the Open World Forum 2009.
Let’s have now a closer look at Kaltura, the open source video platform for online video management, now powering over 32800 different sites.
The mission of the CodePlex Foundation - enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities – could be a roaring success. But in order to  create an open, neutral and business friendly environment first some work has to be done.
The following 5 “Open Innovation Awards†were assigned on Friday afternoon at the Open World Forum held in Paris. This year a jury of ten international open source experts considered as the most promising and representative of open innovation the following companies: Bonitasoft, Kaltura, Scaledb, SonarSource and Ulteo.
Let’s have a closer look at all of them by alphabetical order.
Bonitasoft, a provider of open source BPM software, recently raised 3 Millions from Ventech and Auriga Partners:
“The team, the business model, and the BonitaSoft solution completely captivated us. Given the reputation that this BPM solution has in the open source community, we are confident that BonitaSoft will contribute to the ‘democratization’ of BPM in business through its technological innovation†says Claire Houry, Ventech. “BonitaSoft has everything it needs to quickly become the open source BPM leader in the marketplace,†says Philippe Granger, Auriga Partners.
The idea of ‘democratizing’ BPM sounds fascinating, but justifying a BPM project maybe not trivial. Download numbers - if these were meant to mean anything - are  ‘big’ (140.000) considering that we are talking of a BPM software, but converting users into customers is a different matter.
While Intalio – probably the most famous open source BPM player around (see 2008 BPM Gartner’s magic quadrant) – goes commercial by layering editions (open core), Bonitasoft today generates revenues only through support subscriptions and services. The business model paragraph of their manifesto reports:
BonitaSoft will develop additonal versions of Bonita with professional grade technical support and advanced features to facilitate collaborative work and to industrialize Bonita deployments. BonitaSoft reserves the right to give access to these versions on a subscription basis to its customers only.
My suggestion in this respect is: the sooner the better, upselling is hardly welcomed by the users, and being clear about the business strategy can help potential customers to make their decisions.
From a community standpoint, Bonitasoft is starting to get traction, at least in terms of bug reports and feature requests, much less in terms of code contributions.
Sharing R&D costs doesn’t appear to be a major concern at the present stage, along with standards co-creation and alike.
BonitaSoft business strategy might take inspiration from Talend, but they need to work hard on fostering their ecosystem, provide third-parties with documentation and tools to ease extending the platform and maybe consider to move (also) in the cloud.
Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Migration Overview – A white paper edited by Sun Microsystems (requires a registration) providing a simple migration blueprint introducing to a six step process (Implementing a test phase, Creating an inventory of tools and Microsoft Office dependent solutions, Identifying documents and macros that are still in use, Organizing the migration team, Converting work-flow critical documents, templates and macros and eventually Training and post-deployment support). A case study and scenarios are also discussed.
Nearly there – John Mc Creesh says it is almost time to go to the OpenOffice.org conference. Look at the Conference Programme and if you can make it don’t forget to register online, Orvieto waits for you!
Git and OpenOffice.org - ideas about how could be possible to auto merge OpenOffice document from Git.
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