The EU now provides a search tool to find applications among the 1751 open source development projects hosted on ten federated forges managed by Austrian, French, Italian and Spanish public administrations.
The new search engine basically relies on an automatic translation service, translating projects’ descriptions in English.
SourceForge.net is wanting to make sure performance of the site from various locations on the globe is fast. As Europe is a major source of traffic to the site, they are seeking testers in Italy.
Daniel Hinojosa, SourceForge.net Support Senior Manager, kindly asked me to spread the word, read below his message.
Eric Barroca after reading Dirk Riehle‘s slides about “The Commercial Open Source Business Model†wrote an inspiring blog post, receiving a number of interesting feedback from the business open source folk.
Let me start by recommending Dirk’s presentation, it really worths reading, but beware of his definition of “commercial open source”:
Commercial open source software projects are open source software projects that are owned by a single firm that derives a direct and significant revenue stream from the software.
Thanks for continuing the discussion! Just a short note on the term “commercial open source”. As far as I understand, it was coined by SugarCRM to distinguish Sugar from say GIMP or other open source software that had no primary profit motive in mind.
I’m actually not saying that the only commercial open source out there follows the single-vendor open source model. Acquia is a good example of a commercial company that is based on community software, so is TWiki. RedHat is commercial for sure too.
Because of this possible confusion that you are also pointing out, I have been moving away from “commercial open source” to “single-vendor open source”. From today’s perspective, SugarCRM overreached when coining this term.
Including multiply-sponsored projects in “commercial open source” is a good thing, I won’t argue with you there. But I’m still not convinced that “all” open-source work is “commercial.” There are loads of projects on Tigris.Org, SourceForge.Net, github, and all the other community sites that have no sponsorship at all.
@Dirk thank you to rejoin this conversation!
I believe you’re right, SugarCRM was probably at the forefront with naming it commercial open source, but I am not sure they want to exclude open source vendors like Acquia or Sonatype.
I appreciate your decision to move away from “commercial open source†to “single-vendor open sourceâ€, really.
@jrep I am following the definition of commercial reported by David Wheeler in his paper:
Commercial means either (a) “oriented to profit-makingâ€, or more generally (b) “of, pertaining to, or suitable for commerceâ€, where commerce means “intercourse, dealings, the buying and selling of commodities, or trade†So we’re talking about something (a) oriented toward profit, or at least (b) something pertaining to public trade or dealings.
I must agree with David saying that “when we include the second meaning (which some people forget), nearly all FLOSS programs are commercial”.
Roberto,
At least the open source supporters are doing their coming out (thanks to Eric!)
Your analysis is perfectly correct (as well as Dirk’s one), but I’d like to moderate it on one single point :
I think that there is some open source initiatives that are not commercials!
Some open source initiatives, driven by (non profit) foundations (FSF, Mozilla, Apache…), are mainly motivated by altruism, openness and sharing (as well as by the ego of some of the contributors). Indeed, within thoose foundations, they are not equal : some are using licenses (GPL to name it) with very strong constraints about commercial use : the code developed from a GPL-licensed source code must be given back to the community with the same license!!
This is really the original (and in some way utopian) vision of Richard Stallman.
This is why I mostly agree with you. I even think that everything else is commercial (and marketing tactic)….
By the way, I’ve just read an awesome post from Vishal Vasu (http://www.vishalvasu.com/general/open-source-versus-open-standards/) that reminds us (from a user perspective) that, what is important, is that your software needs to support (useful) open standards!
Regards
Hi Alain,
I know you are right saying that some – maybe even many – open source initiatives are mainly motivated by altruism, openness and sharing. Those motivations do not prevent commercial activities around those projects.
Via twitter I was pointing you to Mitchell’s blog post about Mozilla’s sustainability (courtesy of the WayBack machine) because it is a great example of the so-called second meaning of “commercial” (see my previous comment).
About GPL strictness I’m not so sure, not in a web world at least, but I didn’t cover (yet) licensing and open source commerce.
Last but not least, I totally agree with you and Vishal, I am struggling to make open standards compliance more relevant here in Europe, the next ODF Plugfest will be a step in this direction.
I found an interesting appliance factory that makes an open source project as simple as an iphone application and automatically packages it as a business ready appliance.
Eric as anticipated I wrote an entry about UShareSoft.
Transform your Intranet with Drupal Collaboration – Learn how combining Drupal and Alfresco with Optaros content management experts Chris Fuller and Jeff Potts. 15th of September.
The Open Innovation Summit – taking place on the 2nd of October within the Open World Forum – will give twenty companies the opportunity to make a 7-minute presentation to VCs and major systems integrators to promote their company and projects.
If you are an open source entrepeneur needing funds, take your time to explain how your open source offering is innovative by sending your application before the 1st of September.
If you want to raise money in France and/or want to open an office in the Paris region, this is definitely your chance to make it.
The NEXA Center for Internet & Society seeks two researchers for the following project: Identifying Internet users: technical, legal and economic analysis of the consequences on privacy, fundamental freedoms, innovation and business models.
The NEXA Center for Internet & Society intends to study these issues and their social and economic impact, with the goal of reaching a deeper understanding of the interrelationship between anonymity, privacy and Internet access.
The ODF Plugfest is a series of events bringing together implementors and stakeholders of OASIS OpenDocument Format/ISO 26300 to test standards conformance and discuss ODF implementation issues.
Until the first ODF Plugfest, vendors were not asked to prove that their software products meet open standards‘ specifications, and declarations of conformity was a self-certification process. Now everything is changed, and ODF implementors and stakeholders work together aiming at true interoperability.
Packt announced the launch of the fourth open source CMS award, an award organized by the publish company since 2006 in order to encourage, support, recognize, and reward open source Content Management Systems.
Nominations are open until the 11th of September, to submit a nomination have a look at the 5 different categories and if you are looking for inspiration visit open source directories like opensourceCMS or CMSMatrix.
I am honoured to have been invited to join the judge panel this year, and I am looking forward to share my thoughts with other judges and learn about their views.
Have fun with it! I’ve been on the panel of judges at the past awards and it was great fun. You learn a lot about the many great CMSes out there.
Glad to hear that, I am really looking forward to it!
Technology BIZ, is the first event taking place in Naples aimed at responding to the demand for complex ICT solutions of the southern Italian market. The event will be held on the 28-29 of October at Città della Scienza, Campania region’s organizational body that supports innovation and international openness of the regional system.
TechnologyBIZ will allow visitors both for the public and private sector to attend seminars, participate to workshops and set up one-to-one meetings covering areas related to ICT such as Healthcare, Homeland Security & Defense, Mobile Computing, Open Source, Web 2.0 and more.
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.
Hi Roberto,
I think your comment about “standing on the shoulder of giants” is a really good one. A lot of people just think that an open source solution is a cheaper alternative. In fact, though, the greatest value of open source is the accumulated knowledge from all the users and developers on how software SHOULD be built (and also SHOULD NOT 🙂 ). This becomes a very valuable template for companies who want to build and extend a product/service based on open source software.
Hi Si,
good to hear back from you. I think the experience you gained with Opentaps in this respect might be enlightening for others. Let me know if you are open to tell your story, I’d be glad to write about it.
Is there a blueprint/roadmap for newbies to follow?
Roberto Galoppini and 
Juju, 
Jesus M. González Barahona 6:20 pm on August 31, 2009 Permalink
Well, I’m not that sure about your proposal of looking for *code*. In the case of OSOR, the idea seems to be to link with other sites devoted to libre software for public administrations. Working at the package (or poroject) level, seems to me about right. When you’re looking for some piece of code, the domain of the program probably doesn’t matter that much…
In other words, if you’re looking for some package which may be useful for public administrations, looking at OSOR and federated forges seems reasonable. But if you are looking for a specific piece of code (even if it is for a software to be used in PA), the search should be much wider: probably almost any forge could have the piece you want).
WRT FLOSSMetrics, indeed we’re focused on GForge-like forges (including SourceForge), but we can extract data from any public repository in any forge, provided we have its url, and the kind of repository is supported by our tools. Currently that amounts to CVS, Subversion, git and (limited) Bazaar for SCM, Bugzilla and SourceForge for bug reporting systems, and mbox for mailing lists repositories. More are supposed to come.
Yes, I fully agree that the services provided by FLOSSMetrics could be integrated with OSOR, or with any other forge, for that matter. SourceForge is starting that way (not with FLOSSMetrics, but with their own machinery), and OSOR also started it, offering graphs about the evolution of some parameters related to the activity of the projects (in this case, using a part of the FLOSSMetrics toolchain).
Just to finish, thanks a lot for reporting on FLOSSMetrics, and for taking the time to understand it!
[Disclamer: I’m coordinator of the FLOSSMetrics project, and also involved in the OSOR as a member of the consortium maintaining it]
Roberto Galoppini 7:04 pm on August 31, 2009 Permalink
Hi Jesus,
glad to see you joining the conversation.
As I wrote in my blog post most of the times open source projects for public administrations are lead by SMEs thinking and acting locally. Translating projects’ descriptions can hardly help the share and reuse of knowledge in the context of IT, I am afraid.
Krugle code search engine or similar technology might help to search pieces of code that perform more specific tasks, and eventually reuse code made available from other EU public administrations under the EUPL (apparently designed to ease the licensing burden).
Taking advantage only of code hosted on federated forges may result in a lack of opportunity anyway, either if you look for a whole package or a library. In other words, I am assuming that we need of OSOR here, and the EUPL license may well be the reason for that.
I wish to report more about FLOSSMetrics, let’s keep in touch for writing a specific blog post on project’s final findings.