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  • Roberto Galoppini 10:38 am on April 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Advocacy: from hecklers to lobbyists 

    Dana Blankenhorn says “open source need lobbyists” (actually he didn’t mention free software hecklers). He observes that we need money to hire them because otherwise the law will always be in favor of the proprietary folks.

    In Europe we faced (and we keep facing) very talented lobbyists working hard on a controversial political issue regarding software patents. As you might know patentability of computer-implemented inventions is not legal here yet, the reason for this is simple resumed by Florian Mueller in his “no lobbyist as such” (a must read):

    After spending million of dollars,euros and pounds, company like IBM, Microsoft, Siemens and Nokia did not get their way. They were beaten over at their own game – a game called lobbying – by our group of mostly young people, sparsely funded, and formally untrained “freedom fighters” who staged a spirited resistance. Many of us seemed utterly unlike traditional lobbyists and yet we proved effective in the political arena.

    Florian MuellerFlorian Mueller by duncandavidson

    James McGovern answered back saying that Dana, and not only him, is part of the problem:

    Maybe what he is asking for is to get some other body to spend lots of advertising dollars while not acknowledging that open source doesn’t really need traditional media to be successful.

    Throughout his column he always talks about open source but never seems to segment thoughts on commercial open source such as Alfresco, Intalio, MySQL, etc from non-commercial open source such as Apache. Why not ask the question of media and its ability to simply be charitable in terms of advertising space?

    I am not sure we need any charity, not even for open source projects that are not driven by a corporate actor or are under a big enough “umbrella”. Appropriating returns from Commons is critical indeed, that’s why we see many good open source projects with no advertising coverage, but people like Matt Asay, Matthew Aslett, Alex Fletcher, James Governor, Savio Rodrigues, Raven Zachary and of course James McGovern himself are already making the difference.

    What about federating? Here I am dreaming about a sort of Gawker for Open Source..

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, Commercial Open Source, software patent, gawker

     

    • Simon Phipps 4:04 am on April 23, 2007 Permalink

      Something this overlooks – and that was present in the CII Directive debate – is that as more and more companies depend on open source as the bedrock of their business, they will direct their lobbyists to act on behalf of the open source communities.

      I spent a great deal of time in support of lobbyists (as did my colleague Mark Webbink from Red Hat) patiently explaining to politicians and their staffs the problems with software patents as envisaged by Microsoft and the other pro-lobby members. In fact, I might even want to claim that our little informal alliance – Sun, Red Hat, Oracle, IBM and one other that prefers to remain anonymous – actually swung the interoperability argument that killed the Directive.

      This is not to say we don’t need lobbyists acting on behalf of FOSS projects directly. But don’t forget that corporations that grok FOSS lend can their weight to the cause.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:58 am on April 24, 2007 Permalink

      Dear Simon, thanks for your comment, I wrote a post about it, asking Florian his opinion too. Have a look and keep joining the conversation, you are always welcome.

    • burun 2:56 pm on January 24, 2008 Permalink

      The questions Roberto poses to lobbyist Florian Mueller gave me to think about the current file format war and the role of medium/large European companies. It impresses me how many of them still have no idea of what mess the specification of OOXML are, how bad it will be for them on the market to have it approved by ISO. I also think that a stable lobbying group can be more effective at preventing damaging legislations.

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:13 pm on January 25, 2008 Permalink

      In my opinion what I call the file format war it is a very complicated issue. I would recommend Europe to adopt formal procedures to adopt IT products pretending to be compliant with this or that standard. Would you believe me that there is no product fully compliant with those specifications?

      Everyone talks about standards, but compliance it is a different thing!

    • ameliyat 10:59 am on February 1, 2008 Permalink

      Microsoft will be involved in the patent pool for HD DVD as will every other company who has technology in it. The same is true of Sun Microsystems which developed Java for Blu-ray. Since patent pools have non-discriminatory provisions, no tie-in can exist with any operating system or who is licensing the technology. Every claim in the above paragraph is simply wrong.HDi is based on open web standards (XML) which makes it very easy for web developers to become familiar with it. This is the reason that there are hundreds of HD DVD discs (nearly every title) with HDi interactivity whereas there are less than 30 Blu-ray discs released that are using BD-J. BD-J requires a greater degree of programming experience, which is why the even the Blu-ray technical committee investigating HDi recommended it in place of BD-J, which had previously been selected.

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:48 pm on February 1, 2008 Permalink

      How is that related to the original topic?

    • Ramir.Info 8:09 pm on February 1, 2008 Permalink

      Hello Everyone,

      I just learned that Microsoft Offer to Buy Yahoo for $44 Billion Dollars and Yahoo turn it down. Does anyone knows why Yahoo turn this kind of offer?

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:56 pm on April 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government Policies: the French case 

    APRIL, the French advocacy group whose acronym stands for Association for Promotion and Research in Libre Computing, on the 2th of February launched a survey containing 14 questions to the presidential candidates, asking them for their positions on issues related to the future of the free software (patentability, royalty, data processing of control, interoperability, etc).

    Eiffel towerEiffel tower by Grufnik

    Eight out of 12 candidates have responded, as reported by the article of Bruce Byfield.

    Among respondees the major candidates, Ségolène Royal of the Socialist Party and François Bayrou of the Union for French Democracy, along with Nicolas Sarkozy of the Union for a Popular Movement, who also responded but not fully addressing APRIL’s questions.

    Kudos to APRIL for its great work, read here some excerpts of the original article, orif you can manage French have a look at the APRIL’s press release in French.

    (More …)

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:08 pm on April 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Hackers: Brian Behlendorf’s speech at the Digital Freedom expo 

    Brian Behlendorf, Apache founder and now CTO at Collabnet, on Thursday at the Digital Freedom Expo gave a speech entitled “Ten things you may not know about open source“.

    open standard campaignOpen Standard campaign by 4_eveR_Young

    Some excerpts out of his list:

    2. Apache kept the Web flat and free

    Apache was launched in 1995, at the time Netscape was the dominant Web browser and there was a fear that if the same company could own the browser market and the server market they would have too much control and could charge companies a tax of sorts for web hosting. Apache’s launch was done with a dual purpose. There was the pragmatic aspect of combining efforts for better development and there was the idealistic aspect of keeping HTTP (Hypertext transfer protocol) as an open standard.

    That is really interesting. Enforcing an Open Standards through an open source reference implementation. Someonelse is also suggesting the need for a reference implementation to augment – if not, perhaps, replace – the formal specification of the standard.

    4. Open Source helped free the human genome

    Before the mapping of the human genome had been completed, a commercial consortium, Celera, was sequencing the genome with the intention of patenting it. This preposterous idea of patenting a discovery rather than an invention began to get many geneticists concerned. In about 2002 a doctoral student, Jim Kent, wrote 10 000 lines of Perl code to make a program that could perform the number crunching of raw data that was necessary in sequencing the genome. This program [Human Genome Project] was then run over 100 Linux servers and the entire genome was successfully sequenced a few months before Celera finished.

    While more related to Open Knowledge this story is really interesting, in 2002 Tim O’Reilly described Kent’s work as “the most significant work of open source development in the past year”.

    5. Microsoft loves open source

    As odd as it sounds, Behlendorf explained that Microsoft has benefitted from open source development and also included software, which although not labeled “open source”, had the source code openly provided. The first use of TCP/IP in Windows was a port of Berkley’s code. He sited the work that Microsoft was doing with open source programs such as MySQL, SugarCRM and JBoss. Codeshare, Channel 9 and other websites were also cited as positive signs that the proprietary giant is openeing further, as Behlendorf put it, “dragged kicking and screaming into the future”.

    So I am alone thinking things like that. Ten days ago I happened to see a meeting of developers belonging to a Microsoft’s community and I was quite impressed.

    6. Altruism is not the only reason why people contribute to open source software

    Many contributors use the software professionally and find that doing things such as fixing bugs and adding features is much easier when collaborating within a group. According to a survey done in 2006, the existing base of FLOSS represents 131 000 real person years of developmental effort. The costs of sharing code are low while the benefits are high.

    Many thanks Brian, I am really tired to listen to professors talking about gifts and fun, I am happy that people hacking for real can tell them the truth.

    9. Open source can still change the world

    Behlendorf strongly believes in the power of open source to make the world a better place, citing many examples. Within government, he believes that open source software can help immensely in counting election votes in a trustworthy way and also with transparency of government’s actions and policy. For countries such as China where there is restricted acces on the internet, open source has already been successful on helping people within these countries get greater access by overcoming the censorship exerted on them. Third world development can benefite greatly through initiatives such as the One Laptop Per Child project which runs on entirely open source software for the dual purpose of making it cheaper to produce and so that it can be modified to suite each country’s specific needs. Fighting digital rights management was another example given.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, open standard, hacker, behlendorf

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:31 am on April 20, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org Users: Michael Dell enjoys OpenOffice.org 2.2! 

    Michael Dell, Chief Executive Officer of Dell, at home uses the last release of Ubuntu 7.04 (7.04, aka Feisty Fawn) on a Precision M90 laptop loaded with Openoffice.org 2.2 (download), as results from his biography.

    dell&dr evilDell and Dr.Evil by edans

    While Dell actually didn’t address the demand for Linux pre-installed PCs, the company opened a linux community forum and later a survey to assess users’ linux demand.

    Shuttleworth during a conference call with the press said that Michael Dell’s use of Ubuntu it is not an indication that Canonical is or not in discussions with Dell. He also added:

    The only time I ever met Michael Dell was at a Microsoft Summit at their headquarters and I didn’t think it appropriate to bring up Linux there.

    Technorati Tags: OpenOffice, Dell, Ubuntu, Shuttleworth

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:29 pm on April 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Evangelism: Whurley first TalkBMC post 

    William Hurley, who recently joined BMC as Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy, yesterday wrote his first TalkBMC post, explaining clearly what open source is to him.

    cureAn odd cure by Mr Jaded

    Nestled between Proprietary and Freedomberg, Opensville is a utopia. Everyone who lives in the adjacent cities spends their free time in Opensville. The parks are beautiful, the shopping is amazing, and the nights are pure Vegas. Sounds like a great place, huh? One problem: no one actually wants to live there. No one wants to pay the taxes or put in the effort it takes to keep the city running. Welcome to Opensville, population zero. [..]

    Nagios is one of the most popular monitoring projects in open source, and one of the most abused. There are countless projects, products, and services predicated on the Nagios code base—some symbiotic, others non-contributing parasites. What separates legitimate use from outright exploitation? Where would you draw the line? Should violators be black-listed by the community?

    To me, open means that everyone can participate on a level playing field. As a community we have to take the good with the bad, but I cringe when I see a project taking more than its fair share of punishment. How will the community address this problem? Should there be a rating system? A sort of mooch-o-meter to rank companies and projects that use open source? Would that subjective hierarchy help or hurt the community? How would it be regulated?

    The community has to answer some of these questions if open source is to continue to flourish. Everyone who leads, participates in, or utilizes an open source project should realize they have a personal interest in protecting it from abuse. Keeping the pirates honest will take effort, but the repercussions of apathy will affect us all in the future. Besides, tales of the pirate hunters are often more exciting than the tales of the pirates themselves.

    As Matt Asay William seems to think that the best policing mechanism to answer the question is the community, but auto-referentiality might also be dangerous.

    Could the cure be worse than the ill, eventually?

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, whurley, asay, bmc

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:39 am on April 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    FSF Europe call for action: next week IPRED will be voted 

    Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation Europe and Open Rights Group launched a call for action because next week the European Parliament will vote IPRED2, the EU’s second intellectual property enforcement directive.

    no sw patentAgainst software patent by kianee

    If it passes in its current form, as reported by the Open Rights Group:

    “aiding, abetting, or inciting” copyright infringement on a “commercial scale” in the EU will become a crime. What’s more, it will be the first time the EU will force countries to impose minimal criminal sanctions – this is normally left up to the discretion of member states.

    The FSFE has prepared an open letter to the MEPs, the proposed text, in all formats and languages, can be found on the proposal’s eur-lex page. FSFE endorses amending that text with the compromise amendments hosted on FFII’s site.

    Electronic Frontier Foundation has also set up a web site to help stop the directive in its current form.

    Act now!

    Technorati Tags: software patent, copyright, IPRED, FSFE, EFF, ORG

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:43 pm on April 18, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    File Format: Out of two fighers a third came up.. 

    In Beijing has been held a conference called WTO and IPR’s: Issues in Standardization, convened by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and Sun Microsystems.

    Scott McNealy spent some words talking about three main document formats in existence today: Open Document Format, OpenXML and China’s Uniform Office Format (UOF) called for the last two to be merged

    BarriersChinese’s Wall by frenz_69

    What is significant about his statement is not the sentiment, as a harmonization or merger of the two formats has been a topic of conversation and speculation for some time. OASIS, for example, chartered a working group some months ago to explore with the Chinese how the two formats might be brought closer. But until now, ODF proponents have been shy about placing any pressure on the Chinese to take any such action, not unlike someone who very much wants to be asked on a date, but is afraid to scare off the object of affection by being too forward.

    Read the full post.

    Technorati Tags: File format, standard, OpenXML, ODF, UOF, China

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:51 am on April 18, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Business Models: Collaborative Software Initiative just launched 

    Stuart Cohen, formerly known as the OSDL CEO, launched the Collaborative Software Initiative, a new company dedicated to building communities of IT firms to co-develop software. CSI is apparently going to explore the potentialities of club good theory, that suggests that a group of firms can derive mutual benefit from sharing the cost of production of an (impure) public good.

    Members onlyMembers only by Through 4 eyes

    CSI will form the project community and provides the central project management function for developing Collaborative Software, including development, testing and support for the code. The CSI will also offer the software to a broader base of customers under the open source licensing or Software as a Service (Saas) models.

    The idea to offer a “technological clubs aggregator“ makes a lot of sense to me, being open source software a non-rivalrous – may be not non-excludable – good. Notably among previous experiences I would mention at least the following:

    Considering that firms are willing to cooperate in technological endeavours only if the benefits of cooperation outweigh the costs, network effects can be a pretty good reason to join the “club”.

    Stuart Cohen commented:

    With the successful adoption of Linux and open source software, we are really on the cusp of a new wave in software development where business managers are looking to cooperatively develop software to meet their industry application needs. CSI provides an experienced partner to form communities where today none exist and together build Collaborative Software that can be maintained and updated.

    I believe that both experience and trust are key enabling factors for the success of the initiative. As matter of fact they got some financial support from OVP Venture Partners, they are already working with HP, IBM and Novell.

    While I am not skeptical, I guess CSI’s communities won’t be similar to other open source communities, the whole idea seems different to me. Thinking of OpenAdaptor, that was somehow missing a strong foundation and therefore a promise for the future, I see CSI able to identify roadmaps and to grant maintenance.

    Post Scrittum: I think that the initiative is aimed at offering consumer-firms a better alternative to outsourcing, and CSI has to guarantee results respecting on time on budget constraints. If this is the case, CSI’s communities have to adopt a Corporate Production approach. In other words there is no space for self-selected volunteers.

    About CSI.

    CSI introduces a market-changing process that applies open source methodologies to building Collaborative Software that lowers investments associated with non-competitive yet essential IT activities.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Collaborative Software Initiative, Stuart Cohen

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:42 am on April 17, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Advocacy: Wheeler revised his paper “Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers!” 

    David Wheeler, who I always mention talking about Commercial open source, just released a revised version of his most famous paper, Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers!“. The study contains quantitative data showing that considering FLOSS makes a lot of sense.

    Linux plate/dev/porsche by Xenedis

    This paper provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using open source software / free software (abbreviated as OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS) is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures. This paper’s goal is to show that you should consider using OSS/FS when acquiring software. This paper examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, governments and OSS/FS, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions. An appendix gives more background information about OSS/FS. You can view this paper at http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Advocacy, Wheeler

     

    • Andrea Trasatti 4:19 pm on April 30, 2007 Permalink

      It took me a couple of weeks to find the time to read this article… Not yours, Roberto, but the original by Wheeler. It is interesting in the beginning, but honestly it just becomes boring after you realize that it’s about 70 pages of raw numbers.

      Anyway, I am sure it’s been a LONG work to collect these.

      I think the update should have also removed totally outdated resources, such the statistic that said that linux handhelds have about the same installbase as microsoft windows-based. Unfortunately, this is not true by far, today.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:45 pm on May 6, 2007 Permalink

      Andrea I suggest you to write David, he is always open to others’ suggestions.

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:38 pm on April 16, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Barcamp: Opencamp, a barcamp on Open Source and Open Minds 

    Last saturday Rome guested the Opencamp, an ad-hoc gathering to share and learn in an open environment about Open Source and Open Minds (i.e. Digital Freedom, Trusted Computing, Net Neutrality, Collaborative Web, Creative Commons, Politics and Tecnology, Web and Technology Standards, and more).

    opencamp logoOpencamp logo, designed by Stefano Federici Simone Onofri

    Opencamp, organized by “LSLUG”, a local Linux User group, is the second BarCamp held in Rome, and was quite different the first. Among attendees – not many to be honest – there were either industry professionals or IT students, with practical work experience on FLOSS (Adriano Gasparri, Matteo Brunati, Nicola Larosa, Andrea Martinez, Alberto Mucignat, Luca Sartoni, Giacomo Tufano and Italo Vignoli just to name a few), along with some stars of the Italian Blogosphere (Stefano Epifani, Alessio Jacona, Nicola Mattina, Antonio Pavolini, Tommaso Tessarolo, Leo Sorge, etc).

    I took the chance to give a speech completely different from “Free as in Business: lucrative coopetition“, and instead of being informative on open source business model taxonomies, I chose to share some reflections to open the debate.

    Considering that Italian VCs are not open to invest in open source firms because of the “weak” intellectual property asset, I suggested hackers to keep into consideration the following arguments:

    Software, Free Software is a digital good, whether SourceForge’s marketplace will work or not, the Web can help to agglomerate geographically dispersed market segments–the proverbial ‘Long Tail’.

    Hackers have a chance to become contributors, may be even committers, and eventually open up their shops. They can also simply get hired by software firms or, more likely in my opinion, IT customers willing to get the “open source promise” – be independent – granted.

    If you can catch Italian have a look at RobinGood posts (OpenCamp Part 1 and OpenCamp Part 2), a very good example of how online video might be used to deliver live contentusing ustream.tv.

    Last but not least, special thanks to SanLorenzo for its free – as in good vine – food!

    Technorati Tags: barcamp, commercial open source, marketplace, opencamp, robingood, sourceforge

     

    • Fabio Masetti 2:34 pm on April 19, 2007 Permalink

      Ciao Roberto, sono fabio, organizzatore del RomeCamp e del prossimo VentureCamp a giugno dedicato al Venture Capital. Purtroppo non sono potuto venire all’OpenCamp ma ho letto il tuo post e quello del Senatore Cortiana. Ho visto che hai partlato di Venture e spero di incontrarti al prossimo barcamp. ciao ciao

    • Simone Onofri 11:55 pm on April 20, 2007 Permalink

      Il numero dei partecipanti non influisce direttamente sul successo o no di un BarCamp, lo stesso Fabio (oramai un esperto in questo) ha detto in un recente post che i BarCamp esteri hanno un numero limitatissimo di partecipanti.. consideriamo poi che il tema è specifico il target stesso è più ristretto… insomma… pochi ma buoni!

      PS. il logo dell’OpenCamp l’ho disegnato io 🙂

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