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  • Roberto Galoppini 8:32 am on April 14, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    GPL: OpenLogic experts say yes, Moglen thanks giving a speech 

    OpenLogic yesterday announced the results of a survey regarding the draft of the GPL v3, showing that OpenLogic Expert Community members are positive about the most recent draft of the GPLv3.

    Forty-five Expert Community members corresponded, many of whom participate in more than one open source project.
    — 50% of the respondents said that they believe GPLv3 is good for open source. — 29.5% are not sure — 15.9% said they do not believe GPL v3 is good for open source However, respondents also have concerns about provisions of Draft 3. — 57% were concerned about provisions around patent issues — 57% were concerned about provisions around digital rights management — 43% were concerned about provisions around the use of GPL-covered programs in consumer devices Of respondents that are working on GPLv2 projects — 71% would be in favor of some or all of these projects moving to GPLv3 — 77% thought that it would take a year or less for their projects to move to GPLv3 once the final version of GPLv3 was released.

    Eben Moglen, co-author of GPL v3, will participate in an OpenLogic webinar on May 17 to talk more about the GPL v3 and what it means to enterprises.

    Technorati Tags: GPL, GPLv3, OpenLogic, Moglen

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:17 am on April 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Migration: diary of a migration 

    A living diary gives Senokian Solutions, an open source consulting firm based in UK, a powerful and risky voice to let the IT decision makers know about how do they cope with migrations to Open Source.

    diaryDiary by Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedel

    Mercian Labels, a UK security label printer, has told to have commenced its migration, supported by Senokian Solutions, because of reliability and upgrade cost concerns, and they are keeping a blog to tell us daily about their journey.

    Mercian Labels has commenced its migration away from Microsoft to Open Source software because of reliability and upgrade cost concerns. Supported by Senokian Solutions, the company is blogging its experiences of moving a whole small business IT infrastructure to open source, offering a vital case study resource for SMEs considering a similar move.

    Googling around I sorted out that Mercian Labels is not new to represent a case study, and considering that last time they managed the following results, I am looking forward to see what will happen now with this migration.

    Results

    Lead-time improved from 70% of orders being dispatched in 5 days to 80+% orders being dispatched in less than 3 days, with no extra staff or infrastructure. This also led to a 50% increase in goods delivered within target time.

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, migration, senokian solutions, mercian labels

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:17 pm on April 12, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Marketplace: ideas in action, the SugarCRM case 

    SugarCRM has announced that over 233 applications, extensions and modules are currently available on SugarExchange, and more than 7,000 transactions have occurred since October 2006, when the software marketplace was launched.

    marketplaceMarketplace by Troy B Thompson

    The SugarExchange products listed in the press release are almost all proprietary, with the exception of Insideview and Scalix. As a matter of fact many SugarExchange’s Providers are imitating SugarCRM’s approach, keeping proprietary their extensions and plug-in. It is worth to notice that Sugar Portal for Mambo and Asterisk VoiceRD Integration, just to name two of the most popular this week, are not following this path, being both released open source. Upselling from the open source version to a more feature-rich version might be not easy.

    First movers can take advantage of positive externalities – SugarCRM Announces 1,000 Customers and 1,000,000 Open Source Downloads – but this is not an option for all.

    Talking about participation John Roberts, SugarCRM CEO, said:

    The strong provider participation rates on SugarExchange validate the appeal of SugarCRM to both commercial as well as open source developers. Independent Software Vendors can leverage SugarCRM’s strong customer growth rate and offer complete, integrated solutions to commercial and open source users of SugarCRM.

    Considering how well is going SugarExhcange I believe that SourceForge Marketplace has very good chance. By the way SourceForge has recently announced that has embedded Krugle’s search engine, a code search engine for developers similar to the famous koder.

    Technorati Tags: marketplace, commercial open source, sugarcrm, krugle, sourceforge, koder

     

    • greatswami 1:58 am on April 15, 2007 Permalink

      I purchased the full VoiceRD integrated appliance from the company. GUI full of bugs and poorly designed interface. LDAP database makes it difficult to operate and gain help from the very active asterisk/trixbox community. There are hardly any active discussions on the company’s wiki and they take for ever to respond to questions. No documentation coupled with no support whatsoever from the company even though I spent thousands on the system. Additionally, they promised 24/7 monitoring/support agreement from Novell but after 4 months of waiting they were unable to provide. If you decide to purchase a complete system from them make sure you test out first, but I would recommend staying away.

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:17 pm on April 17, 2007 Permalink

      Thanks for your comments, I would like to hear a feedback from Asterisk VoiceRD Integration’s authors also.

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:48 pm on April 11, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Second Life: the practical developers’ guide to Second Life Client 

    With the new year Linden went (partially) Open Source releasing its Second Life client with a GPLv2 license with a FLOSS exception. In the meanwhile later was created the first “open source” Second Life server. Few days ago Peter Seebach wrote an insightful post on hacking Second Life client that I warmly recommend to anyone interested in the subject.

    started!10, 9, .. ignition! by bryan campen

    NASA within the CoLab initiative is taking second life seriously, with a classroom-course facilitated virtual build of the International Space Station in Second Life. The project is aimed at catalyzing the volunteer community, and teach them about the ISS, space sciences, and technical skills.

    If you are interested just in knowing more about on line virtual worlds read this mini-guide.

    Technorati Tags: virtual world, second life, open source, NASA, floss exception

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:33 am on April 11, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Jobs: open positions at ENST, a French Institute located in Paris 

    At ENST, a French engineering school and research institute located in Paris, France, we currently have two internship proposals to work on XWiki, a Free Software wiki. European candidates may apply. Interns will receive 800€/month. Contact me if you need more information.

    We also have fixed-term positions available (up to 18 months) on similar subjects (working on XWiki). Net income will be around 2000€/month. Do not hesitate to contact me if you are an European citizen and want to apply.

    Read the full post.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:36 pm on April 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Community-based production: do they need a roadmap? The Debian case 

    The Debian Project yesterday announced the release of “etch”, the last version of Debian.
    The press release reported that it took 21 months of development to create this release. Whether you consider contributing to Debian a work or a joy, it would be interesting to know how much would have cost to develop “etch” from scratch.

    roadmapRoadmap by Pinocure

    Being based exclusively on volunteer contributions, Debian can’t grant the availability of all packages included in the previous version, as results from “Evolution of Volunteer Participation in Libre Software Projects: Evidence from Debian“. Packages maintained by volunteers who left the project become unmaintained (“orphaned”) and the probability that an orphaned package gets adopted by other maintainers is not 1.

    [..] maintainers who left Debian between July 1996 and December 2004 were responsible for 33.5% of the packages in 2.0, 67.5% of these packages can still be found in 3.0.

    The Constitution itself can’t help much when a volunteer decide to exit and no one is willing to take care of his or her tasks. It is worth to notice that within an hybrid production model paid employees are often responsible for less attractive tasks, as results from “GNOME, a case of open source global software development“:

    Paid employees are usually responsible for the following tasks: project de- sign and coordination, testing, documentation, and bug fix- ing. These tasks are usually less attractive to volunteers. By taking care of them, the paid employees make sure that the development of GNOME continues at a steady pace.

    Corporate production has to be on Time on Budget. The firm solves the problem of finding the efficient management of human resources through time not allowing the free entry and exit, and delegating production control to a manager.

    Community-based production on the contrary allows volunteers to enter and choose their tasks. Volunteers choosing what to do apply for tasks they like, and that they are likely to accomplish effectively. They can also freely exit from a project though, or not to end their tasks on time.

    How open source firms will approach the hybrid production model? Whatever is your guess, read the following (old) excerpt from the Debian Weekly News – December 2nd, 2003:

    Debian Roadmap? The project was asked if there was a roadmap for the Debian distribution, so that certification can be organised accordingly. Ben Collins pointed out that Debian hardly has release goals and Jonathan Dowland added that a smaller group of loose-knit volunteers has managed to agree on a roadmap.

    Technorati Tags: Debian, Coordination costs, Hierarchy, hybrid production model

     

    • Martin Michlmayr 2:42 pm on May 10, 2007 Permalink

      I believe roadmaps are gaining importance in free software development too. IMHO this is related to increased complexity found in many successful projects (both in terms of the size of the development community and the code base itself), which requires a higher degree of planning than in the past. For example, shortly after Debian 4.0 was released, the release managers contacted the maintainers of every large software package in Debian (e.g. the Linux kernel, KDE and GNOME) to obtain more information about the release plans of these projects. This information will be used to create a release plan for Debian. Furthermore, during the development cycle of Debian 4.0, release goals were defined in a much better way than this was done in the past. There was also a split into release blockers and release goals to make it clearer which work is absolutely needed before a release can be made.

      In summary, I don’t believe the absence of plans is something inherent with free software development. I believe there will be more planning as more projects gain considerable complexity and size, and to some extent we can see that already.

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:06 pm on May 13, 2007 Permalink

      Martin thank you to join the conversation. I agree with you, the absence of plans is not inherent with free software development.

      You mentioned GNOME and other projects where paid developers are on duty for unsexy tasks. Do you believe that the hybrid production model might be the third way?

      This way we might get the best of both world, but harmonizing contributions is not straightforward, though.

    • Martin Michlmayr 12:47 pm on May 30, 2007 Permalink

      There’s certainly a trend towards hybrid models, even though they are (or may be) associated with certain problems too. There’s a fairly good paper about the issue of control in the Netbeans community. The question there is who is actually in charge of the project – community or a company (Sun in this case).

      Reference:

      Jensen, Chris and Scacchi, Walt: Collaboration, Leadership, Control, and Conflict Negotiation in the Netbeans.org Community

    • Roberto Galoppini 3:07 pm on June 2, 2007 Permalink

      Thank you Martin, I didn’t read that paper before.

      The way a corporate actor open the development process to others can deeply affect results. Looking at Eclipse vs Netbeans popularity I wonder at which extent it is to be related to the way IBM and Sun backed their respective projects.

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:13 am on April 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Movie: Open Source Cinema initiative 

    Reading Wayne Porter I happened to know about Open Source Cinema, likely not the very first push for Open Source Film, but for sure now on a stage level.

    b-movieB-movie heroin by ale2000

    As Porter suggests the question how makers make money is still open , since they are still searching for someone to fund their film. I googled around and I found another interesting post on viability, not a definitive answer though.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Cinema, Porter

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:09 am on April 6, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Hackers: Jeremy Irons’ hints for young programmers 

    Jeremy Irons, one of the lead developers of the Samba Team, wrote an article for ZDNet entitled “Working for the Man? Advice to a young programmer“. After his resignation from Novell he talks about the importance of the community.

    The community is more important than your employer
    Are corporations fundamentally amoral? If they can make more money by outsourcing your job to India or China, or recycling employees into fertilizer for the rose garden at corporate headquarters, will they do it? I once had to listen to several high-level executives (for a previous company that shall remain nameless) waiting for the private corporate jet complain how inefficient it was that the country was run by democratically elected politicians as “they just didn’t understand business.”

    Corporations are great places to work when things are going well, and I enjoy the perks as well as the next employee, but I’m very careful even in my optimism to not make the mistake of thinking this is the way things will always stay. In the free software/open source community, the people you’re collaborating with and creating code with are the people you can really depend on. While you might not get on with all of them personally, they share your common goal of making sure that the code is the greatest, most beautiful work of art that all of you can create together. Smart corporations, at least the ones you’d want to work for, hire from that pool of people, and even though individual corporations may stumble and fall, if you’re part of our community you should be able to successfully manage your career between the occasional stormy periods of corporate upheaval.

    Read the full article.

    Technorati Tags: Jeremy Irons, Samba, hacker

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:00 pm on April 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Market: OpenLogic’s CEO unveils new trends 

    Steven L. Grandchamp, OpenLogic’s CEO, has wrote an insightful article entitled “The Evolution of Open Source” (require membership), explaining that there are many sourcing and selection issues and how this market is evolving.

    Support can be particularly vexing, with companies juggling support contracts with dozens of different commercial open source companies or trying to tackle problems internally without the proper expertise, either one a risky and time-consuming proposition.[..]

    The open source service companies can assume many forms: One form is the stack supplier, and others include the support provider, systems integrator, consultant, software developer, and a combination of all of the above. Among the newcomers are Virtuas, BitRock, SpikeSource, and OpenLogic[ the author’s company], but the larger, traditional IT players are also beginning to take notice and build practices in this area.

    Trends Trends by farfalina

    I would also add open source consulting firms like Navica and Optaros, just to name two of.

    While the size and substance of the service companies differ, all share a common philosophy: each eschews the typical model for the commercialization of open source. Rather than latch onto one, particular open source product with a big installed base and monetize it with subscriptions, support contracts, and consulting, each company provides solutions that extend across many open source products. Each supplier traffics in expertise about how to use open source in concert with software downloaded, purchased, or developed internally.[..]

    The real opportunity for growth is in demystifying the use of open source. Those third-party, open source firms that focus on helping enterprises develop policies, pick projects, and manage deployments are the ones most likely to succeed and excel.

    I would rather say that “horizontal” business models are new – compared to the “old” vertical ones – not sure they are more likely to succeed, though.

    Those firms are all taking advantage of the absence of a Corporate actor:

    • Consulting, because (almost) no one is marketing OS products;
      .
    • Selling quality assurance, because (almost) no one is tracking the production process;;
      .
    • Building Stacks and Benchmarking, because (almost) no one develop partnership programs;
      .
    • Mediation, because (most of) open source projects lack of commercial support;
      .
    • Offering indemnification and IP coverage, etc.

    OpenLogic is an open source consulting firm based in Colorado, has just added sixty new open source to its Certified Library, also releasing a new version of its Enterprise 4.4, with added also Open Source Governance functionalities designed to help enterprises.

    Technorati Tags: OpenLogic, Commercial Open Source, Grandchamp, Open Source Service

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:24 am on April 4, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Licensing: is StillSecure trying to redefine Open Source? 

    I already mentioned StillSecure releasing Cobia, a security platform that they call “Open Source”, redefining the meaning as reported by the license FAQ:

    Is Cobia open source?

    The definition of “open source” is evolving as companies create new licenses or add “riders” to OSI licenses such as the GPL. Some believe that open source means it must be one of the OSI compliant licenses (GPL, Mozilla, Apache, etc.). We’ve found what is most important to a majority of open source software users is that open source software is free of charge and include easy access to source code. Cobia software meets these requirements through our community license structure.

    Shift Shift Freedom by aliceinreality

    Being compliant with OSI or FSF definitions is mandatory if you want to call open source or free software your products, wehther or not you like OSI and FSF licenses’ approval processes.

    Thomas Ptace at matasanochargen blog wrote a post entitled “Questions for StillSecure About Cobia” raising some issues about Cobia’s restrictions about redistribution and asking them to stop calling Cobia an open source product or fully complying with the OSI definition.

    Reading the license I found things like this, not really open source style indeed:

    2. GRANTS OF RIGHTS

    (a)From original developer. Subject restrictions in Section 2 of this License, the Original Developer grants you a non-exclusive, worlwide, royalty-free license:[..]
    (iii) to Distribute Unmodified Code, but only if:[..]

    B. You do not embed, integrate, bundle or incorporate the Unmodified
    Code with any other product or good (whether tangible or intangible)

    Alan Shimel, Chief Strategy Officer of StillSecure, replied:

    1. Is Cobia open source? The not so short answer Thomas, is that if you are a strict constructionist and believe all open source must have an OSI approved license, than I guess you can say it is not open source. Me personally, I don’t like strict constructionists in my Supreme Court judges and I don’t deem software open source or not by a strict construction of whether or not an OSI approved license is in place. Thomas, I don’t say this flippantly either. We thought long and hard about licensing and this issue around Cobia. Here is the story. We believe and our research proves it, most people consider software open source if the product is free to use and it includes the source code. I think only purists will get hung up about the OSI stuff.

    I wouldn’t describe myself as a purist, but I as Thomace I firmly believe that outsiders need incentives, and such license can be an obstacle to firms’ participation.

    Alan added also this:

    Thomas, todays commercial open source business model isn’t the open source model you grew up with. I am glad you brought up both Snort and Nessus. Go ask Ron and Marty if they were starting today if they would do it under GPL from the beginning again. If they are being truthful, they would tell you no way. The idea we are trying to get across here is that if you are using Cobia for your own use in your network and not reselling it or packaging it for profit, it is free and open. If you are going to use it for profit, why should we not share in this? Someone has to pay the bills here.

    Success story like Snort are a typical case of open source community-based product that turns in a proprietary product and I can’t believe they might get there without going that way. As a matter of fact, many open source firms are giving away software “for free” getting advantage of positive externalities and contributions.

    StillSecure can choose its way, I can’t say anything about that, but they can’t pretend it to be the only way.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, StillSecure, Cobia

     

    • Nick G 3:01 am on January 7, 2008 Permalink

      Robert,

      I think a lot of people would agree that open source should be about giving back to the community.
      Most of us use open source software every day, without even thinking about it (yes even windows users). And it sure would be nice to see people contributing back to the community…

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:47 am on January 7, 2008 Permalink

      I definitely agree with you Nick.

      I am volunteering by OpenOffice.org community from more than five years now, and it has been also an interesting professional experience that I would recommend anyone in the field.

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