10 amazing tricks for OpenOffice.org – interesting and funny tricks, included playing with StarWars game.
Nautilus: icons enable OpenOffice documents with real preview – Ubuntu users can enjoy OpenOffice.org document preview in Nautilus (thanks to the “OpenOffice Thumbnailer” package).
Arrows 3D Clipart Gallery Theme – An extension containing 8 arrows in 3D with shadow.
The European Union took the decision to opens in-depth investigation for fear of prices hikes, and IT veterans, open source experts and economists negatively commented the news.
Before expressing any opinion let’s see what the Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said:
As I recall (happy to be corrected), naming specific products in EU tenders is in violation of tender law. To wit, a tender may reference a RDBMS as requirement but not SQL Server 2008. This is why for example the Hungarians got into hot water over the Microsoft-heavy public tender a while back.
It’s probably a bit unrealistic in this day and age to think that a tender can be specific enough without referencing specific technologies and products but that’s the law today and if we’re going to advise against naming Microsoft in tenders then MySQL shouldn’t be targeted with this form of financing either.
Hi Josef,
I was thinking of research calls, sorry. We can learn a lot from the past in this respect, see the PyPy Story!
Concentration in IT markets, especially in Europe, is basically induced by anticompetitive characteristics and legally questionable activities of three IT companies since long: IBM, Microsoft, HP.
Non-approval of upper merger will not lead to further competition. The opposite will be the case. Moreover the Open Source market,
actively promoted by Sun Microsystems, will suffer seriously.
Now this anticompetitiveness is actively supported by the EU commission’s antitrust division, headed by Mrs. Kroes. This fact is casting serious doubts in the work and competency of Mrs. Kroes’ team world-wide.
The commercial branch of MySQL has a market share of 0.4% officially and is thus far from being able to cause a concentration in the database market.
Having said this, I notify that EU commission’s decisions itself will have to be regarded as cause of concentration in case of
disapproval of above merger.
Hi Peter,
I suspect that IT concentration has different roots. Europe missed to take advantage of the “packaged” software era in the early 90’s, but few players (SAP). IT market worked and works by reselling US software plus selling system integration services.
So said, I’m with you when you state that the commission anti-trust division seems to miss the real point, and as I wrote I’d like EU to put its (our) money where its money is.
RiverMuse – a company established in 2008 by the original founders of Micromuse  and RiverSoft – at the end of July announced the availability of RiverMuse Open Source Fault Management, a fault management platform designed to be extensible via pluggable modules.
Phil Blades -Â VP Products & Community at RiverMuse – told me more about their open source vision.
The Open Innovation Summit application deadline has been extended from the 1st of September until the 8th, take your chance to raise capital or meet potential partners to bring your open source solutions to the market.
If you are an open source entrepreneur willing to meet up with VCs take your time now to fill up the application form and be sure to cover the following topics: (More …)
“Hadoop: The Definitive Guide” is the first book covering the now famous java framework supporting data intensive distributed applications.
Doug Cutting, the project’s author now working at Cloudera, wrote that Tom White – author of the book and long time contributor to the Apache top-level project – is the most qualified person to write a book about hadoop.
Toli Kuznets, Marketcetera CTO and co-founder, will tell you about how to implement your trading strategy on the Marketcetera platform.
Reserve your Webinar seat now, the webinar will be held on Thursday 3rd of September at 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT.
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.
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]
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.
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.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Peter Parker, 
Juju,
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