Net Freedom: Italian Blog Strike
Today Italian bloggers protest against an Italian government bill introducing rules which will put at risk the internet freedom of speech in Italy.
See the English version of the press release to know more.
Updates from Roberto Galoppini Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Roberto Galoppini
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Roberto Galoppini
OpenOffice.org Security Project, Quick Start Guide, Lorem Ipsum Generator
OpenOffice.org Security Project -  the Security project’s Wiki currently covers all about digital signatures, encryption and document integrity, feel free to join and help with more items.
Magenta Lorem ipsum generator – an extension generating the dummy text Lorem ipsum.
OpenOffice.org New User Orientation - new-user orientation quick start guide by OpenOffice.org Ninja.
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Roberto Galoppini
European Open Source Observatory keeps launching new Features
The European open source observatory opened up about one year ago, last February went into the wild 2.0 and now offers a free Virtual Forge service, aimed at giving a better understanding of hosted projects.
Europe keeps investing money to fund OSOR development, now trying to mimic Ohloh metrics and data, instead of spending energies to create synergies with others.
In the OSOR news  Marco Battistoni, Unisys OSOR Technical Manager, says (emphasis is mine):
However setting up and operating such a repository can be very costly and time consuming (believe us, we know!):Â one has to buy servers, internet connection, install the necessary applications, hire experts to operate the site 24/7… This needs a lot of commitment both in human and in financial resources.
I’d prefer to see our money spent to create something new, or simply to share knowledge about interesting open source projects and tools. There are definitely more forges than necessary.
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Stefano Canepa
I agree with you, there are so many places where a free software developer can host his/her project that it’s difficult to decide but no one help in sharing ideas, this could be of some help in cutting down the number of project doing the same thing and help developer to team up.
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Roberto Galoppini
Stefano don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Europe is wrong having its own repository/forge. European public adminstrations have to deploy a long term sustainability plan when it comes to hosting projects. Today moving projects from a forge to another is not trivial, since data federation is still to come (and maybe Europe might well help towards this goal).
OSOR EC-funded project is spending big money, and I’d like to see most of these resources spent to better disseminate projects information.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source BI: Jaspersoft Special Offer and the Real Value of Open Source BI
Yesterday Jaspersoft announced the availability of Jaspersoft Unlimited, a special offer at a lower price. Jaspersoft offered a similar package back in 2007, but this time training has been added to the bundle.
Brian Gentile, Jaspersoft CEO and open source core advocate, commenting the news told me:
Roberto Galoppini
Microsoft Open Source Strategy: CodePlex keeps Growing
Yesterday Microsoft announced that the number of projects hosted on CodePlex breached the 10,000 mark, just after CodePlex celebrated its third anniversary.
Even if numbers are not impressive compared with Google code – becoming home to over 80.000 projects in half the time – it is definitely a measure of how seriously Microsoft is taking its open source strategy.
Roberto Galoppini
Software Patents are Back: Software AG
Software AG released a survey carried out by the Technical University of Darmstadt, stating that, among other practical recommendations, software patents are needed to protect innovation.
Dale Halling
The arguments against software patents have a fundamental flaw. As any electrical engineer knows, solutions to problems implemented in software can also be realized in hardware, i.e., electronic circuits. The main reason for choosing a software solution is the ease in implementing changes, the main reason for choosing a hardware solution is speed of processing. Therefore, a time critical solution is more likely to be implemented in hardware. While a solution that requires the ability to add features easily will be implemented in software. As a result, to be intellectually consistent those people against software patents also have to be against patents for electronic circuits. For more information on patents and innovation see http://www.hallingblog.com.
Roberto Galoppini
Hi Dale, thank you to join the conversation. I see you’re a patent attorney and an electrical engineer, I got a computer science degree and my background doesn’t help me much when it comes to talk about electronic circuits.
So said, I live in Europe and software patents are not (yet) legal on this side of the pond. Most of us are happy with that, given how little software patents are welcome by US IT entrepreneurs (see this book on intellectual property and open source for more information). I understand that lawyers, or some of them, are in favour of software patents, but there is no evidence of how they helped innovation so far. Many IT companies, included the big ones, publicly stated how software patents mostly are causing damages, only few players take (real?) advantage of them in ritualized warfares, but this is definitely not about innovation.
Roberto Galoppini
Playing more around with WordPress
I keep updating my blog to organize information in a clearer way, and I made some changes just yesterday, while WordPress was stating that WordPress themes are GPL too.
Matteo Ionescu, who originally brought my blog to 2.0 life, helped me to make more cosmetics changes, especially about new and old widgets, and my K2 template today comes with a slightly new look (new ‘top posts’ box, smaller ‘categories’ box, etc).
Comments and feedback are welcome, more is to come soon!
Roberto Galoppini
OpenOffice.org Portable, PDF Import Extension, OOo Con Website runs on OCS
Sun PDF Import Extension - The extension allows to import and modify PDF documents, the perfect tool to change dates, numbers or small portions of text. Long documents or with sophisticated layouts are not suitable for the PDF Import Extension, though.
OpenOffice 3.1.0 Plus Win Portable USB (Italian) – The Italian school Ettore Majorana in collaboration with Ylvo COMPANY the created the Italian version. The English version is available at the PortableApps website.
OOo gets OCS – The OpenOffice.org Annual Conference website runs on OCS software.
Roberto Galoppini
SourceForge New Site On Line!
SourceForge few days ago served its 4 billionth download and today launched the new website. The new UI is the answer to inputs from project administrators asking for an easier path for users to download their software.
I asked Jon Sobel, SourceForge Inc. Group President, his opinion about this change:
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Ole Nielsen
Thanks for giving us SourceForge!
However, with the July 2009 version we miss the ability to link directly to specific releases. Now any link points to all files and one must find the specific release manually. The link in question is https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=172848&package_id=197866&release_id=688445
Also, it appears that the green download button no longer points to the latest file upload which is annoying.
Cheers
Ole Nielsen
Roberto Galoppini
An ODF Plugfest a Day Take the Doctor Away
The Dutch government is showing the way to go: the Minister for Foreigng Trade Frank Heemskerk opened the now famous ODF Plugfest saying that a joint course of action for developing effective ODF support in each other’s products is needed.
Last week the Italian government announced a joint effort with Sun Microsystems to foster the use of StarOffice by local public administrations, but the press release doesn’t mention either ODF or open standards. Improvements are needed, the lack of a European coherent strategic vision towards standards’ compliance.
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