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  • Roberto Galoppini 1:07 pm on July 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Systems Management: some pieces that caught my eye at Hyperic 

    Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, announced the availability of the beta of CloudStatus, a tool providing an independent view of how works the Amazon Web Services cloud.

    Stacey Schneider, senior director of marketing, after being interviewed introduced me to Jeremy Hogan, who just joined Hyperic as Director of Community Management. Since recently I started speculating on community and sponsored projects, I asked him to talk a little bit about Hyperic’s approach to open source communities.

    Hyperic at this point falls into the bee keeper model, where the majority of the code comes form the company, but I also have a few years of experience at Red Hat, where the bulk of the code comes from the upstream so I can talk about that model as well.

    Really, the community is still a community whether you have corporate interests or commerce driving innovation. Just like the wild west was eventually tamed and settled. Saloons became four star hotels and a rocky chunk of desert became LA.

    I am likely to meet Jeremy at OSCON, so I’ll keep all my questions about how lucrative coopetition can boost Hyperic’s business and his opinion about GroundWork’s attitude to be involved in the coordination of some inter-projects collaborations.

    Technorati Tags: Hyperic, Open Source Management, sponsored project, Jeremy Hogan

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:59 am on July 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: European Interoperability Framework and IPR 

    On the 25th of June IDABC organized an Information Day on the novelties of the new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and now the dispute is open: BSA representatives call for “own goal”, while open source evangelists explain why standards on a RAND basis are discriminatory towards open source software.

    Dispute about Europe-wide definition of open standards

    A dispute has been sparked in Brussels about the definition of open standards to promote the interoperability between eGovernment services. According to drafts for a revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which were recently presented by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Informatics, the specifications of open standards have to be made available either free of charge, or for a specified nominal fee. If a standard, or parts of it, are protected by patents, the revision stipulates that these parts have to be “made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis” for third party use. This has caused protests by IT business associations like the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which counts Microsoft and Intel among its members. [..]

    Jan Wildeboer is an open source evangelist at Red Hat in Europe who supports the plans for the revised EIF version. He explained, in an interview with heise online, “Particularly the stipulation that presumed intellectual property has to be made available without the payment of license fees in open standards complies with a fundamental requirement for open source developers and providers of open source solutions.” He said open standards are generally a “vital component of modern IT infrastructures”, and was surprised that the BSA renewed its call for license fees to be paid for HTTP and DHCP. Wildeboer said this argument has already proved redundant in the debate about software patents.

    Read the full article.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:03 pm on July 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Spain wants to ensure that Open Source users have equal access to eGovernment 

    Spain booked its place in the semifinals in Matthew Aslett’s European Open Source tour, but its political structure swung the decision in France’s favor, the European country who eventually won of the tour, also with my big respect and consideration.

    Today reading epractice.eu, the portal created by the European Commission, I happened to know about Cenatic‘s (Centre for the Application of Open Source Information and Communication Technologies) initiative.

    The new action plan gives top priority to ensuring that Open Source users have equal access to eGovernment. Part of that drive will be a series of studies and reports on electronic filing, process improvement, transparency and electronic billing. These will be linked to Spain’s Law on Citizens’ Electronic Access to Public Services. [..]

    Currently, CENATIC is working on Open Source applications for XBRL, a language for document exchange between administrations. Its interim conclusion is that there are viable Open Source solutions for financial document exchange between public administrations, small and medium-sized enterprises and the tax and regulatory authorities.

    Read the full news.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:26 am on July 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Network Neutrality: European Telecommunications Packet Regulations rejected 

    EU: media lobby’s monitoring proposal rejected

    The Telecommunications Package will not prescribe uninterrupted monitoring of the internet as demanded by the Conservatives on behalf of the media and entertainment industry. On Monday evening, the Industry, Research and Energy Committee (ITRE) and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) of the European Parliament voted on around 1,000 changes to the EU Telecom rules, consolidated into over 30 amendments. The compromise proposal put forward by the rapporteur for the draft framework directive, Catherine Trautmann, was accepted. The Conservatives are said to have become more sceptical about “internet monitoring”.

    Read the full article.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:56 pm on July 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Foundations: GNOME Hires Stormy Peters 

    The GNOME Foundation – engaged to further the goal of the GNOME project to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software – hired Stormy Peters as Executive Director.

    Stormy will be focusing on accelerating the adoption of GNOME desktop, working with the board of directors, to strengthen the foundation by attracting new industry members and community contributors.

    Luis Villa welcoming Stormy on board said:

    This is obviously a big commitment for GNOME. It has been a while since we’ve had a full-time employee, and we’ve clearly been doing pretty OK without one – we continue to have good relationships with our advisory board, we still have a strong community, and we continue to develop very strong, relevant software. So there is an obvious question of ‘why now?’ My answer is that this a time of opportunity for GNOME – we have a ton of opportunities in the mobile space; we’re starting to see Linux desktop uptake at places like Dell and Asus; and we serve an important role as a critical infrastructure provider for exciting, dynamic projects like Mozilla and OLPC.

    The GNOME board felt the need to employ a professional with a proven track of record to face challenges and to pursue opportunities diversely treated by the actual organization. As result from a recent academic research, volunteers are key drivers of peripheral activities, while community-integrated paid developers have an important role in project  development, maintaining the infrastructure aspects of the code base.

    Attracting industry members and similar strategic tasks are not an autonomous peripheral participation,  a term used to describe activities that support and complement code development within /OS projects, like translations, interface aspects visible to the user, writing, marketing and artwork.

    Is Stormy Peters the right person for that job? She shared with me a little background of her.

    I’ve been involved with the GNOME community for eight years now – they were my introduction into the world of open source. After my first GUADEC, I was hooked by the GNOME community’s passion and excitement about creating a free and open source desktop for all as well as an awesome development environment.

    Luis Villa reporting about Stormy hiring process says very good things of her, so she is probably the most suited for such job. A tough job, requiring to accommodate pretty different needs, being even if the GNOME Foundation is a sponsored community project.

    I didn’t find much about GNOME Financial information, and I asked Stormy the following question:

    How does the GNOME Foundation pay your salary?

    The GNOME Foundation has a number of income streams from sponsorship fees to GUADEC (their annual conference). The current funding will cover my salary, but the hope is that my involvement will increase the community and industry involvement as well.

    Stormy will be creating her own job, and it is a probably a very new one.

    I wish you best of luck!

    Technorati Tags: StormyPeters, GUADEC, GNOME, GNOME Foundation

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:42 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Network Neutrality: FFII urges action on the European Telecommunications Packet Regulations, first reactions 

    Today the European Parliament is going to vote on proposed amendments to the telecommunications packet regulation, below an excerpt of FFII press release and Kathy Sinnott reactions.

    European Parliament rushes towards Soviet Internet

    Brussels, 04 July 2008 — Amendments to the European Telecommunications directive being rushed through the European Parliament propose a “Soviet internet” where software publishers and internet service providers watch traffic and data for Hollywood. Software and services that run on the internet would have to ask for permission of the regulators.

    Some amendments to the European Telecommunications directive allow administrative authorities in each Member State to define which are the authorised software applications for the internet. Parts of the directive should be implemented by the member states through requiring specific “technical features” in electronic communications networks. Live-analysis and filtering compose a pre-requisite for a “Soviet style” censorship environment.

    Read the full press release, below Kathy Sinnott’s press release.

    Kathy Sinnott MEP for Munster will be voting against a series of amendments to the European Telecommunications Directive designed to give the EU control over citizen’s internet usage. The proposed amendments to the could force internet service providers to turn over information on customers and monitor their internet usage. It could also force software makers to include spyware in their products to allow not only governments but also corporations to monitor citizen’s activities whether or not they are suspected of unlawful behaviour.

    Kathy Sinnott MEP said “I am a great proponent of net neutrality. The reason the internet is what it is today, is that no-one owns it and no company or government has as yet taken control over it. These amendments being pressed by some MEP’s seek to move Europe closer to the Chinese internet model where usage is monitored and where an individual goes online can be curtailed. This will give vast control over our lives to governments and in some cases corporations. I believe that law enforcement agencies should be allowed to pursue specific targets (eg. child pornography, terrorism) but monitoring the
    entire populace is not the way to go about it. These intrusions into our privacy would be unacceptable and I will be urging my colleagues to vote down all such amendments on July 7th.”

    Read also Philippe Aigrain’s post on the subject.

    Technorati Tags: Network Neutrality, net neutrality, FFII, European Parliament, Kathy Sinnott

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:24 pm on July 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source and Social Responsibility, some random thoughts 

    Bradley M. Kuhn, FLOSS Community Liaison and Technology Director of Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), asks if contributing to FLOSS is becoming a social cause, as he received a phone call from someone involved with a socially responsible investment house.

    Social ResponsibilitySocial Responsibility by Casallart

    My friend Stefano Maffulli wonders if free software is closer to be perceived as a social clause, suggesting that we might need a way to measure how close the actions of corporations are to the values of the Free Software movement.

    While I am not convinced it is feasible to measure what he calls the “Free Software Fairness Index”, I see that Jonathan Schwartz in 2007 published the first Sun’s Corporate Social Responsibility report, while corporate/social responsibility advocates asked the Oracle board to issue an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders.

    Are we really entering an era where FLOSS issues are on the socially responsible criteria list for investors, as Bradley hopes?

    Technorati Tags: social responsibility, BradleyKuhn, Stefano Maffulli

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:00 am on July 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Observatory and Repository, EC considering Open Source Migration, German Migration Guide available: links 05-07-2008 

    The Open Source Observatory and Repository opens up – The OSOR provides a platform for the exchange of information, experiences and FLOSS-based code for the use in public administrations, everyone is invited.

    EU: EC considers study on migration to Open Source – The European Commission seems considering doing research on whether it should migrate to Open Source software or not. Carlo Piana commented saying that the Commission should be more thorough in following their own policies.

    EU: SUN and Novell to governments: there is plenty of Open Source support – Simon Phipps says there is enough support available for Open Source projects of any scale. It sounds a bit over optimistic.

    DE: Manual for migrating to Open Source updated -The German Ministry of the Interior has published the third edition of its ‘Migrationsleitfaden’, a manual for public administrations  migrating to Open Source. The guide was first published in 2003. It has been downloaded 150,000 times so far and has been translated into several languages.

    Sign up for the IDABC Monthly Open Source News Service if interested in similar news.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:05 pm on July 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Development: About Community and Sponsored Projects 

    Classifying Open Source production models is not an academic curiosity, as result from recent conversations on how the development model affects at large the software life-cycle and, more important, the business strategy.

    Theodore Ts’o opened a conversation about organic vs non organic open source development, following a Mozilla’s organic definition. Matthew Aslett later reopened the discussion further exploring the bee keeper analogy, getting some reactions from Stormy Peters and James Dixon (original author of the Bee Keeper model).

    Sponsored DevelopersAre all your developers corporate-sponsored? by camera_rwanda

    Beyond definitions, the way open source firms cope with their communities, and how their business is affected by the relationship, worth some attention. The relationships between firms and communities in open source software has been analyzed by very few academic papers so far. Dahlander and Magnusson in their paper “Relationships between open source software companies and communities: Observations from Nordic firms” distinguished three different approaches to handle the firm–community relationship: symbiotic, commensalistic, and parasitic. Managerial issues vary depending on the chosen approach. The symbiotic approach seem to be the most promising in terms of the possibility to influence the community, but firms adopting it are also confronted with challenging managerial issues related to decision rights and control.

    West and O’Mahony in “contrasting community building in sponsored and community founded open source projects” investigated how changes in building and attracting an “external” when open source firms spin out internally developed code. The following table from the paper reports key issues for community-led and sponsored open source projects.

     

    Community initiated

    Sponsored

    Reasons for Initiation
    • Solve a problem
    • Create a “free software” alternative to proprietary solution
    • Achieve greater adoption
    • Get development help on areas that are of ow priority for the firm (e.g. special dialects)

    Key Issues
    • Garnering Resources
    • Building healthy community, attracting talented developers
    • Distributing software
    • Gaining “mindshare” with minimal marketing
    • Gaining legitimacy
    • Building healthy community, attracting talented contributors
    • Resolving ambiguity about control and ownership

    Contributor Motivations
    • To make software happen
    • To gain fulfillment
    • To build and learn new skills
    • To Solve personal and professional problems
    • To complete areas that are of high priority for contributors
    • To gain visibility by prospective employers
    • To influence sponsor’s alignment with complementary projects

    Control
    • Democratic, transparent, usually meritocratic
    • Some leadership and stratification
    • Varies but usually sponsor retains direct or indirect control

    The paper suggests that ongoing relationships between the sponsor and the community face a trade-off between appropriating returns from the commons versus providing incentives for external participants to join the community. As a matter of fact unilateral decisions and legal obligations make difficult recruiting contributors. On the contrary governance mechanisms enabling the sponsor to determine project’s evolution through pluralistic support are definitely of help in this respect.

    Apache, the Collaborative Software Initiative, Eclipse, OpenOffice.org or SAKAI seem to follow very different approaches to community building, technology transfer and fostering open source ecosystems. That is for another post, maybe more than one: I will make some interview before reaching any conclusion, in if any.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, community-driven, collaborative software initiative, open source projects, SAKAI, Dahlander, Magnusson, OMahony, West

     

    • James Dixon 4:52 pm on July 4, 2008 Permalink

      These are great points Roberto.

      Based on my own experience I don’t agree with West and Mahony’s items in the Contributor Motivations section. I have contributed to both commercial and organic projects in the past and my motivation is the same regardless of the model: I have a need for the software that the project produces but I am stalled or blocked by a documentation, design, or coding issue. I participate in the project to unblock myself and in the process I contribute my changes to the project.

      In terms of how I select the packge in the first place I try several projects and choose the one that has the bet fit for my needs (this includes functionality, architecture, community etc). I don’t care whether it came from JBoss or Apache or Sourceforge.

      James Dixon, CTO, Pentaho

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:52 pm on July 4, 2008 Permalink

      Hi James, it is great to hear back from you!

      I quoted the West and Mahony’s original table fully, and I agree that the Contributor Motivations section is probably not the most interesting (Lakhani and Wolf are my first choice in this respect).

      I agree that open source software selection is a very interesting topic. I will cover this issue at some extent talking about how super-communities fit into the open source development picture, and your feedback is welcome!

    • Joel West 11:21 pm on July 15, 2008 Permalink

      I would tend to agree that the motivations section was not the strongest part: it was less our own work and thus heavily derived from the prior research of others (including Lakhani and Wolf). The main focus we had — what we thought the contribution was — was on governance of sponsored projects and how that differs from independent ones. This is consistent with Siobhan’s work on community governance and my own interest in openness as a source of competitive advantage.

      Given our focus, we may have simplified away James’ case where he needs the technology and therefore does something to make it happen. This is very consistent with the story of Brian Behlendorf and the Apache contributors.

      However this is where I’d draw the distinction. Brian was contributing because as an employee of a user company — i.e. a company running a website. The data collection for this study focused on IT vendors, normally companies that want to give away X so they can sell Y. So the motivations here tended to be more strategic: we’ll assign 2.5 bodies to support project X to make sure it is available for us when we need it.

      I can certainly see how the line gets blurry for IT vendors: IBM support Apache on principle, but a particular bug needs to be fixed by next week so that WebSphere 12.7 won’t crash. Still, for big companies there’s normally a requirement to get permission to work on OSS projects (at least during work hours) and so the decision to participate in a project would have to be approved as fitting the strategic goals of the company. Presumably a CTO (especially in a non-public company) would have more discretion than a bench-level engineer.

      Joel West
      San Jose State

    • Joel West 11:31 pm on July 15, 2008 Permalink

      Oops, now I can see the source of the confusion.

      The paper quoted in this blog posting is the one that Siobhan & I wrote in June 2004 — effectively our first draft.

      The paper I was referring to one published in April 2008. The newer paper reflects many months of working out the governance issues that distinguish sponsored from independent projects.

      Joel

    • Roberto Galoppini 4:26 pm on July 18, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Joel, I am really glad you joined the conversation.

      I tend to spend part of my blogger’s time and effort to spread the word about academic researches and EC-funded projects, often unknown due to poor dissemination. I think it is a great thing that you spend some time blogging about your findings.

      I took the chance to report about your newest paper on another post about open source communities, maybe raising other issues about what I call hybrid production model.

      Getting back to your comments, I believe that IT vendors are the most important open source actor, but not the only one. Actors like the Collaborative Software Initiative are just trying to industrialize bottom-up processes seen with Apache before, and later with organizations like SAKAI.

      I guess that open source ecosystems in the next future will be seeing consumers playing a much important role.

      Do you agree?

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:37 pm on July 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Community Awards: Selected Finalists Announced 

    Sourceforge 2008 community choice awards‘ nomination phase is closed, the finalists list is on line and it is time to vote.

    I am partialI Am Also Partial To A Sip Of Wine Sometimes… by *lemonade*

    This year’s pool is a mixture of old favorites and new names, and I am happy that OpenOffice.org is in the “Most Likely to Change the World” category, and invite you to vote for our beloved project!

    Yes, I am partial to my favorite open source productive suite!

    Technorati Tags: SourceForge, Open Source Community, Community Awards, OpenOffice.org, openoffice

     

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