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  • Roberto Galoppini 4:48 pm on July 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Survey: About OpenLogic Census 

    Six months ago OpenLogic announced the Open Source Census, an initiative to quantify the global use of open source in enterprises. On the 16th of April OpenLogic eventually launched the collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software, and recently announced the first results.
    Complete Lego CensusComplete Lego Census by Cavalier92

     

    • Ubuntu is the top Linux distribution on machines scanned to date – Various versions of Ubuntu accounted for almost 50% of all Linux distributions installed on participating machines. Debian accounted for 14%; SUSE Linux accounted for 12% of install base; Fedora Core 7%.
    • International interest in Census – 66% of machines scanned in the first two months were outside the U.S. U.S. participants represented about one third of participants. Active global participation in the Census came from areas such as Europe, Canada and Australia.
    • Top open source packages – The top 5 installed open source packages were in order were, Firefox, Xerces, Zlib, Xalan and Prototype.

    I asked my twitter and blog buddy Stormy Peters , Director of Community and Partner Programs at OpenLogic, some feedback about the Census initiative. OpenLogic is an open source firm providing services to help customers to manage open source governance, taking advantage of the frequent lack of open source corporate actors. Apparently launching this survey OpenLogic is doing Forrester, Gartner or IDC job (the last is one of the sponsor of the initiative).

    Why OpenLogic decided to launch an opt-in survey?

     

    As OpenLogic worked with large enterprises, we realized that companies did not know how much open source software they were using. To help address this problem, we developed an open source tool, OSS Discovery, to allow companies to inventory the open source on their systems. As we started working with customers to conduct these inventories, we felt that it would be useful to aggregate this data in an anonymous way. From this experience, The Open Source Census was born. Most research firms use traditional surveys (of software vendors or of end users). Unfortunately, these methods are inadequate for open source since it is downloaded freely and companies do not always know how much open source they are using. IDC sponsored The Open Source Census to supplement the data that they get from other research methods.

    Traditional surveys, basically done by phone calls to software vendors, simply don’t work: OSS procurement is done by clicking on a download button, most of the times. OpenLogic conducting such a survey sponsored by IDC is definitely a sign of the time.

     

     

    What can you tell about the OS census so far?

    We are happy with the initial response to The Open Source Census with almost 1500 systems scanned as of Jun 30. To date, most of the participants in the Census are individuals scanning and submitting data for one or two systems. This is expected since these participants primarily came from press when we launched The Open Source Census. We are now working to actively recruit large enterprises to scan a sampling of machines. We expect that many of these enterprises will scan hundreds or even thousands of machines. The sponsors of The Open Source Census are currently recruiting enterprises and we expect these activities to pay off in the months ahead as enterprises submit large blocks of scans to the Census.

    Enterprises scans will tell us a lot of interesting things, I am not sure Firefox or Xerces will still be in the top ten, though.

    Any comment about the reaction to news of Microsoft’s Support of Open Source Census?

     

    From the beginning, we knew that we wanted The Open Source Census to be a collaborative effort – not just specific to OpenLogic. We felt that collaboration was critical to making The Open Source Census successful. Prior to launching The Open Source Census, we began the process of reaching out to a wide variety of participants in the open source community and ecosystem. The list included large platform vendors, commercial open source vendors, open source communities and organizations, law firms and analysts. Because this is an open project, we did not limit or exclude anyone from sponsoring or participating – as long as they agreed with the goals and process for The Open Source Census. We welcome all sponsors who might want to participate and help make The Open Source Census successful.

    Beyond Stormy’s diplomatic answer all the fuss around Microsoft’s sponsorship is spreading the word about the open source census, and Matt Asay, Savio Rodrigues and Sean Michael Kerner posts are of help in this respect.

    Side effect or not?

    About The Open Source Census:
    The Open Source Census is a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in enterprise. Founded by OpenLogic, the Open Source Census has a number of sponsors including OpenLogic and IDC. The Open Source Census initiative has open source tools designed to scan individual enterprise computers for all installed open source software. The results of these scans can then be contributed anonymously to the Open Source Census, where the aggregate data is published.

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, openlogic, OpenLogic Census, IDC, Gartner, Forrester, StormyPeters

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:20 am on June 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Software Patents: about the WIPO patent committee meeting 

    After a hiatus of three years, the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) met for its 12th session on June 23, 2008 to June 27, 2008. Given the collapse of the talks to initiate a Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) to harmonize patent law with respect to prior art, novelty, inventive step and grace period, even the most prescient of WIPO watchers were at a loss in prognosticating the outcome of the WIPO SCP. In 2007, informal consultations of the WIPO SCP were not able come to consensus on deciding upon a work program for the WIPO patent committee.

    As a result the the WIPO General Assembly (2007) instructed the International Bureau to

    establish a report on issues relating to the international patent system covering the different needs and interests of all Member States, which would constitute a working document for the next session of the SCP. The Report would contextualize the existing situation of the international patent system, including reference to the WIPO Development Agenda process, and would contain no conclusions.

    Under the stewardship of the Chair (Maximiliano Santa Cruz, Chile), and his two Vice-Chairs (Mr. Yin Xintian, China) and (Bucura Ionescu, Romania) working in concert with the International Bureau, this meeting bore witness to the flexibilities displayed by Member States including Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, the European Union, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Singapore and Switzerland to ensure that the WIPO patent committee embrace a positive agenda. This positive agenda is evidenced in the Summary by the Chair(SCP/12/4 Rev) posted by WIPO on June 27, 2008. It should also not be forgotten that during the patent committee interregnum, the International Bureau launched a series of patent symposiums that covered a range of issues including the research exemption and patents and standards.

    Despite strong signals sent by Group B countries (rich countries) early on in the Committee that left no doubts that patent harmonization was foremost on their agenda, the conclusion of the meeting took a different turn, a balanced outcome that gave something to developed countries and developing countries, users and right holders alike.

    Read the full article, by Thiru Balasubramaniam

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:45 am on June 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Italy seen from UK, by Matthew Aslett 

    To coincide with EURO 2008, Matthew Aslett is embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

    We lost with Spain, and Matthew wrote his Italian Open Source Tour.

    Key policies:
    In October 2002, a commission for free software in public administration was established to study open source adoption. in May 2003 CNIPA (Centro Nazionale per l’Informatica della Pubblica Amministrazione) published a study (PDF in Italian) that recommended (amongst other things) that public offices should neither prohibit nor penalize the use of OSS packages. A working group later produced guidelines (PDF in Italian) as to how to remain compliant with the recommendations.

    The Italian government put its money where its mouth was in December 2006 as Italian budget law committed €30m over three years to projects that stimulate the information society (although what happened to those funds is open to question) while in May 2007 Italy launched its own repository of open source software for public administrations, the Collaborative Development Environment.

    In June 2007 Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, announced the creation of the second Open Source Commission to define guidelines for public procurement of open source software. In May 2008 it published its first draft report.

    Key projects:
    National open source success stories include the Ministry of Justice, which has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as has the Ministry of Economics and Finance.

    Meanwhile the National Institute of Design and Mint is using JBoss, and Corte dei Conti is also using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

    In July 2007 the IT department of the Italian Parliament presented plans for the migration of 200 servers and more than 3,500 desktop PCs to Linux and OpenOffice. The migration was due to begin in September and take two years.

    Regional government projects include Cremona, Foggia, Rome, Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Genoa, Bologna, Balzano, Savona, Umbria, and Tuscany again.

    More details are available of Rome’s open source policy, Genova’s OpenOffice trials, Bologna’s open source projects, and Bolzano’s FUSS project.

    Read the full article.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:12 pm on June 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Mobile: Funambol keeps growing and raises 12.5 Millions in Venture Capital 

    Congratulations to the Funambol team for raising 12.5 millions of funding in a series B financing led by mobile-focused venture capital firm Nexit Ventures, along with Castile Ventures (new investor) and was joined by existing investors, Walden International and HIG Ventures.

    Investors are banking in a long term perspective, while Funambol is cash flow positive from the beginning of this year, so I asked my friend Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, the following question:

    How is this money going to be spent?

    Tight-ropeA tight-rope walker (funambol) by hdc.

    Our plan is to use the cash to scale up the organization. In particular, around sales and operations. Commercial open source companies tend to have leads in every part of the world, which is a great thing. However, in order to follow the leads through, you need people on site (in particular if you are selling a product to service providers). Therefore, we are opening a few more offices world-wide, where we already have customers, to properly serve them and expand our presence.

    Sometimes easy questions are a valuable tool to get interesting insights. Open source ISVs facing the “turning OSS users into customers” are likely to meet Lead Users – a term coined by Eric Von Hippel referring to users of a product experiencing needs actually unfulfilled and who could significantly benefit from the solution to those needs – from all over the world. If thinking global is the natural choice for open source firms, acting locally requires individualization and customizations to your customers’ needs, yet a local structure to effectively implement such needs.

    As mentioned in my first interview to Fabrizio, Funambol addresses only the “top of the pyramid” (carriers, large ISP, etc), enabling also the base of the pyramid – the “free” Customers – to generate value for Funambol, as it is happening with AOL who just selected Funambol to help with synchronization of its own online and mobile mail.

    In the meantime Funambol ignited also a partnership with SpikeSource, in order to address through SpikeSource and their partners other layers of the “pyramid”. Fabrizio himself commenting the partnership said:

    This partnership with SpikeSource enables every company, regardless of size, to benefit from the simple implementation of Funambol’s mobile open source application.

    Funambol besides fostering its community and delivering its wireless sync application for the iPhone, is creating an open source (mobile) ecosystem around its platform, as every open source firm should do.

    Kudos to Fabrizio and his team!

    Technorati Tags: Funambol, SpikeSource, Spikeignited, Venture Capital, Nexit Ventures, Castile Ventures, Walden International, HIG Ventures, FabrizioCapobianco, lead users, free customers, pyramid market

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:36 pm on June 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Mail merge in OpenOffice.org, Microsoft ODF Workshop, Open Source in Portugal: OpenOffice.org links, 23-06-2008 

    Mail merge in OpenOffice.org – mail merge in OpenOffice.org made clear.

    Microsoft Invites to ODF Workshop in Redmond – Erwin Tenhumberg, who is leaving Sun to join SAP, reports about the event.

    Open source tour of Europe: Portugal – Matthew Aslett reports about OpenOffice.org/StarOffice in Portugal since 2004, just as happened in Italy.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:17 am on June 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Lazio e-Citizen, secretly open source compatible 

    epractice.eu, the portal created by the European Commission offers a service for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners, reported about Lazio e-Citizen, a digital inclusion project.

    The programme responded to European directives on the Lisbon Strategy and its objectives were to increase the residents’ awareness of the importance of digital literacy, the benefits that e-skills bring to their personal and professional lives, and to fight against social exclusion. The project developed a strategy to bridge the digital divide based on specific criteria: gender, age and skill levels.

    SecretDon’t be a secret keeper by *Drangongly*

    I asked Alessandra Devitofrancesco (ECDL foundation), author of the Lazio e-Citizen case reported on epractice to tell me more, and she kindly put me in touch with the AICA (ECDL member) responsible of the initiative, Pierpaolo Maggi.

    He explained me that the project has been developed using the open source course management system Moodle, and that the portal is accessible also through Firefox and Netscape. On the contrary the article on epractice and also e-citizen FAQ report (bold emphasis is mine):

    The schools, universities and Permanent Territorial Centres which were involved in the Lazio e-Citizen project were chosen according to different technological requirements:

    • Availability of one or more rooms with at least 12+5 desks and Internet access (ADSL or wireless)
    • LAN network among all desks and shared printer
    • PC Pentium 4 (or superior) or equivalent (i.e. AMD)
    • Windows 2000 or later versions
    • Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 or superior
    • Accessories: audio set and headphones: CD ROM reader, minimum video resolution SVGA 800×600

It is time for outing, I publicly invite project’s promoters to disclose the specific technology choice (moodle), how it has been used and, last but not the least, telling people that the portal is accessible to open source.

eAccessibility and eInclusion are definitely also about allowing open source users to access information.

Technorati Tags: eAccessibility, eInclusion, digital literacy, digital divide, moodle, lazio e-citizen, course management system, epractice, Lazio

 

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:15 pm on June 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: France beats Italy 4-0! 

    SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, a competitiveness cluster aimed at developing the local economy and enterprises’ competitiveness, using partnership and training to produce and deliver enabling innovations, just run its third internal convention. Among the five thematic groups, since October 2007 has been included a technology-oriented working group on open source (Logiciel Libre).

    ParisParis, capital du logiciel libre by Koninho

    Roberto Di Cosmo, professor at the university of Paris-Diderot and president of the Logiciel Libre working group, invited me to join the event to learn more about what is going on in the Paris area in the free software arena.

    Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva’s CEO, is the vice-president of the open source thematic group, while in the council are sitting representatives from big firms like Cap Gemini, Bull, C-S, along with people from INRIA, university Pierre et Marie Curie and Nuxeo.

    Roberto explains that the goal of this group is to help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area by federating research laboratories, SMEs and big firms through R&D projects, partially supported by public funding in the standard scheme of competitivenes clusters.

    The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors. On the other side, this framework has been put at work in the particularly fertile ground of the Paris area, that hosts 50% of the ITC R&D of France, with a significant presence of Open Source ISV, a large number of research centers and Universities with IT laboratories, that have a long tradition of contributing to Free Software, and an exceptionally high concentration if IT expenditures.

    Roberto, how System@tic allocates resources to the projects?

    A distinguishing feature of the R&D projects in a competitiveness cluster, is that they must bring together at least two industrial partners and a research laboratory. In the case of our group, resources are allocated in the following manner: 59% SMEs, 26% laboratories, 15% big firms. The projects go through a rigorous evaluation process, first inside the group, then at the level of the cluster, and then in the services of the ministry of Industry, the region, and the departments of the Paris area.

    During the first year public investments sum up to less than five millions euro, less than half of the how much has been allocated for open source software by the Italian budget law last year, this year and next one. Italy is investing more money actually, but it is still unclear how such investments will eventually benefit the IT Italian ecosystem, though.

    Italy is still missing a clear strategy about how to foster the Italian open source ecosystem through training, education, research and outreach, while France apparently has found its own path for developing it.

    Dominique Vernay, Systematic president, during his opening speech congratulated the Open Source group for the speed with which it has started 4 high quality R&D projects, integrating quickly in the Systematic infrastructure.

    Marc Lipinski – vice president of the Conseil Régional de l’Ile de France for higher education, research and innovation – gave a particular importance to the role of this group while addressing the over 400 delegates present in the room, stressing its creation as one of the most significant events in the last year for Systematic.

    During coffee-breaks I spoke with few French open source actors, among others Cedric Thomas (OW2), Ludovic Dubost (Xwiki), Stéfane Fermiger (Nuxeo), Daniel Schaefer (Kalis), but also with open source customers, like Denis Teyssou (AFP) or Marie Buhot-Launay (Paris Region Economic Development Agency), inward investment adviser for ISV companies wanting to invest in the Paris area.

    People had a very positive feeling with regard to the approved open source projects, and looking at projects like scribo is easy to share their thoughts.

    SCRIBO – Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies – aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents. SCRIBO has a total budget of 4.3M? and is partially funded by the French administration. It brings 9 participants together: AFP, CEA LIST, INRIA, LRDE (Epita), Mandriva, Nuxeo, Proxem, Tagmatica and XWiki.

    Italy beat France on a soccer field, but on the open source ground we have a lot to learn from them.

    Technorati Tags: France, Italy, Open Source Government, ecosystems, DominiqueVernay, RobertoDCosmo, MarcLipinski, FrancoisBancilhon, Scribo, System@tic

     

    • Djordje Lukic 12:08 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink

      Hm… I wonder why the hell Di Cosmo didn’t tell his students about this …

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:42 am on June 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Monitoring: RRDTool 1.3 available, a chat with Tobias Oetiker 

    RRDTool, the round-robin database tool, announced the release of RRDtool 1.3. The new release includes additional capabilities and functionalities, and it has been rewritten to make it more modular.

    Tobias Oetiker, the author of many famous open source tools like RRDTool, MRTG and SmokePing holding a seat on GroundWork Open Source’s Project Lead Council, approaches software development from an hacker perspective: to scratch a personal itch.

    Tobias Oetiker
    Tobias Oetiker (on the right) by QFamily

    Since I had issues to solve and did not find existing software to do it. Then because I use OSS almost exclusively in my work, I found it only fair to share the results of my work too. After all OSS only works when several parties throw their goods into the basket.

    How all this started?

    I wrote MRTG and SmokePing because I needed the functionality. So essentially I wrote them for myself. And since I like to see people enjoying using my tools, I put them out there. In the case of rrdtool, I did not need it directly, but based on the experience from writing MRTG I had a pretty clear vision as to what tool is missing from the system managers toolbox.

    So the motivation for writing rrdtool was primarily drawn from the positive feedback I got from mrtg users. As it turned out, I had actually hit a nerve with all three of my tools since they all got pretty good use across the net.

    For most of the time while developing the tools I have been working for ETH Zurich and did the tool work mostly in my spare time. Since I had a fixed income from the University I did not explore commercial opportunities.

    Originally economic incentives weren’t the cause behind such code developments.
    What about the economic incentives, today?

    I found that publishing software as OSS has the nice effect of triggering more feedback than in a closed environment and also draws contributions every now and then which is a very nice plus the economic value is in me being known quite well for my work which makes it very easy getting contracts, because people assume I know stuff, which is not entirely a wrong assumption <smile>.

    There are also direct benefits, in the sense that some companies contract me to develop additional features for the OSS packages. I always draw up the contracts such that I can include the results back into the mainline. Most of smokePing extensions have been created in this way.

    Tobias was the typical hacker described by researches interested in understanding motivations (intrisic motivations). Later Tobias was also also motivated by financial rewards (extrinsic motivations), coming from selling consulting services on his products, and he eventually ended open his own company.

    Which are your source of revenues, besides consulting?

    Well I am trying this with the sponsorship approach, the idea is that companies that profit from the products become a sponsor who just gives money to encourage the future development of the product. I use this money to pay for maintaining the products and developing some additions which are not covered by some other contract, just because I think they are necessary a further source of income is google ads which works quite well due to the high traffic on the website.

    Which are the advantages for your customers? And for you?

    The big advantage of this approach is that the customers normally have a clear vision of which problem they want to solve, and since I know the tool well I can integrate an optimal solution which will continue to evolve even after the contract ends, since the extension is now part of the product.

    This leads to a forth motivation to do it all. Being the author of these well known tools gives me a certain standing in the industry, which comes in handy when bidding for contracts, since customer assume (rightly) that I know stuff and I am able to finish projects.

    Our biggest contract last year had nothing to do with any of the tools but the customer asked us only because he had seen my name mentioned in connection with monitoring.

    Tobias creates tools in a way that users can get along without needing any extra support contract. The software is enriched as part of their service offerings, and as time goes by they enhance their toolbox. They do not sell tools, but the stuff they make the tools for.

    Oetiker + Partner AG is a pure IT service company, for some probably the highest form of open source firm.

    Happy hacking Tobias!

    About RRDtool
    RRDtool is a freely (as in freedom and in beer) available software tool for the collection and graphical display of time series data and is deployed to monitor computer networks and network traffic. Installed at hundred thousands of sites world wide, RRDtool monitors everything from small local networks to large IT infrastructures of internationally operating telecom providers. RRDtool is included in the family of Open Source tools developed by Tobias Oetiker, which also includes MRTG, and SmokePing, which is used for the measurement and display of line quality parameters in Internet connections. For more information about MRTG, RRDtool and SmokePing visit: http://oss.oetiker.ch

    Technorati Tags: TobiasOetiker, Open Source Monitoring, Network Management, GroundWork, RRDTools, MRTG, smokeping, motivations

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:24 pm on June 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice and Mono, MySQL Italian Webinar, About going hybrid at Microsoft: links 15-06-07 

    OpenOffice-based applications with Mono and MonoDevelop – Miguel de Icaza teaches you how to build OpenOffice solutions with Mono and MonoDevelop.

    Italian Webinar – Materiale, Domande e Risposte per il Webinar “Guida alla scalabilita’ di MySQL” – Ivan Zoratti Q&A session held during the Italian webinar on MySQL scalability.

    Go hybrid – Paul Bach is looking for projects hosted on CodePlex interested in participating a research aimed at designing Codeplex support.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:44 am on June 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Forresters on Open Source usage, SIP Standards adherence at Microsoft, Open Source European Tour: links 14-11- 

    Forrester survey finds lack of interest in OSS? – Savio on Forrester’s findings, interesting.

    Port 25 fighting the good fight: A story of SIP compliance and standards adherence at Microsoft Corporation – James Governor reports about s Sam Ramji’s efforts to ensure Microsoft’s SIP softphone work with Asterisk open source PBX and SIP Server.

    Open Source European tour – Matthew Aslett is taking a look at open source policies and deployment projects in some European nations.


     

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