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  • Roberto Galoppini 8:14 am on June 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: Standards Today Bulletin, April-May 2008 

    Standards Today – sponsored by Gesmer Updegrove LLP – is a source of news, ideas and analysis relevant to those that develop and use standards.

    EDITOR’S NOTE: ONE FOR ALL AND ALL FOR ONE
    For centuries, the life of the author, inventor or researcher has largely been solitary rather than collaborative. Just another one of those cases where the Internet really is changing everything.
    EDITORIAL: PATIENCE AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF COLLABORATIVE EXPRESSION
    The full potential of the Internet to act as a platform for the sharing of content and information is only beginning to be explored. Many are embracing that potential, using innovative tools such as open source and Creative Commons licenses. Others would circle the wagons to prevent their content from being more widely reused than in the past. It may be that they have the most to lose if they are successful.
    FEATURE ARTICLE: “OPENNESS” AND THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE
    Until the advent of the Internet, the acquisition of knowledge was a slow and linear process of discovery/review/publish/read and start the cycle once again. The legal system that evolved to support that process ranked the rights of creators over users, because society lost little in the bargain. Today, the Internet has upset that equation, and creators of all types are voluntarily relaxing their ownership rights in order to mutually enjoy the benefits of greater access, faster development, and more useful collaboration.
    STANDARDS BLOG: INTRODUCING THE HAGUE DECLARATION
    A new non-profit called the Digital Rights Organization has been founded to promote “free and open standards.” Its first public act was to issue a declaration calling on governments everywhere to protect the standards upon which our human rights depend.
    CONSIDER THIS: ALL STANDARDS ARE CREATED EQUAL (BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS)
    Standards are the bullies of the design world, always telling every other part of a plan what it has to do. But everyone has a boss, and even standards sometimes have to kowtow to an Alpha Standard.

    If you wish to receive future issues of Standards Today you can register or send an email to: consortiuminfo.org@gesmer.com with the word REGISTER in the subject line.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:37 am on May 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Mandriva at School, Denmark on Open Standards, Brazilian Open Source Procurement, OpenOffice courses: IDABC links 

    FR: Education Minister encourages Open Source use – Last month Mandriva and the French Ministry of Education agreed on a 60 percent discount for the purchase of the commercial version of the free software for all teachers and staff at France’s schools and universities. Austria too has plan to increase open source usage at school.

    DK: Committee appointed to evaluate impact of Open Standards – The Danish government appointed five experts to evaluate the implementation of Open Standards in the country. The committee is part of a study requested earlier by the Danish Parliament. I hope Italy will soon consider similar investigations.

    DE: Munich GNU/Linux desktop selects European Open Source licence – The development team of the most told migration project believes that having selected the EUPL will help other Open Source developers to implement and use their work. EUPL is one year old, but this project migration started back in 2003: what is going on?

    Brazilian government lists preferred Open Source applications -The list is intended to prevent equivalent software solutions from being developed several times. Public managers should check out the portal before starting a new software development project, and if a solution exists the procurement can then be adapted to improve on that software project. It sounds a great idea, maybe the Italian Government could consider a similar policy.

    LV: City council to provide OpenOffice courses – The city council of Ogre is providing free training for OpenOffice, an Open Source suite of office applications, to improve the competitiveness of the local businesses and boost the performance of the local government.

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

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:33 pm on May 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: About the Open Source session at ForumPA 

    The objective of the round-table “Between cooperation and competition: the necessary synthesis to help open source dissemination” recently held at the ForumPA was to facilitate a better understanding of what is missing in the Italian open source market from the public administration perspective.

    ForumPA, the greatest Italian event of and about the Public Administration, represents the largest community of practice in the Italian Public Sector, gathers more than 120.000 stakeholders of the public sector through the conference and by emailing the newsletter.

    In the CrowdIn the Crowd by Pensiero

    I am honored to have been asked by Gianni Dominici,Vice General Director of ForumPA, to chair the only open source session. I invited selected speakers to contribute on topics often not well covered by other nationwide open source gathering.

    Davide Gorini, Director of the first Italian open source business incubator, told the audience all about the business incubator offering facilities and consulting to entrepreneurs engaged in Free/Libre Open Source Software services and products.

    When OSS Incubator project was born we fixed three goals; giving support to FOSS startups, create networking and relationships with the suburb area, facilitate the encounter between software manufacturers and public administrations.After just one year since the launch the assessment is very positive; the response from entrepreneurs is enthusiastic and the structure is nearly full; companies have different business models, from CRM platform to GIS software and that helps the natural collaboration and internal networking.

    Contaminations with the suburb area are giving interesting feed-back; there is a growing exchange of ideas and participation to events and activities in order to spread the values and concepts of free and open source software.

    The third goal has been achieved and the result is the involvement of the incubator and of the companies working within it in projects of software development, training and support together with local and central PA.

    The conclusion is that such initiative has proved to be very effective and should be encouraged from local and Central Public Administration interested in promoting models of local development, knowledge diffusion and innovation.

    Italo Vignoli, OpenOffice.org Italian Marketing Manager, gave a very thoughtful speech on the need to marketing open source products, showing the audience OpenOffice.org marketing results. I took the chance to mention again ClamAV as example of good open source product with poor branding and hence little diffusion, proving the need for an open source awareness campaign.

    Getting back to OpenOffice.org Italian success, wearing my OpenOffice.org community hat I asked CNIPA representatives to fund our association with some money to help us to develop an OpenOffice.org add-on to digitally sign ODF document as required by CNIPA regulations (Adobe is already doing it).

    I asked Flavia Marzano, Strategic consultant for public administration innovation and long-time consultant on open source for public administrations, to talk about the story of free software in Italy, below her short recap.

    What can we say as a summary of the “story”?
    Since 1941 Italy has laws that help Public Administrations in buying free software, since 2004 Regions begun to make laws on free software for PAs, since 2006 Italian Government put money on free software for PAs… in 2008 we are still waiting for free software in PAs! Let’s go on…

    Paolo Zocchi, Senior Adviser of the Minister of Regions and Local Authorities by the previous Italian government, instead has adopted a much more positive tone, maybe even too much in respect of the actual Italian open source ecosystem.

    The round-table was interesting because of the diversity of the experiences of the speakers, and attendees could pose questions and get answers for about twenty minutes at the end of the session.

    My intention for the next year is to run it as an unconference event, do you agree?

    Technorati Tags: open source government, gianni dominici, davidegorini, italovignoli, flaviamarzano, paolozocchi, open source dissemination

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:36 pm on May 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Introducing Open Source Network Marketing 

    My decision to start Commercial Open Source blog was significantly influenced by my desire to share ideas on open source business models, extending my quest for feedback and opinions from other authoritative open source thought leaders.

    Rereading Matt Asay‘s post about “the convenience of proprietary software“, to which just yesterday followed Stormy Peters’ answer, I thought it was time to throw another business model idea: open source network marketing.

    Making a differenceMake a difference by aepoc

    Wikipedia’s entry on Network Marketing reports (the italic emphasis and URLs are mine):

    Network marketing is a business distribution model that allows a parent multi-level marketing company to market their products directly to consumers by means of relationship referral and direct selling.

    Independent unsalaried salespeople of multi-level marketing referred to as distributors (associates, independent business owners, franchise owners, sales consultants, consultants, independent agents, etc.), represent the parent company and are rewarded a commission relative to the volume of product sold through each of their independent businesses (organizations). Independent distributors develop their organization by either building an active customer base, who buy direct from the parent company and/or by recruiting a downline of independent distributors who also build a customer base, expanding the overall organization. Additionally, distributors can also earn a profit by retailing products which they purchased from the parent company at wholesale price.

    Skepticism around Multi Level Marketing has its place, and there are many resources explaining what’s wrong with Multi Level Marketing. As a matter of fact the legitimacy of MLM businesses can’t be given for granted, and many pyramid schemes try to present themselves as legitimate MLM businesses. Apparently the Federal Trade Commission advises that MLM companies setting greater incentives for recruitment than product sales are to be viewed skeptically. Others state that the real problem with MLM is the people it attracts, highlighting that network marketers often have little or no experience developing business relationships other than that of employer/employee, and they are in danger of disappointment caused by the failure to quickly satisfy unrealistic economical expectations.

    So, why do we need a scheme like an MLM to sell open source?

    Information asymmetry make categorizing open source customers a not so easy task, and I believe that is not uncommon to see users – read potential customers – spent a lot of time (therefore money) instead of buying commercial open source products and services. Someone, somewhere in the IT department, knows how much time spends to make things work.

    These people can make the difference, they can really help to turn users into customers, from inside.

    They use open source software, they know what kind of support do they need, they are the best distribution channel than ever. They do know how to reach customers – rather they live by them – and how to offer your value proposition.

    The point is: what you can offer them?

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Business, Open Source Marketing, Open Business, Network Marketing, business models

     

    • Fabio Marzocca 5:01 pm on May 31, 2008 Permalink

      What can you offer them, is your (and mine) question…

      One answer is hidden in Open Source’s main weapon: the Community. Qou can try to join all those people into an horizontal, cross community not strictly related to a software project but to a wide knowledge of main attractive themes of Open Source.

      It is not easy and I am here just putting my thoughts on a keyboard, but maybe we shoudl brainstorm on it.

      Fabio

    • Roberto Galoppini 3:57 pm on June 1, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Fabio,

      open source world is becoming more and more valuable, but only a tiny fraction of OS actual value goes back to the original author and to whoever it may concerns. I call this the “appropriating returns from Commons” problem.

      Open source network marketing – if applied responsibly and ethically – could be an effective response to such problem. Positive network effects are making few OS products ready for prime time, but half of them lack of enterprise support. CIOs are asking OS companies behave like proprietary vendors, pre-sales support included. Proficient open source personnel are, by no means, the better option.

      The frittering is truly in the details: how the compensation scheme pays, allow or not to allow downstream partnering, etc.

      Lose weight now, ask me how! 😉

    • Fabio Marzocca 1:07 pm on June 2, 2008 Permalink

      Roberto,

      you know very well that your words apply globally, and not on the poor italian OS market. Here we are far away from asking ourselves why the OS value doesn’t get back to original authors: there is NO value here to get back anywhere.

      But let’s talk globally. The benefits of the network effect are by no doubt interesting. And it could be a chance, too. I see just one problem: network effects have positive returns when you reach and go over a certain critical mass: how many investments should you draw in order to reach the critical mass?

      And now, here it is, my question: how does the compensation scheme pay? 🙂

    • Roberto Galoppini 4:45 pm on June 3, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Fabio,

      you are right, open source vendors are not popular in Italy, despite there are quite a few open source developers here.

      Talking about positive network effects, you are right saying that (big) investments are necessary. New players need to spend big bucks to reach a critical mass, and to become the next philanthropic arm of free software business is not for all. All in all there are enough well known open source products to which apply OS networking business models, though.

      The compensation scheme has to be build in a way that preserve and enhance open source values, and no economic rewards have their own place in the equation alongside economic ones. Moreover potential conflicts of interest has to be kept as low as possible, users have to turn into customers because it makes sense, not because network marketing has cheated them.

      The compensation scheme is just like a dress, and it has to fit you absolutely perfectly. It is definitely not a one-size-fits-all system.

    • Fabio Marzocca 11:01 pm on June 3, 2008 Permalink

      Roberto,

      while I’ll keep waiting to find my perfect dress to fit, I can tell you to add also myself into that “few italian open source developers” list! .-)

    • Roberto Galoppini 7:30 am on June 4, 2008 Permalink

      Fabio,

      I am afraid that great tools like your Baobab maybe not the perfect for open source network marketing, but I would be happy to tell people about you, let’s talk about that.

      Ciao!

    • Savio Rodrigues 1:21 pm on June 4, 2008 Permalink

      Roberto, I don’t’ think the problem is that users unknowingly spend time. They knowingly spend time to save money.

      The problem is that the OSS movement has used “low price…heck, we’re free” as the value driver for years now. Users have bought into this and now we expect users to all of a sudden pay for support or something else around OSS?

      This is why I strongly believe that selling support is the wrong decision for the OSS industry. Support is of little value…so why would I pay for it?

    • Roberto Galoppini 2:27 pm on June 4, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Savio, great hear from you again!

      I believe you are right about users knowingly spend time to save money, at least in US. But Europe is a different “country”, where CIOs look for solutions instead of products, as John Newton confirmed. TCO and ROI are rarely evaluated, attitude to risk taking is pretty low, and information asymmetry plays a role.

      So said, I am afraid you are generally right saying that support is of little value into mature IT markets, while it is growing interest in emerging ones.

    • Anonymous Coward 4:13 am on June 9, 2008 Permalink

      Nice. Turn open source into a scam.

      No one in their right mind would ever pay for open source software. There will never be sufficient economic value to charge for copies.

      There is no money in distribution. How can anyone compete with apt and yum?

      Digital copies will always be free as in beer. The value comes from the creation of originals. There are many professional open source developers getting paid to do just that.

      If you’d like to see more software, forget distribution, feed and shelter the creators of originals.

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:18 am on June 11, 2008 Permalink

      My idea of open source network marketing is neither a pyramidal nor a Ponzi scheme – that are both illegal and unethical – and it doesn’t pay on levels.

      You are right, an IT department could manage a Linux distribution on its own environment by itself. So said companies like Red Hat are delivering value to the market, even if the determination of this value is the result of subjective judgments.

      I definitely agree with you, when you say that to see more free software the market need to feed authors. Note that it doesn’t say anything about how this might actually be done, and I think that an appropriate network marketing could help to create economical resources for funding code development.

    • Zurvita 7:50 am on December 3, 2008 Permalink

      Why is it that every time somebody says “Network Marketing” the word SCAM is always attached?

      Although MLM or Network marketing attracts some people that are scammers and schemers there are some of us that are professionals that have been highly successful by helping others.

      Your compensation plan (it’s not a scheme) is vitally important and if you were to actually consider an Open Source MLM it would be extremely important to consult someone who has been successful in the industry.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:43 am on December 3, 2008 Permalink

      Open source is different, also in this respect. First, a large part of the free software crowd has strong ethics. Second, many open source developers and hackers have strong technical expertise on open source software.

      So said, I believe open source network marketing needs a team to be properly designed and implemented, and a MLM expert would definitely be one of them.

    • Kim Dion 12:16 pm on April 20, 2009 Permalink

      It is true that network marketing companies do push their people to recruit. I work with a training that coaches network marketers to lead with product and offer the option of an opportunity with the company. We believe that if a person is not passionate about the product they cannot not promote.

    • mlm classifieds 1:20 am on February 4, 2010 Permalink

      Kim,

      Your comments are thought-provoking. The industry is flooded with many mlm biiz opp. Success goes to the person who is passionate about the product. Now thats a long term biz.

      Regards,
      Alexander

    • Larry Rivera 10:01 pm on August 17, 2010 Permalink

      Hi Roberto,

      I think the biggest problem in the network marketing industry is there are so many people who are selling the sizzle of the business but not the steak.

      Just because something has a binary plan or a 5×5 doesn’t make it illegal or immoral. Unfortunately it only takes a few bad apples to ruin it for the bunch.

      I think in general the network marketing business model is one of the businesses models around that allows for motivated people to really get in there and earn some money.

      Personally I believe that if more people adopted mlm pay structures for their affiliate programs online they would find more people willing to promote their products.

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:02 pm on May 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Frameworks: WaveMaker, an interview with Chris Keene 

    The Open Source Think Tank has been a great opportunity to meet in person many open source CEO, and I just managed to run an email interview with one of them: Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker.

    WaveMaker, providing a web application development platform consisting of a visual AJAX component and a Java one, started life as a partly open source company building software for grid computing. In 2007 the company with the name ActiveGrid moved on to building a visual development platform in Python, finally under the NewWaveMaker brand.

    Chris Keene

    Chris Keene by twoeggs

    Chris, was AcriveGrid open source from the beginning?

    ActiveGrid was only partly open source because we had not fully embraced publishing our source code and involving the community in the development process. This meant that we had all the headaches of open source – people wanting everything for free – with none of the benefits of a committed community.

    What happened next?

    I joined ActiveGrid in early 2007 and made two immediate decisions: first, to move from Python to Java and second, to become a real open source company. We needed to move to Java in order to get corporate adoption and also because we found that the Java community had many robust components like Spring and Hibernate that could accelerate our development efforts.

    Why did you need to move to open source?

    We needed to move to open source because we lacked the enormous marketing and sales budget to sell our software directly to the enterprise. Instead, we needed to leverage word of mouth in the open source community to help us sneak into corporations through the back door of open source.

    I understand going open source basically was part of your marketing strategy.

    Did you benefit from the move?

    In December 2007, we renamed the company WaveMaker. In February, 2008, we announced our new WaveMaker product and our support for the AGPL license.

    Within two days of announcing our open source release, our download volumes skyrocketed by a factor of 20, from 50 downloads a day to over 1,000 downloads a day. At the same time, the number of registered users and daily posting volumes in our community at dev.wavemaker.com jumped by similar amounts.

    These results are pretty impressive, I admit. Lurking around your forums it looks like if answers usually come from WaveMaker’s employees, users seem to have a pretty parasitic approach to the “community” space. Developers following the motto “we don’t use software that costs money here“are probably happy with WaveMaker now, but how to turn downloads into profits is a different problem.

    Chris, how do you profit from your product?

    WaveMaker is available under a dual license: AGPL for open source projects, and a commercial license for projects which need support or enterprise security features.

    WaveMaker website reports about some customers and also about alliances, that is both useful for potential customers and partners, but is lacking of information about the differences between the open source and the proprietary version.

    If having a business model around the free software is fundamental, to let people know how your business works and how they can benefit is also important.

    About WaveMaker.
    WaveMaker is an open source, visual development platform for building Web 2.0 applications. WaveMaker applications are based on standard Java and Javascript and leverage other open source components such as Spring, Hibernate and Dojo.

    Technorati Tags: open source framework, wavemaker, activegrid, chriskeene, open source think tank, open source web 2.0, open source marketing

     

    • Abdul Latif Sultan 11:22 am on August 23, 2008 Permalink

      Hi, I’ve been writing a thesis on open source marketing. Though it’s a wide subject yet hardly anyone has written any thesis on it in India. It’s even hardly taught in Indian B-schools. It’s a vast subject & too widely used in India yet hardly anyone in India took any initiative for it. Now, I’ve been searching for evidence which suggest that OSM can bring commercial success & it’s not a fool game at all. The interview here that I read is quite supportive to OSM’s commercial facts yet I’d appreciate if I get some more support time & again in the form of an interview, questionnaire & other articles on OSM. Hope you’d be quite helpful!

    • Roberto Galoppini 9:17 am on August 25, 2008 Permalink

      Nice to hear from you Abdul,

      I believe that all in all open source marketing is a pretty new thing, and the fact that appropriating returns from commons doesn’t make things any easier. So said the importance of an open source brand is definitely not less than for a proprietary one.

      Let me know more about your research and keep in touch.

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:57 pm on May 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Legislative Observatory: Commission’s Report on Copyright Harmonization 

    The European Legislative Observatory sends to subscribers a list of changes, I found interesting the Commission’s report on the application of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

    Read the Commission Staff Working Document (PDF). Oddly Italy is mentioned just once, while as far as I know we are having a “sophisticated” approach to the copyright matter.

    Technorati Tags: European Legislative Observatory, Copyright Harmonization, Italian Copyright law

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:02 am on May 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards People, Alfresco’s pricing, Firefox Hyperwords plugin: links 25-05-2008 

    Caroline Arms on digital formats for digital long-term preservation – Jon Udell met Carolina Arms. Caroline works on the American Memory project at the Library of Congress. The Library participates in standardization efforts such as PDF/A and Office Open XML. By the way, I hope that the Italian OpenOffice.org association will join the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group to participate in ODF maintenance.

    Alfresco and E2CM – Is Alfresco priced too high as a framework for building custom applications? Probably it depends on where you are coming from…

    Firefox Plugins: Hyperwords – All the text on the web becomes richly interactive – Learn how to translate web pages on the fly using Hyperwords plugin.

    WordPress Birthday Party – WordPress next Tuesday will be five years old.To celebrate they are throwing a party in San Francisco at 111 Minna, starting at 9PM. Get the full details and RSVP on Upcoming.org or on Facebook.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:49 am on May 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    BlogLab, Learn From Bloggers 

    BlogLab is a laboratory course held by Stefano Epifani and Antonio Sofi at the University of Rome, Faculty of Communication Science. BlogLab introduces students to blogging and how to blog, allowing students to learn by doing through face-to-face and on line discussions with fellows.

    The image was removed as required by the original author, see comments below

    BlogLab is at its second edition, the course aims at helping neo-bloggers to manage their blog with the aid of experienced bloggers for a period of time. A jury will evaluate the works produced, and the winners will eventually get an internship opportunity by selected companies.

    Last year 60 students participated to the course, 50 blogs were opened and managed by the students and 7 companies offered an ad hoc internship program.

    This year I am going myself to be a fellow instructor, along with many well-known Italian bloggers like my friends Nicola Mattina, Diego Bianchi and Antonio Pavolini who I just met yesterday afternoon when I got there.

    Happy blogging!

    Technorati Tags: BlogLab, StefanoEpifani, AntonioSofi, NicolaMattina, DiegoBianchi, AntonioPavolini

     

    • bugsandfishes 7:32 pm on August 1, 2008 Permalink

      Hi there – I don’t know why you’re using my photo to illustrate this, but whatever the reason I would REALLY prefer if you didn’t use my images without my permission. Thanks! Laura (aka bugsandfishes on Flickr)

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:40 am on August 4, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Laura,

      I am sorry about that, my mistake. Usually I take care to control if they are licensed under a permissive creative commons license. By the way, I really like your photos! Ciao, Roberto

    • bugsandfishes 7:32 pm on August 23, 2008 Permalink

      Thanks for the quick response! Much appreciated 🙂

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:22 am on May 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: OpenOffice.org Italian Association welcomes Microsoft’s decision to support ODF 

    Microsoft announced that it will update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5 and PDF/A. Microsoft will also join the OASIS ODF working group and the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group, actually on duty for ODF maintenance.

    Promise of a new dayPromise of a new day by ۩ QTR974 ۩ عـــبـــدالله ۩

    Andy Updegrove, Erwin Tenhumberg and NoOOXML seem happy about that, while John MCreesh is of different opinion advice.

    OpenOffice.org is a large community, the Italian OpenOffice.org Association has taken part in the process and is expressing its opinion directly from the voice of its President, Davide Dozza.

    The Italian OpenOffice.org Association PLIO could not do anything else than welcoming Microsoft’s announcement, considering our openness to dialog and cooperation with Microsoft expressed in our open letter on the 22th of February, expressed also at the OMAT conference on the 2nd of April.

    The public dialog strategy is paying off, PLIO and Microsoft Italy today are bringing an important contribution to the software community as a whole.

    Today users are winners.

    Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, Microsoft, Microsoft Interoperability, ODF, PDF, OASIS, ISO, DavideDozza, PLIO

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:48 pm on May 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Mobile: Why Funambol is launching a New Forge 

    Funambol, a provider of open source push email and PIM sync solutions for the mass market, announced the launch of a new forge.

    The new Funambol forge will be a unique access point for Funambol-related open source projects, resulting in a central collaboration site for developers and community willing to share code and technical tips, as well as downloading software and documentation.

    A New Forge
    A New Forge by carlos.benjamin

    I asked my friend Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager, what is going to change from before.

    The new Forge is a tool that Funambol community members deserve. For a complex project as Funambol is, all my efforts are in the direction of giving to contributors a place where it is easy to find things like code, samples, support and documentation. The main obstacle to newcomers is the quantity of data accumulated, the legacy of the project, that looks like a big knot. The new Forge builds on top of this legacy, which is good stuff, to create a better environment for collaboration. This is the reason why I made an effort to migrate in the new system all archives of past years email in Funambol lists.

    I understand archives are important, and a little more tweaking is still needed likely. Take the chance to make your product roadmap as easy as possible to access, potential users and customers might be interested into it, despite Debian lives without it.

    How those changes will affect your job?

    Contributors and community members will have their life at Funambol easier and I wish I will too 🙂 Or better, now that the new Forge is up, I’ll be able to focus on the development of Funambol more closely on one hand, and on the other hand to spend more time talking to the community because there are still many Code Sniper bounties to be collected.

    I am a great fan of sniper programs, and considering how micro-contributions are key to Funambol success, I believe you did a very smart move setting up your own forge.

    Technorati Tags: community manager, funambol, code sniper, stefanomaffulli, open source forge

     

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