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  • Roberto Galoppini 10:43 pm on February 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org: The Italian OpenOffice.org Association welcomes Microsoft’s move to open its API 

    PLIO, the Italian OpenOffice.org Association who support and promote the Italian open source office productivity suite OpenOffice.org, today after Microsoft’s announcement wrote an open letter to Microsoft.

    Welcome, Microsoft.

    Following yesterday’s announcement, we are ready to co-operate at the promotion of open formats in order to support this new endeavour in the area of office suites. We are ready to co-operate, but we will criticize you for every uncertain or false step.

    Inside interoperability there isn’t any space left for tricks: interoperability means that you have chosen to be on the same side of the users.

    We believe in your good faith more than the EC doesWe trust you more than the European Commission, as they have told the world who highlighted that this is the fourth time that Microsoft makes an announcement about interoperability, without any impact – until today – on the company strategy.

    We sincerely hope that this time, for a number of reasons – including our proactive opposition to the fast track standardization of Office 2007 file formats, which will go on until all the necessary changes will be made, the chances that mere words are going to translate into facts are higher than in the past.

    At the same time, we invite all the companies that support the ODF format together with us – and those that belong to the OpenOffice.org community: Sun, IBM, Novell & Red Flag – to work for a full interoperability, as the technical and legal obstacles are going to disappear soon.

    Users should be able to exchange transparently Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org documents, in both directions.

    The software industry, which is not based just in Redmond, must demonstrate a true commitment to make ODF a more widespread format.

    If this will happen, users will win, and the market – i.e., all of us – will win.

    Associazione PLIO (Italian National Linguistic Project OpenOffice.org)

    Today at the international event ECOySOL – Semana de promoción científica y tecnológica para el desarrollo del Ecosistema Digital y del Software Libre – I had the pleasure to share our strategy with the attendees, including our very last decision to open a constructive dialog with Microsoft.

    We just broke up 1,000,000 downloads last week, but I told them also where the story starts.

    Five years ago we were already working hard to promote OpenOffice.org: cooperating with Italian free software organizations I managed to get our Minister of Education head up on the importance to tell Italian schools about OpenOffice.org. She eventually did it indeed, thanks to our common efforts and some media coverage.

    Media became very receptive to our news only later, when Italo Vignoli joined our community, and the story goes on.

    Fostering perception of the existence of OpenOffice.org is not an issue anymore for us. OpenOffice.org’s low end disruption is taking over in Italy, our users are not the innovators of the innovation adoption curve, but early adopters.

    Now we need help, and we are asking Sun (already paying a lot of attention to our open letters), IBM, Novell & Red Flag to work with us for a full interoperability, as soon as the technical and legal obstacles will disappear.

    Users demand inter-applications interoperability, let’s do it now!

    PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project, is the Italian community of volunteers who develop, support and promote the open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office applications (standard ISO/IEC 26300) and is available on major computing platforms in over 90 languages, available to 90% of the world-wide population in their own mother tongue.
    OpenOffice.org is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL), can be legally used in any context.

    Technorati Tags: PLIO, OpenOffice, disruptive innovation, Sun, Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft, interoperability, OpenOffice.org

     

    • Stefano 8:24 am on February 26, 2008 Permalink

      I believe there is a mistake in the translation where it talks about trusting Microsoft more than EC?

      The Italian version of the letter says something ‘we believe in your good faith more than the EC does’, it doesn’t talk about trusting more one over another. Please correct this text before it spreads further and offends our allies in Bruxelles.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:41 am on February 26, 2008 Permalink

      Stefano,

      I promptly corrected my post, and I informed Italo about your kind remark.

      I believe that Italo’s mistake was done in good faith, likely to spread the word fast. I see myself in him, blogging in English is a continuous learning process.

      Thank you!

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:18 am on February 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Community Awards: SourceForge launches the 2008 Community Choice Awards 

    SourceForge.net launched the 2008 Community Choice Awards, the third edition of SourceForge awards program it is now open to all FOSS projects, and it includes new categories.

    I asked Ross Turk some feedback on the awards:

    I’m really excited about this year’s awards – we’re doing some cool new stuff! The big news, of course, is that we’re no longer restricting it to SourceForge.net projects, so any FOSS project can be nominated in any category. I think that’s huge.

    We have some new categories, too. We’ve pruned the ones from last year that weren’t very popular and added a few new ones that we think will cause people to stop and think.

    Also, this is the first year we’ll be selling sponsorships. It’s a way for us to fund a bigger, cooler party, and a way for us to provide our sponsors with good access to one of the coolest communities around.

    SourceForge allowing nominations for any open source project, not just those on SourceForge.net, it is definitely going to be much more interesting this year. I remember Matt Asay saying that participants had a tenuous grip on what “enterprise” means last year (firebird won), I guess opening will help in this direction.

    I am looking forward to see who is going to win the new category “Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition”..

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Award, SourceForge, MattAsay, RossTurk, Firebird

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:10 pm on February 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Microsoft Interoperability: Microsoft opens up its data formats and platforms 

    Microsoft today announced new interoperability principles to increase the openness of its flagship products Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 as well as future versions.

    To drive greater interoperability Microsoft sets four new principles, the Questions and Answers page by Bob Muglia is a must read.

    PressPass: Isn’t this also intended to be a part of an agreement with the European Commission?

    Muglia: Today’s announcement isn’t part of an agreement with the Commission. However, it’s a reflection of the changed legal landscape for Microsoft and the industry as a whole. It’s an important step forward in our ongoing efforts to fulfill the responsibilities and obligations outlined in the ruling of the European Court of First Instance in September 2007.

    To me it sounds like a huge change, but I want to go deeper into before writing more about it.

    Technorati Tags: Open Standards, Microsoft, BobMuglia, Microsoft Interoperabilty

     

    • Carlo Daffara 11:37 am on February 22, 2008 Permalink

      Many others have commented that this kind of announcements are being done with a certain regularity, and that the patent covenant are not extended to “commercial open source developers” (whatever that may means) but only for “noncommercial OSS developers”. I have found much more interesting the announcement that Microsoft will provide a list of patents that cover specific API and technology, and this will provide a “navigation” across potentially infringing open source implementations, or the possibility for invalidation (by the identification of prior art, for example) of patents that cannot be circumvented.

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:40 pm on February 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: Document “Freedom” Day 

    My friend Giacomo Poderi, Free Software Foundation Europe Italian representative, today forwarded me a document introducing Document Freedom Day, a global day for document liberation scheduled for 26 of March.

    It is a day of grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open Standards in general. The DFD is supported by a large group of organisations and individuals, including, but not limited to Ars Aperta, COSS, Esoma, Free Software Foundations Europe and Latin America, IBM, NLnet, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, OSL, iMatix, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Inc., The Open Learning Centre, Opentia, Estandares Abiertos.

    The initiative clearly promotes ODF, the website reports the ODF logo and, just to name another open standard, the Portable Document Format (PDF) is not even mentioned. Why you didn’t call it Open Document Format Day then?

    ODF logoThe ODF logo, courtesy of RedHat

    My friends, Freedom it is about choice..

    Technorati Tags: Open Document Format, ODF, Portable Document Format, PDF, Open Standards, FSFE

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:19 am on February 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source VoIP: top 50 Open Source VoIP applications 

    Open source VoIP programs could help to cut telephony costs, and I wish to bring to your attention a post, I happened to know thank to Amy S. Quinn, listing few open source VoIP programs (SIP Proxies, SIP Clients, H323 Clients, IAX Clients, PBX and IVR Platforms, Stacks and libraries).

    Read the full article.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source VoIP, SIP Proxies, SIP Clients, H323, IAX Clients, PBX, IVR

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:50 am on February 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org 2.3 break through 1,000,000 downloads! 

    The OpenOffice.org Italian Association is proud to announce that the Italian release of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite has experienced a surge in demand for its software since the launch of OpenOffice.org 2.3 and with the follow-up Release 2.3.1.

    OpenOffice.org experienced more than 1,000,000 downloads in less than five months, this put the Italian release of OpenOffice.org in a leading position in the worldwide office productivity application market.

    Davide Dozza, Association’s President and Co-Maintainer of of the Italian Native-Lang Project, commented:

    I’m very proud about this result. It demostrates that the community effort can yield amazing results, especially when such community is composed of eterogeneous and expert people.

    How do you like Italian open source? 🙂

    Update: Italo Vignoli, PLIO Marketing and Communication Manager, wrote:

    Apologies. On September 18, 2007, while announcing OpenOffice.org 2.3 we boldly stated that during the following 6 months the software would have been downloaded by one million people.

    At the time, it was a brave announcement, as the previous million of downloads took exactly nine months, from January 18 to September 17, 2007, and the total of the previous 30 days was a meager 116.405 downloads.

    And, in fact, we were wrong, as it took only 151 days (i.e., four months and 28 days) to get to that threshold: on Friday the 15th of February, OpenOffice.org in italian got to 1.001.185 downloads, at a daily average of 6.742,82 since September 18.

    Read his full post, is enlightening.

    [tags] OpenOffice.org, openoffice, PLIO, DavideDozza[tags]

     

    • Tara Kelly 12:37 pm on February 19, 2008 Permalink

      Hoorahh!!

      This is a happy day 🙂

    • Roberto Galoppini 2:51 pm on February 19, 2008 Permalink

      Indeed! 🙂

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:24 pm on February 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Think Tank 2008: some feedback 

    Olliance Group and DLA Piper last week hosted the third Open Source Think Tank “The Future of Commercial Open Source”, bringing together industry leaders to brainstorm potential solutions to the issues that commercial open source is facing today.

    all togetherThis is the open source season by Philisopher Queen

    The Open Source Think Tank is the greatest networking event in the open source arena, gathering about 130 professionals ranging from CIOs and open source firms’ CEOs, to consultants, analysts and VCs.

    Andrew Aitken, Olliance Group CEO, kicked off the meeting with some opening remarks, reporting about the lack of resources – as later confirmed by many CIOs demanding for a better vendors’ support – and foreseeing an increase in consolidation over the next years, prediction confirmed also by Larry Augustin.

    Andrew in his speech mentioned also the fragmentation of open source, an old mantra that miss the value of the Group Forming Networks, also known as Reed’s law:

    The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

    The number of mature open source projects and developers is raising daily, last but not least at the Google Code site, and many of them answer vertical markets‘ needs. Chris Anderson keynote, on the second day, remarked the importance of the so called “long tail”, and introduced us to Chris’s last adventure: open source hardware and its still obscure licensing.

    Many CIOs during their panel sessions screamed against license proliferation, a term referring to the so called “explosion of choice” in open source licensing. Why that? I think that Larry Rosen was right telling them that it is plenty of proprietary licenses, and I tried to figure out why all this concern for open source licensing. Talking with Colin Bodell, Amazon VP Website Applications Platform, I confirmed the idea that the big guys cook their own meal. Basically they don’t need to spend time and effort with any procurement process to acquire (by downloading) open source software, but they have to ask the legal department. I see the problem, though I understand that SMEs are not affected by this, while they experience a much bigger problem with open source software selection.

    Europe and North-America are definitely two different markets: Europe look for solutions, while USA ask for products. John Newton, Alfresco’s CTO, once speaking about these differences told me:

    This is a phenomenon that I have observed for over 20 years. It may have something to do with the proximity of US companies to the software developers, their earlier development of software, a cultural willingness to experiment with business, or just general risk taking.

    After speaking with few North-American CIOs I believe John is right, but that is definitely not the only difference

    European public administrations demand for open source, while in North-America customers are mainly medium to large enterprises. It is not by casualty that I didn’t meet any representatives of North American Public Administrations at the Open Source Think Tank, I think. On the contrary every Italian open source conference see little participation of Manufacturing or Financial CIOs, but it is packed by people from public institutions.

    I really enjoyed brainstorming sessions, and I asked Cristopher Keene, CEO of Wavemaker, formerly known as Activegrid, to summarize our first session, when we were asked to brainstorm on the following question: Does the open source industry need another organization to represent it’s increasingly broader commercial interests?

    The idea we developed at the open source thin tank was to create a council of CIOs who use open source products within their organizations.

    The goal of this council would be to educate the open source community about business issues which make it hard for CIOs to adopt open source, such as licensing complexity and product completeness. The council could also drive an important dialogue around licensing requirements and patent indemnification risks that are holding the industry back now.

    One way to start this council would be as an outgrowth of Open Source Think Tank conference. CIO attendees of this conference could identify what they see as the top three barriers to open source adoption today and then work over the next year to articulate what they would like to see vendors doing to overcome these barriers.

    Christopher rightly suggested to connect to Jerry Rosenthal, Open Invention Network CEO, but we eventually ended missing the opportunity for the time being. I think that the idea we discussed for about an hour would merit to be investigated further, considering also the possibility to create different councils for different market segments. Customers’ dimensions could refine matching criteria to bring CIOs under the same umbrella.

    During brainstorming session I happened to talk with Richard Daley (Pentaho), Erica Brescia (Bitrock), Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), Brian Gentile recently appointed as Jaspersoft CEO, Larry Rosen, Mark Brewer (Covalent, now SpringSource), and many others.

    Beyond brainstorming sessions the Open Source Think Tank was a great chance to meet in person the who’s who of open source. I found myself chatting with our open source hero MÃ¥rten Mickos, congratulating him up on his honors while drinking a glass of Californian wine (call me conservative, I still tend to prefer Italian ones!). I happened to talk with so many interesting people that I am afraid to forget mentioning some of. Sanjiva Weerawarana (wso2) and I spoke about OSI and how open source is growing in Asia. I finally had a chance to meet in person Sam Ramji, Robert Duffner and Bryan Kirschner to talk about Microsoft open source strategy. I spent an evening with Ross Turk, and I enjoyed meeting Philippe Cases (partechvc), kindly introduced to me by MÃ¥rten. I had breakfast with Raven Zachary (the 451 Group), and we planned to meet up in Europe soon to talk more. A small chat with Kim Polese (SpikeSource), kindly introduced to me by Sam during the wine tasting around the Napa Valley, and I also had a short but interesting spot with Larry Augustin just before Chris Andersen’s keynote. I really enjoyed speaking with Dave McAllister (adobe) about open standards and with Dominic Sartorio about OSA, I definitely need to report about all these IT conversations in a series of postings.

    I had great time with many sipping some wine, among them: Joseph A di Paolantonio, Aaron Fulkerson (MindTouch), Roger Burkhardt (ingres), and I was happy to meet few other European actors: Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer (Hippo), Alexandre Zapolsky (Linagora) , Bertrand Diard (Talend). Talking about Europe I had also the opportunity to discuss with Olliance people about an Italian Open Source Think Tank, let’s see if it could eventually happen..

    An open question: Why I didn’t see any Solution Providers, but Accenture?

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, think tank, open source think tank, olliance, AndrewAitken, CristopherKeene

    Related posts: Chris Coppola – Chris Keene – Chris Marino

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:03 pm on February 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Projects: more on Qualipso 

    So far, it’s not clear how open QualiPSo’s operations will be, or how much its activities will benefit all of the European OSS community, not just QualiPSo members. Besides these concerns, in this first year there has also been grumbling about the lack of a published work plan and, in general, of enough information and interaction between QualiPSo and the community. There is still time to fix this now that the project has officially gone public.

    Read the full article, by Marco Fioretti

    Technorati Tags: MarcoFioretti, Qualipso, commercial open source, EC funded

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:28 pm on February 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Think Tank Meetings: Ross Turk and the State of the Art of the SourceForge Marketplace 

    The 2008 Open Source Think Tank was a great chance to meet in person great people in the open source business community, a must for whom interested in professional networking.

    On Friday I spent an evening chatting with Ross Turk, and I asked him to tell about SourceForge Marketplace state of the art.

    The SourceForge.net Marketplace has been a very interesting experience. As you know (or may not know, actually), we wanted to start down this path with an implementation that was as flexible as
    possible. We didn’t want the tool we provided to limit the creativity of its primary users, our community. We felt strongly that it was a better idea to simply provide the tool and watch how people use it, since they’d come up with far more creative uses than we could come up with ourselves.

    That said, what we released appears on the surface to be rather basic. Under the covers, there was a lot of effort put into some stuff that nearly nobody will ever see but the system can’t exist
    without, so I don’t want to say it wasn’t a lot of work – but to the users, it’s a simple listing and transaction engine. Just about anything can be listed for sale, and almost any kind of transaction
    can take place. There’s a flipside to that, though, because in order to get that flexibility as quickly as we did we’ve implemented mostly just the bare necessities. Even in retrospect, I think that was a good strategy, because almost immediately we began to learn things.

    First, we learned that people are interested in the idea. People are responding to it in pretty large numbers; growing numbers, in fact, and I think that’s good.

    Second, we learned that there are a few types of transactions that people seem to want to do that our system doesn’t support. For example, people who want to sell services by the hour are working around the lack of that ability by creating listings for a single hour of service and dealing with the discrepancy in purchase price with the buyer directly. Adding the capability to have per-incident, per-hour, and per-project pricing would be useful to a lot of people.

    Probably the most subtle thing we’re learning is how to balance the market-based nature of what we have built with the somewhat non-market tendencies of our community.
    Some projects are happy to have their services prominently displayed, but I can imagine there are a few folks out there who would rather keep the suggestion of commerce as far away from them as possible. I think that our community has varying opinions on the commercialization of open source, which leads to the question: At what point does suggesting available services on the pages of an open source project stop providing value for that project? I think we’re learning where that line is.

    Ross, what about the SourceForge Advisory Board?  

    There’s not a whole lot to say about the SourceForge Advisory Board yet, since not a lot has happened! In a nutshell, though, here’s the deal: we realized last year that, while we think we know about our business and our position in the open source ecosystem, there’s a good likelihood that we’re a bit too intimate with what we do to be as accurate on those things as we could be with a little help. We need an external group of people who understand what we are, what we should become, and what we should value.

    Right now, we’re planning an initial kickoff meeting in California. I assumed that dealing with the travel logistics of an international advisory board would be a monster task, but I seriously underestimated the difficulty of just getting eleven people to agree on a date. 🙂 We’ll all know a little bit more about this topic once that happens, I think.

    Ross I simply can’t wait to join you and the others, please keep me updated. All the best!

    Technorati Tags: open source think tank, rossturk, sourceforge, sourceforge marketplace

     

    • Dominic 6:03 am on February 13, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Roberto,
      Good post. IMO, Sourceforge Marketplace is a great innovation for open source. At the Think Tank, we heard a lot about how enterprise customers face a shortage of expertise and support options for their use of open source. What better way to address this problem than with the same grassroots, bottom-up style that has made open source successful all along? The Marketplace enables an open, peer-to-peer model of exchanging expertise. Anybody can put up their shingle, saying they are in business of offering support and services, and anybody can find them to procure those services. Nice work, Ross!

      Dominic

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:36 am on February 13, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Dominic,

      I believe you are right saying so, SourceForge Marketplace might greatly help users and potential customers to find professional support, especially for less known open source projects.

      I will soon write about my personal take aways from the Open Source Think Tank, I see you just posted on the subject, well done!

      Keep in touch Dominic,I would be really glad to help with OSA Europe.

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:54 pm on February 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Meetings: RedMonk’s Birthday Party 

    Yestersday’s RedMonk 5th birthday party  was a friendly start here in San Francisco, and a chance to meet in person few people of the international open source scene.

    Stephen O’Grady was a good host, he introduced Gianugo, Italo and me to some RedMonk’s friends, like Rita Manachi.

    Cote and I spoke a little bit of Sun+MySQL M&A, but mainly we enjoyed the party sipping beer.

    I also enjoyed to chat with Greg Stein but  because of jet-lag I had to leave early, eventually missing to speak with James Governor and Danese Cooper, just arrived when I was already out of the door.

    Technorati Tags: redmonk, italovignoli, gianugorabellino, danesecooper, jamesgovernor, cote, stephenogrady, gregstein

     

    • Savio Rodrigues 5:06 am on February 8, 2008 Permalink

      Hey Roberto, what are you up to now? What brings you stateside?

    • Roberto Galoppini 4:23 pm on February 8, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Savio, how’re you doing? I came over to attend the open source think tank, today one of the brainstorming session is about business models! 😉

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