Now that the European Commission has approved the Oracle/Sun merger, while waiting Larry Ellison’s webcast about Oracle + Sun strategy update, I asked again Florian Mueller to share his opinion on Commission’s clearance of the deal.
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OSOR news reported about the second ODF Plugfest, the event held in Orvieto at the beginning of this month bringing together standards experts from major multi-national corporations, representatives of European public administrations, andmany individuals active in the European open source  community.
Orvieto last week hosted the second ODF Interoperability Workshop, an international event bringing together ODF implementers from all over the world. My talk “open standards and interoperability” opened the first session on day 1, just after Fabio Pistella - President of the Italian National Center for ICT in Public Administrations (CNIPA) – welcomed the international audience.
Two days ago in Orvieto we announced that in two weeks the open source and open standards world will converge in Orvieto (Italy). The second ODF Plugfest (2-3 Nov) will open the week, bringing together implementors and stakeholders from all over the world to work together on ODF interoperability.
The OpenOffice.org 2009 conference (4-6 Nov) – organized by PLIO association and Orvieto LUG – has a very rich program, including specific sessions aimed at schools and at OOo development.
I’m proud to inform that the ODF PlugFest is ynder the sponsorship of the “Consiglio Regionale dell’Umbria” and the “Regione dell’Umbria”.
Osvaldo Gervasi
President of the Umbria’s Open Source Conference Center
Osvaldo that’s a very good news, indeed!
Umbria region is really at the forefront when it comes to open source and open standards. Let me know if you think anyone from the Region or the Regional Counsil is willing to give a speech at the ODF Plugfest on day one (2 Nov) to tell the audience about Umbria’s approach to open standards and ODF.
Thank you for your help!
The second ODF Plugfest will eventually take place in Orvieto (Italy) on the 2nd and 3rd of November, and I want to personally thank all people who helped to make my dream a reality. The event will be held at  the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio Di Orvieto and everyone is invited (below the original invitation).
Sign the online petition for an open and free Internet in Europe at http://www.euopeninternet.eu.
It is time to act again to protect Net Neutrality in Europe, as reported by the open letter signed by 26 European internet civil society organizations.
Next Monday the conciliation committee will held its first meeting, the Quadrature du Net’s guide (code name: Operation Revelation) will give you some tools to make the Telecoms Package a public issue. Stay tuned to this page, since it will be updated with the latest developments.
The European Union took the decision to opens in-depth investigation for fear of prices hikes, and IT veterans, open source experts and economists negatively commented the news.
Before expressing any opinion let’s see what the Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said:
As I recall (happy to be corrected), naming specific products in EU tenders is in violation of tender law. To wit, a tender may reference a RDBMS as requirement but not SQL Server 2008. This is why for example the Hungarians got into hot water over the Microsoft-heavy public tender a while back.
It’s probably a bit unrealistic in this day and age to think that a tender can be specific enough without referencing specific technologies and products but that’s the law today and if we’re going to advise against naming Microsoft in tenders then MySQL shouldn’t be targeted with this form of financing either.
Hi Josef,
I was thinking of research calls, sorry. We can learn a lot from the past in this respect, see the PyPy Story!
Concentration in IT markets, especially in Europe, is basically induced by anticompetitive characteristics and legally questionable activities of three IT companies since long: IBM, Microsoft, HP.
Non-approval of upper merger will not lead to further competition. The opposite will be the case. Moreover the Open Source market,
actively promoted by Sun Microsystems, will suffer seriously.
Now this anticompetitiveness is actively supported by the EU commission’s antitrust division, headed by Mrs. Kroes. This fact is casting serious doubts in the work and competency of Mrs. Kroes’ team world-wide.
The commercial branch of MySQL has a market share of 0.4% officially and is thus far from being able to cause a concentration in the database market.
Having said this, I notify that EU commission’s decisions itself will have to be regarded as cause of concentration in case of
disapproval of above merger.
Hi Peter,
I suspect that IT concentration has different roots. Europe missed to take advantage of the “packaged” software era in the early 90’s, but few players (SAP). IT market worked and works by reselling US software plus selling system integration services.
So said, I’m with you when you state that the commission anti-trust division seems to miss the real point, and as I wrote I’d like EU to put its (our) money where its money is.
The EU now provides a search tool to find applications among the 1751 open source development projects hosted on ten federated forges managed by Austrian, French, Italian and Spanish public administrations.
The new search engine basically relies on an automatic translation service, translating projects’ descriptions in English.
Well, I’m not that sure about your proposal of looking for *code*. In the case of OSOR, the idea seems to be to link with other sites devoted to libre software for public administrations. Working at the package (or poroject) level, seems to me about right. When you’re looking for some piece of code, the domain of the program probably doesn’t matter that much…
In other words, if you’re looking for some package which may be useful for public administrations, looking at OSOR and federated forges seems reasonable. But if you are looking for a specific piece of code (even if it is for a software to be used in PA), the search should be much wider: probably almost any forge could have the piece you want).
WRT FLOSSMetrics, indeed we’re focused on GForge-like forges (including SourceForge), but we can extract data from any public repository in any forge, provided we have its url, and the kind of repository is supported by our tools. Currently that amounts to CVS, Subversion, git and (limited) Bazaar for SCM, Bugzilla and SourceForge for bug reporting systems, and mbox for mailing lists repositories. More are supposed to come.
Yes, I fully agree that the services provided by FLOSSMetrics could be integrated with OSOR, or with any other forge, for that matter. SourceForge is starting that way (not with FLOSSMetrics, but with their own machinery), and OSOR also started it, offering graphs about the evolution of some parameters related to the activity of the projects (in this case, using a part of the FLOSSMetrics toolchain).
Just to finish, thanks a lot for reporting on FLOSSMetrics, and for taking the time to understand it!
[Disclamer: I’m coordinator of the FLOSSMetrics project, and also involved in the OSOR as a member of the consortium maintaining it]
Hi Jesus,
glad to see you joining the conversation.
As I wrote in my blog post most of the times open source projects for public administrations are lead by SMEs thinking and acting locally. Translating projects’ descriptions can hardly help the share and reuse of knowledge in the context of IT, I am afraid.
Krugle code search engine or similar technology might help to search pieces of code that perform more specific tasks, and eventually reuse code made available from other EU public administrations under the EUPL (apparently designed to ease the licensing burden).
Taking advantage only of code hosted on federated forges may result in a lack of opportunity anyway, either if you look for a whole package or a library. In other words, I am assuming that we need of OSOR here, and the EUPL license may well be the reason for that.
I wish to report more about FLOSSMetrics, let’s keep in touch for writing a specific blog post on project’s final findings.
Tim O’Reilly yesterday at OSCON during his keynote unveiled the Open Source for America, which includes industry and thought leaders of the open source world in its membership, and is meant to provide:
“unified voice to help effect change in U.S. Federal Government policies and practices to allow the federal government to better utilize open source software for cost efficiency, security and enhanced performance.”
Do we need to run a similar initiative here, in Europe?
Frank are discussing. 
Roberto Galoppini, and 
Peter Parker, 
Why should PostgreSQL be a threat to Oracle? MySQL has never been a threat to Oracle anyway. 99% of the MySQL users are just looking for a database to store data, they don’t buy support, they don’t need any company in control of the software.
And if they don’t like PostgreSQL, they might take a look at Firebird, CouchDB or another tool. There is so much more out there, MySQL is just one of many.