Updates from October, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:34 pm on October 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source ECM: Alfresco and Nuxeo news 

    Alfresco has announced that Proforma Global has selected Alfresco’s document management solution, while Nuxeo has just announced the availability of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform 5.1.

    Proforma Global is a division of Proforma, a $300 million company with 650 offices worldwide. It provides some 30,000 clients with fully integrated solutions for both print and electronic communications, designed to serve its clients’ industry-specific graphic communications, commercial printing, promotional and multimedia needs

    Proforma Global, a division of Proforma, use Alfresco to help one of its customers to collaborate on and update the look and content of product data sheets among personnel throughout the world.

    Matt Asay, Alfresco’s VP Marketing of Business Development, said:

    The great thing about Proforma’s adoption of Alfresco is that it was on its terms, not ours. Proforma evaluated the software for months before contacting Alfresco to purchase our support and other services. With Alfresco’s open source and open standards Enterprise Content Management solution, Proforma has complete control of its own content, as it should.

    This is the true value of open source: it returns control to the customer, letting them how or if to engage a vendor. For Alfresco, this has meant that we can’t rest on our laurels (i.e., our software). The software may get the customer interested, but it’s the value we provide around the software that closes the deal.

    I am happy to see that UK’s position as the open source laggard of Europe is changing in Alfresco’s opinion, and it’s not the first signal in this direction.

    Talking about Nuxeo, the updated platform provides an infrastructure designed to meet the needs of large scale enterprises SOA oriented, with first implementations in the media, energy and defense sectors.

    Stefan Fermigier, Nuxeo CEO, asked about the UK market commented:

    We’re going to announce next week our biggest deal in the UK and the UK market already represents approximately 20% of our global business.

    UK seems to start looking with more interest to commercial open source solutions today.

    If you are evaluating Open Source Enterprise Content Management solutions, have a look at Alfresco and Nuxeo QSOS sheets before, it might help you. Ohloh comparation is also available.

    Technorati Tags: Alfresco, Nuxeo, ECM, Commercial Open Source, StefanFermigier, MattAsay

     

    • Matt Asay 7:53 pm on October 25, 2007 Permalink

      Thanks, Roberto. Just one clarification: I’m the VP of Business Development, not marketing. I know nothing about marketing. 🙂

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:45 am on October 26, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Matt, sorry about that, I fixed it. By the way, in my opinion you know a lot about marketing! 😉

  • Davide Dozza 7:24 am on October 2, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org Conference 2007: some thoughts 

    The OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 was held in Barcelona, from the 19th to the 21th of September. People from all the world, employees and volunteers, attended the conference to learn about OpenOffice.org future.

    I returned myself a couple of days ago, and I wish to share here some thoughts about the final round table, actually one of the most important sessions.

    Round table participants were:

    • Louis Suarez-Potts, OpenOffice.org Community manager, who recently joined Sun Microsystems;
      .
    • Zaheda Bhorat, managing Open Source Programs at Google (formerly working at Sun),
      .
    • John McCreesh volunteer and OOo marketing Project leader;
      .
    • a representative of IBM (sorry, I don’t remember the name);
      .
    • Michael Bemmer, StarOffice manager at Sun Microsystems;
      .
    • Simon Phipps – Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems;
      .
    • Michael Meeks from Novell;
      .
    • Cai Yung Hu from RedFlag.

    While I was expecting to hear some news about the future of the project, the panel was basically a self celebrating presentation focused on download results and on the new project entries, namely IBM and RedFlag RedFlag.
    Now, unless we redefine a community just as a technological club open to firms, I wouldn’t call this group a community. After IBM and RedFlag joined the project, it is getting more and more difficult to call OOo an Open Source project managed by the community. it is becoming an Open Source project managed by big companies, “build contributed in collaboration with the community“.

    Barcelona guested also the Drupal Conference over those days, and it is worth to mention. Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) released with GPL license and managed by a community. More than 400 people attended this conference, they paid 50 Euro, they mainly represented themselves or small firms and there were more than 40 sponsors.

    On the other hand, about 300 people attended the OOoConf without paying any fee, and only few people came from small firms or just for personal interest. Many were from Sun and Novell and sponsors were less than 15.

    Drupal and OOo are not comparable in term of code and users. There are different orders of magnitude between them. Nevertheless Drupal has more participation than OOo. Frankly I’d expect much more community participation from the biggest Open Source project in the world. Inside OOo I would like to view more hybridization among stake holders and the community . This would allow a better participation of single volunteers and small firms that are at the moment quite scarse. Louis said the next 12 months will be the most important of the entire project history. I definitively agree. And I hope they will be spent to make it really open because without a community the future is at risk.

    What is your opinion?

    Technorati Tags: OpenOffice, Open Source Community, LouisSuarezPotts, RedFlag, IBM, SimonPhipps, Novell, Sun

     

    • Simon Phipps 11:31 am on October 2, 2007 Permalink

      I didn’t think much of that panel either, David, but I think you need to reflect more deeply. A key question to ask is how many of the people at the Drupal event were actually developers working on the core code, and how many were end users?

      OOoCon had a large proportion of people who were directly involved in co-development of OpenOffice.org – the annual OOoCon provides them with a place to meet. OO.o is well sponsored, yes, which some people regard as a strength. Thus most of the individual developers who work on its code are employees of a sponsor company. End users of OpenOffice.org don’t really have to have special skills to use it so aren’t that motivated to attend. There are many end-user mini-conferences around the world during the year, arranged by the excellent OOo marketing community.

      By contrast, Drupal users will be mainly programmers and/or SysAdmins. They will be interested in hints and tips on usage, on meeting each other for learning and support. Drupal is also relatively new and there are plenty of people encountering it for the first time. I’d expect a Drupal event to be larger and to have a larger number of users attending.

      While I think the discussion of community building is a good think (indeed there was a session on that topic at OOoCon), I think your comparison is misplaced. Any technology whose main users are developers will produce the effect you describe when compared against OOo, regardless of the health of either community.

    • Michael Meeks 11:24 am on October 3, 2007 Permalink

      Unfortunately, attracting and retaining corporate developers to work on OO.o is really rather a difficult problem, though easier than attracting volunteers 🙂 Persuading Sun to change their community and ownership structures to improve things is also an almost impossible task.
      Some day, I hope we’ll see a meritocratically elected board of core contributors rounding up an OO.o conference packed with developers 🙂

    • Simon Phipps 5:09 pm on October 3, 2007 Permalink

      Has it been easier for Ximian Evolution, Michael?

    • JJS 6:47 pm on October 3, 2007 Permalink

      A community is what it is. Those who are interested in the project will join and participate based on their level of interest. Those who do not participate can offer opinions. But if the opinion simply amounts to, “I don’t like your community,” then the project members are likewise free to offer constructive criticism on that opinion.

      Later . . . Jim

    • Tor Lillqvist 11:02 am on October 5, 2007 Permalink

      Aren’t you linking to the wrong Red Flag company? The one that joined the OOo community is called something like “Red Flag CH2000” http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Beijing_Redflag_Chinese_2000_Software_Co.,_Ltd.(, while you link to Red Flag Linux, another entity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux

    • Davide Dozza 11:22 am on October 5, 2007 Permalink

      Simon, I definitively agree with you about developers and end-users. But this is exactly the question a I’m reflecting on.
      Why OOocon had a large proportion of people who were directly involved in co-development of OpenOffice.org and they come almost from Sun, IBM, etc and not from small and medium firms?
      I think OOo could be a great horizontal framework for services and software delivery on which firms could develop their business and contribute back. And moreover OOo could also be a place where volunteers contribute or a gym for people who want to get trained in a large and challenging project.
      But OOo doesn’t look like this. It seems that the major discussion topics are relating to keep satisfied the SUN requirements which are JCA, license, etc. instead to encourage external contributions and participation.
      It’s maybe time to transform StarDivision people from great developers to project managers oriented to the Community and to open the project?

    • Davide Dozza 11:36 am on October 5, 2007 Permalink

      Jim, first we have to define what kind of community we are talking about. Is it a free software community? Is it a software user community? Is it a community of software vendors? I think is very important because people can get puzzled about, as I’m becoming.
      In this way people will consciously join and participate to the project.

    • Roberto Galoppini 4:08 pm on October 5, 2007 Permalink

      You’re definitely right Tor, thank you!

    • Simon Phipps 10:50 pm on October 5, 2007 Permalink

      I just wrote a huge long answer and WP threw it away. Too upset to write it again, maybe next week.

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:40 am on August 27, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Projects: Qualipso deliverables on business models (part II) 

    QualiPSo – the ever largest Open Source initiative funded by the European Commission – is making public its first results, and I just started to analyze them.

    The goal of the project is “to define and implement technologies, procedures and policies to leverage the Open Source Software development current practices to sound and well recognised and established industrial operations”.

    QualiPSo includes 7 research and development domains (QualiPSo Competence Centres, business models, next generation forge, trustworthy results and process, information management, interoperability, legal issues), articulated in 10 work areas.

    Today I read the deliverable “State of the art concerning business models for systems comprising open source software“, apparently the most promising result within the “business models” research area.

    autoreferentialityCalypso Cabaret by Sackerman519

    Looking at the document as a whole, basically it is an essay of pretty known and old articles, like the Seven open source business strategies for competitive advantage, by John Koenig, and the mentioned many times “Economics of Open Source” of my buddy Carlo Daffara, plus some minor citations. Not a single new business model, they just mentioned Open Source (?) Franchising, not exploiting it any further.

    I must admit I learned about Sunil Joshi citations, but I honestly expected to find something more than things grasped around the net, sometimes even without double check. For example they happened to cite the Orixo consortium, so I guess they didn’t take a chance to talk with a representative, neither to read Gianugo advising on using consortia nor looking at the Orixo’s events section. On the contrary I didn’t read a mention of ZEA or Open Source Consortium, just to name two of them. I would warmly recommend them to add these, at least.

    I found it auto-referential just as the already mentioned deliverable D2.1.2 , since chapter 3 “BIG INDUSTRY OSS BUSINESS MODELS CASE STUDIES” is only about 4 QualiPSo’s members.

    Last but not least, chapter 4 “SME OSS BUSINESS MODELS CASE STUDIES” results to be a list of cases collected by the official sites of those firms, mostly cut&pasting public information available, not a deep research I would say.

    QualipSO seems following a Ferengi’s rule: Sell the sizzle, not the steak, I hope they will come out with something interesting soon..

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, research, public funded, QualiPSo, IST

     

    • Josef Assad 8:20 am on August 27, 2007 Permalink

      No surprises, Roberto.

      At a very high level, I think the involvement of the EU in open source needs to be more enabling and less leading. I don’t think free culture is rocket science, and I agree with you that regurgitation of what is known is a waste of funds, but it is also a natural consequence.

      Rather than create the environment for open source adoption, it is my opinion that EU funds would be better directed at creating the conditions through which a free culture environment will organically develop. I’ve emphasised the operative words.

      I don’t think free culture lends itself very willingly to massive orchestrated initiatives, but that doesn’t mean that dep pockets can’t make significant impact.

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:49 am on August 28, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Josef,

      to the create the conditions you talk about, the dissemination should have a prominent role in projects like this, but as Hemingway wrote:

      Before we take to sea we walk on land, Before we create we must understand.

      The research phase should investigate, analyze and organize known facts in depth, if its ambition is:

      to make Open source a formidable lever to strengthen Europe’s competitiveness, accelerate ICT growth, and implement the i2010 policy for growth and jobs.

      What I am saying here, is that at the present stage deliverables like this can’t be an appropriate tool to help IT firms to include Open Source Software in their actual business strategy.

      About deep pockets, I must tell you that as European citizen I am concerned about how public money is spent.

    • GNUliano 2:43 pm on August 31, 2007 Permalink

      Thank you very much Roberto for your post… I found it very useful and informative!

  • Carlo Daffara 1:51 pm on August 23, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Estimating the number of active and stable FLOSS projects 

    A recurring debate discussion among FLOSS-supporters and detractors is related to the estimation of the real number of active FLOSS projects. While it is easy to look at the main repository site (sourceforge.net) that boasts more than 100.000 projects, it is equally easy to look in more depth and realize that a significant number of those projects are really abandoned or have no significant development. How many active and stable projects are really out there?

    choicesToo many cereal choices by PartsNpieces

    For the purpose of obtaining some unbiased estimates in the context of the FLOSSMETRICS project, we performed a first search among the main repository sites and FLOSS announce portals; we also set a strict activity requirement, stately an activity index from 80 to 100% and at least a file release in the last 6 months. Of the overall 155959 projects, only 10656 (6.8%) are “active” (with a somehow very restrictive definition; a more relaxed release period of 1 year shows an active percentage of 9.2% or 14455 projects).

    However, while Sourceforge can rightly be considered the largest single repository, it is not the only potential source of projects; there are many other vertical repositories, among them BerliOS, Savannah, Gna! and many others, derived both from the original version of the Sourceforge code and many more based on a rewritten version called GForge. That gives a total of 23948 projects, to which (using a sampling of 100 projects from each) we have found a similar number of active projects (between 8% and 10%).

    The next step is the estimation of how many projects of the overall FLOSS landscape are hosted on those sites, and for performing this estimate we took the entire FreshMeat announce database, as processed by the FLOSSmole project and found that the projects that have an homepage in one of the repository sites are 23% of the total. This count is however biased by the fact that the probability of a project to be announced on FreshMeat is not equal for all projects; that is, english-based and oriented towards a large audience have a much higer probability to be listed. To take this into account, we performed a search for non-english based forges, and for software that is oriented towards a very specific area, using data from past IST projects like Spirit and AMOS.

    We have found that non-english projects are underrepresented in FreshMeat in a significant way, but as the overall “business-readiness” of those projects is unclear (as for example there may be no translations available, or be specific to a single country legal environment) we have ignored them. Vertical projects are also underrepresented, especially with regard to projects in scientific and technical areas, where the probability of being included is around 10 times lower compared to other kind of software. By using the results from Spirit, a sampling from project announcements in scientific mailing lists, and some repositories for the largest or more visible projects (like the CRAN archive, that hosts libraries and packages for the R language for statistics, that hosts 1195 projects) we have reached a lower bound estimate of around 12000 “vertical” and industry-specific projects. So, we have an overall lower bound estimate of around 195000 projects, of which we can estimate that 7% are active, leading to around 13000 active projects.

    Of those, we can estimate (using data from Slashdot, FreshMeat and the largest Gforge sites) that 36% fall in the “stable” or “mature” stage, leading to a total of around 5000 projects that can be considered suitable for an SME, that is with an active community, stable and with recent releases. It should be considered that this number is a lower bound, obtained with slightly severe assumptions; just enlarging the file release period from 6 months to one year nearly doubles the number of suitable projects. Also, this estimate does not try to assess the number of projects not listed in the announcement sites (even vertical application portals); this is a deliberate action, as it would be difficult to estimate the reliability of such a measure, and because the “findability” of a project and its probability of having a sustained community participation are lower if it is difficult to find information on the project in the first place; this means that the probability of such “out of the bounds” projects would probably be not a good opportunity for SME adoption in any case. By using a slightly more relaxed definition of “stability”, with an activity rating between 60% and 100% and at least a release in the last year, we obtain around 18000 stable and mature project from which to choose- not a bad result, after all.

    Technorati Tags: open source metrics, sourceforge, flossmetrics, flossmole

     

    • Bill Poser 6:57 am on August 27, 2007 Permalink

      The activity criterion used underestimates the number of projects that provide useful software. A project may not have had a recent release because it is complete and has no known bugs, or no bugs significant enough to fix. Of course, it would be difficult to take this into account without a lot more work since it would be necessary to examine the status of each project.

    • Carlo Daffara 7:47 am on August 28, 2007 Permalink

      As mentioned in the text, this is meant to provide a lower bound to the number of available, active and stable projects; as such, we have chosen a very strict definition of activity, and we used the project choice of “stability”, even considering that this lowers the number of suitable projects even more (there are many “beta” projects that are really stable). We already have found projects that are stable but not included in the count; an example is GNU make (that is stable, but having no new release in one year would not make it to the list).
      It must be considered, however, that even projects that are more or less finished (no more bugs) may need a small recompile or modification to adapt to changing platforms and environments; in this sense, stable project with no release in one year should be considered an exception and not the rule. Using a simple sampling approach, we estimate that those are less than 2% of our original count, and so we would not rise the package count in a significant way. Our main objective was to demonstrate that the lower bound of the number of both stable and maintained packages was significant, and I believe that that result was reached.
      Many thanks for your comment (and for reading the article thoroughly :-))

    • Nathan 9:24 pm on October 22, 2007 Permalink

      It would be very interesting to see that list of 18,000 stable, mature, active projects. Any plans to publish it?

    • Carlo Daffara 10:19 pm on October 29, 2007 Permalink

      For some of the forge sites that allows for data extraction, such a list can be obtained through the FLOSSMOLE data source. For those sites that have no search functionality, or that provide only part of their database in a searchable way, statistical methods were using based on a sampling approach, and in this case no list (just the numbers) can be obtained. It is important to understand that what we were looking at was a lower bound on the number of active and stable projects, not a “final” list.

    • Ali 4:43 pm on October 25, 2012 Permalink

      Hi,
      I am doing currently a research on open source firm. for statistical model i need number of projects registered to sourceforge year by year, is there any way to extract these information from sourceforge?

    • Roberto Galoppini 3:52 pm on October 27, 2012 Permalink

      Sure, look at the SourceForge Research Data at the Notre Dame University.

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:40 am on August 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Projects: Qualipso deliverables (part I) 

    QualiPSo – the ever largest Open Source initiative funded by the European Commission – is making public its first results.

    Waiting to eventually join the first QualiPSo conference, that will focus on the challenges that the Open Source model introduces while being integrated in industry strategies, I had a first look at deliverables within the “business models” research area, namely the deliverable State of the art concerning strategies for industry towards Open Source communities and vice versa (PDF).

    autoreferentialityThe gesture of “me” by timtak

    Too little is said about Open Source Consortium Model (paragraph 6.6), where across Europe there are quite a few indeed, and I am available to help QualiPSO researchers if they are willing to further investigate the matter.

    Could you believe that the chapter ATTITUDES AND STRATEGIES OF INDUSTRY TOWARDS OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITIES describes only examples where a QualiPSO member is involved?

    Apparently QualiPSo didn’t take yet into consideration my suggestion to make public their description of work as many others did already, stripping from only confidential information. This way everybody could find all possible details about the project, including the project management and exploitation/dissemination plan and the detailed Workplan. This way we might even get a rough idea of the cost of individual deliveries, while the average cost is already a known information, though.

    I am still convinced that transparency pays..

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, research, public funded, QualiPSo, IST

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:40 am on August 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Italian Parliament, two-year switch to begin in September. 

    The IT department of the Italian Parliament presented plans for the migration of all of its 200 servers and more than 3500 desktop PCs to GNU/Linux and Open Office. The switch will be carried out gradually, as reported by IDABC, it will start next September and it will take about two years.

    After reading that the Italian parliament bets house on SuSE Linux I asked Pietro Folena to tell me more.

    According to IDABC the IT department of the Italian Parliament presented a massive migration plan (200 servers, 3500 desktops) that will take about two years. Could you tell us more about it?

    Pietro Folena Pietro Folena, courtesy of Chamber of Deputies

    Mr. Pietro Folena, Member of Italian Parliamente, proposed on July 2006, to adopt Free Software in the Parliament (low house) IT infrastructure and on desktop Pcs, both. The second proposal was to allow to MPs the choise between Windows and a Free Software Operative System, like GNU/Linux. This year the IT department of the House of Deputies (the low house of Italian Parliament presented a plan to migrate to Suse Linux Enterprise Edition the desktops of MPs, parlamentarian fractions, offices, but servers was migrated during 2005 and 2006.

    In order to introduce politicians to Linux are you consider a sort of “One Laptop per Politician” initiative? If this is the case, how would you get them interested in learning a new paradigm?

    No, It’s matter of freedom. We have Windows 2000 on our desktops. But this was an imposition that I didn’t accept. I’m a elected MP, so I want to decide if using Windows or a Free Software Operative System. I think that I’m more free using free software.
    I hope that all MPs will chose GNU/Linux on desktops, to know this alternative to proprietary software. If MPs will know the Free Software filosophy I think that laws on software and culture will be better.

    You said that “This migration will be a very important case study and will present us with best practices, relevant for all public offices.”, is the IT department wondering to write a blueprint (i.e a replicable and complete description of a set of tools and processes that satisfied a specific need)?

    At this moment I know there isn’t a blueprint, because migration of desktops will start on september. But I think that it will write next year or after.

    A political question, what do you think of the idea of “open-source politics”?

    There are some interestin projects of this. I think that “open source politics” are necessary. Politicians and cityzen are too far. But I see some facts: European Parliament, in example, changed the IPRED 2 directive by Internet-people riot. In Italy we deleted a fee on cell phone by a petition signed on Internet. The Net is a chance of democracy and partecipation.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Government, Italian Parliament, PietroFolena, blueprints

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:51 pm on August 1, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source at Microsoft: some thoughts 

    Bill Hilf participation to OSCON 2007 raised up contrasting “sentiments”, as seen from the Tim O’Reilly post on, and from Groaklaw to Miguel de Icaza known voices from the Open Source blogosphere keep joining the conversation.

    Game of Life Game of Life by Demirtunc

    Hilf announced a new Microsoft’s Open Source portal, talking about Open Source from a Microsoft’s perspective, and that they were going to submit shared source licenses to OSI for the approval process.

    Reading Open Source @ Microsoft FAQ, it is pretty clear that the portal is not (yet) part of a new strategy, but a medium toward a goal: accomplishing heterogeneous customers’ (and partners) needs. Nonetheless, as far as Microsoft’s partners will be progressively embracing open source technologies, I bet Microsoft will turn this into a long term strategy. Since Microsoft’s business is mostly about infrastructural software, they might get advantage of the pervasive capillarity of Microsoft’s partners (750.000) to foster collaborative development over their proprietary technologies.

    Of a different sign, the decision to submit shared licenses to the OSI approval process: reading Rosenberg’s post at Port25 it is clear that Microsoft understands the impact of its move:

    As we look forward to the next three years, we already see the needs of our constituents driving our priorities for licensing, infrastructure, and process. Although open source at Microsoft and the OSI are two different animals, I would submit to you that both are at a point in their maturity where their constituencies need to become more involved to maintain growth. [..]

    So what about the flip side of the OSI becoming a membership organization? Could they really be voted out of existence or rendered ineffective? It doesn’t seem likely to me. Participation in the OSI and adherence to OSI licensing guidelines and Open Source definitions is entirely voluntary. If it isn’t serving the best interests of the community, the community will go elsewhere. Anyone considering an effort to “vote the organization into the ground” would surely realize that such heavy handedness would be self-defeating. That’s not to say that a new membership structure wouldn’t lead to change, but I believe that these changes would have to be the result of vigorous consensus building and that’s probably not a bad thing.

    Shall we see Microsoft joining the new OSI, in the very next future?

    I wish to thank Robin Good to ask me an opinion on the subject through his last invention, Robin Good World News, a web-tv channel collecting independent video news from around the world.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Strategies, Commercial Open Source, Microsoft, robingoodtv

     

    • Alex Fletcher 7:17 pm on August 2, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto,

      More than simply provocative, your question is spot on. Microsoft really should consider joining the OSI Board of Directors as an observer. Apple and Google have already done so. A move like this would help them develop a clearer identity & strategy as a participant in the open source bazaar.

      Alex

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:59 pm on August 2, 2007 Permalink

      Alex, I totally agree with you. I claimed it was a ‘provocative’ question because, for a large part of the Open Source/Free Software world, it is. While unthinkable for many, I believe it is going to make sense, but it will take a while before <<another Microsoft, inside the Microsoft!>> 🙂 will eventually take over the company.

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:39 am on July 29, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Links: 29-07-2007 

    Where’s the grassroots marketing for Linux? – Alex says that the biggest barrier to Open Source adoption is (poor) marketing, and I share his vision. But appropriating returns from the commons is not trivial, and Open Source firms are not willing to invest huge amount of money to publicize public goods. In my opinion we need to implement unconventional marketing campaigns, spending little money and possibly through a collective action. Consortia and similar organizations could play their role in this respect.

    Open Source at Microsoft – Bill Hilf announced a new web “property” (fix the FAQ page) that outlines Microsoft’s position on OSS, while Port 25 will still be the source for technical issues. Microsoft is getting closer to OSS (SpikeSource certifies OSS on Windows), but I really doubt they are going to buy Red Hat. While I believe that Savio’s analysis is lucid and intriguing, I am afraid that Microsoft’s investors are too IP-addicted, and the 235 patents story tells a lot about how important is to keep them calm. The “cultural” issue is an issue, if we talk about investors, IMHO.

    California city connects with open-source networking – Now it is clear why Cisco is trying to prevent Open Source networking to be successful.

    WHurley spins BMC into open source – Dana mentions Whurley’s experience at BMC, apparently another known hacker is leading the Open Source strategy of a (previously) not OS firm. Just as Bob Bray is doing at Autodesk. Again, when talking about hybrid production model (firm+community) people matter.

    Advertising the open-source way with Openads – Matt met Scott Switzer, Openads’ founder and CTO, to learn more about Openads business model.

    OSCON: Open Source Awards 2007 – David Recordon won the Open Source Awards 2007 as Best Strategist because he has turned OpenID into a viable alternative to non-open identity systems.

    SourceForge Community Choice Award winners are…. – Matt commenting SourceForge community-driven awards process says that participants had a tenuous grip on what “enterprise” means, may be he is right, and not just green of envy because Alfresco didn’t win! 😉

    OSI Approves New Open-Source License – Ross Mayfield, CEO and co-founder of Socialtext tells eWeek the whole story of the CPAL long approval process.
    The Bug in OSI Approved Licenses – I don’t see any “bug”, besides the partially missing transparency, and VCs’ attitude to invest in OS firms is definitely not an OSI’s issue.

    Intervista a Bruce Perens (Italian) – When Bruce Perens met the blogosphere here in Italy, I happened to interview him, and Nicola Mattina managed to get it published on Nova 24 (Il Sole24 ore).

    [cisco, OSI, Perens, NicolaMattina, BobBray, Whurley, BMC, DavidRecordon, OSCON, commercial open source, open source strategy, Microsoft, SavioRodrigues, SugarCRM]

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:43 am on June 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Italy launches Commission on Open Source 

    The Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, on the 22th of June announced the creation of the second Open Source Commission, composed of sixteen members and coordinated by Angelo Raffaele Meo. The Commission will be supported also by the National Center for Information Technology in Public Administration(CNIPA) and the Department of Innovation.

    Italian coffee Italian coffee cirox

    The start of this commission is further proof of my personal and Government willingness to aid the diffusion of Open Source software, fostering open source policies and making them central.

    The Commission follows two other important initiatives:

    The Commission will define guidelines for IT Public procurement of open source software.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Government, Open Source Procurement, Italy

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:42 pm on June 12, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian new tech startups – The Best Ecosystem for Technology Start-ups: the Italian Evidence 

    Researchers and policy makers agree on the fact that New Tech Based Firms (NTBF) play a fundamental role in modern industrialized economies. This is all the more true in Italy. On the one hand, in fact, due to the weakness of the national high tech industry, there is a great need for a complete generational renovation in the enterprise operating in this sector. On the other hand, the country presents many success stories of new enterprises operating the the medium and low tech content sectors. Therefore the question arises concerning the conditions necessary in Italy for the development of top level firms operating in high tech sectors.

    In this context, the analysis produced by the RITA Observatory of the Department of Management Engineering of the Polytechnic of Milan (RITA Report 2005) showed that Italy boasts a vast number of young high tech enterprises that could be candidates to become “gazelles”.

    KDE Resting Gazelle, by khosey1

    These enterprises are concentrated in the stronger parts of the country, particularly in Lombardy (30.3%), while their presence is far rarer in the Southern Italy (15.4%). Moreover the productive specialization of these enterprises is influenced by the traditional vocations of Italian regions and the presence of large enterprises operating in related sectors. In particular two thirds of all NTBFs operate in the service sector (software, Internet services, TLC and desktop publishing). In the manufacturing sector, a fundamental role is played by ICT (21.6% of the total, 8% of which in electronic, optical and biomedical tools) and automation and robotics (19%). The share of NTBFs operating in biotechnologies, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and new materials is more modest (4.9%).

    The birth rate of Italian NTBFs underwent a significant increase in the latter half of nineties. Nonetheless, after the pinnacle reached in 2000, their birth rate is decreasing with the important exception of start ups generated by the public research system.

    This is due to the negative effects created by the new economy bubble and, more generally, to the unfavourable macro economic conditions that have recently affected a vast portion of the high technology sector. Nonetheless, the enterprises have survived this period of competitive selection are starting to exhibit a new vivacity, which is particularly visible in the increase of indications related to innovative activities such as patenting and participating in research projects financed by the European Union.

    (source: “an eye to innovation” newsletter, by FILAS)

    Reading the ICT market in 2006 report, edited by AITECH-Assinform – the Italian association of Information & Communication Technology companies – apparently the IT Services shows some (little) sign of recovery (+0.4%), but software development and maintenance and data processing are both experiencing a downturn (-0.7% and -2.3% respectively).

    Also interesting to notice that apparently innovation by Italian business does not take place on a co-operative basis, as results from the fourth Community Innovation Survey, by EUROSTAT.

    Co-operation with customers in innovation activities ranged from 4% in Spain to 41% in Finland, and I am wondering what about launching an Italian Cooperative Software Initiative?

    Technorati Tags: startups, ecosystem, innovation, open source

     

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