Updates from March, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:53 pm on March 8, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Prize: the province of Rome launches a contest 

    ColosseoColosseo by Screenweek

    The Italian province of Rome is organising a contest for young Open Source software programmers, ‘Oggi programmo io’ (Today I code). Rome hopes the event will help foster the use of this type of software. The best three contestants will win 4.500, 2.500 and 1.000 euros.

    Participation in the contest is open to everybody between 18 and 24 years of age living in the province. The contestants need to develop a completely new application that may be based on existing Open Source software. It should provide an original solution to typical public administration tasks. The winning applications will be made available on the website of the province.

    The contest is an initiative of the the e-government department of the province of Rome. Its main objective is to provide young programmers in the province with incentives to develop Open Source software. It also aims to create a community around applications developed especially for local public administration.

    The software has to be submitted to the province before the end of March.

    Read the full news by the IDABC Open Source Observatory , and don’t forget to subscribe the monthly news service if interested in the European initiatives on Open Source.

     

    • Savio Rodrigues 1:47 pm on March 9, 2007 Permalink

      Sounds like a great idea!

      The only thing I wonder about is whether an 18-24 year old knows enough about government & public service tasks to know what “typical public administration tasks” are.

      I’d say that open source programmers program what they know (i.e. “scratch an itch” as ESR put it) or what they get paid to do (and someone or the community gives them direction in terms of what to build).

      Maybe if the contest gave a few examples of what government officials felt would makes their jobs easier and improve public service, that would help?

      In any case, it’s a great idea and hope it draws a lot of attention!

    • Roberto Galoppini 2:21 pm on March 9, 2007 Permalink

      I also doubt that young hackers might know public administration’s needs, but at the end of the day the initiative – by the way promoted by my friend Flavia Marzano – will hopefully draw a greater attention to OSS in the schools.

      Usually I am not in favour of OS projects public funded, and I will soon write a post about it, but educating students to code and share their programs it is definitely a good idea. Open Source it is here to stay, students applying will get their chance to learn from it.

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:25 pm on March 2, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Linux platform of choice: most popular websites got the facts 

    The uptime monitoring company Pingdom performed a survey (PDF) to sort out what seven of the most popular websites use to deliver services like blogging, blogging tools, file sharing, instant messaging, stock photo libraries, video sharing, and web statistics.

    The article “What the Web’s most popular sites are running on” explores the underlying hardware and software that keep these famous websites working under heavy traffic conditions.

    No news most of them use Apache, holding 58.7% of the market share, while for the very first time below 60 percent since September 2002, as is not a surprise that the database of choice for all but one of them is MySQL, and PHP is the most common server-side language scripting.

    Pingdom Infrastructure Survey 2007Graph excerpt from the Pingdom Infrastructure Survey 2007

    The seven participants all responded to a set of 28 survey questions (all responses available in the PDF matrix) plus a number of follow-up questions about their website infrastructure where they could further explain their choices.

    Let’s see what participants said about their choices.

    Linux was selected for multiple reasons. It has a proven track record in scaling, open source code to allow for altering code as necessary, price, excellent support if necessary and ease of finding talent to support and maintain it.
    (Jan Mahler, network operations manager at YouSendIt)

    Initially, the fact that the software stack was free (as in beer) had a major influence on our decision. But moving forward, standardness and supportability started becoming major factors. Using the big-name Linux distributions gives us support with big-name hardware vendors, and vice versa.
    (Brent Nelson, senior systems administrator at iStockPhoto)

    The features that you get for free on MySQL, with replication, in-memory and fault-tolerant databases (if using MySQL cluster), transaction support, and the wicked performance, cost thousands of dollars with other database engines
    (Joseph Kottke, director of network operations at FeedBurner)

    And, out of the chorus, Ron Hornbaker, who built the first version of Alexaholic in just one weekend, a definitive proof of productive can be the ASP.NET environment.

    I’m most comfortable coding with C#.NET, and this was a personal project.

    Alexaholic is the only site in this survey to use Windows and IIS, but it is worth to mention that IIS is actually gaining ground on Apache and 31.1% of the Internet’s websites hosted on IIS.Read the full article.

    Technorati Tags: Apache, Linux, get the facts, Pingdom

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:36 am on January 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Insurance firm looks for cases 

    Firms offering open source insurance compliance take advantage of the absence of a corporate actor, delivering services for many if not all packages. Their business model might be considered “horizontal”, as opposite to the classical (vertical) business model, where a firm offers every kind of services for a single package/distribution.
    Recently a firm offering Open Source Insurance sent an email to mailing-lists about FLOSS saying:

    Has anyone seen any recent (or any at all) analysis of losses due to Open Source violations? I’m looking for something that would put some estimated dollars on cases such as D-Link, Linksys, etc.

    As friend of the Italian chapter of the Free Software Foundation Europe I reported some GPL violations in the past, and what I learn from the very beginning is that FSF’s actions to enforce the GPL are conducted by confidential discussions, as far as possible. The reason is simple: private negotiations cost much less, and get to a better cooperation.

    On the other side I understand the point of view of the insurance company, you can’t charge an high price for a risk with limited documented history of losses. I warmly suggest them to have a look at the gpl-violations.org website, originally founded by Harald Welte., which last post about GPL violations is a must-read for all.

    Since suspected violations requires a bit of work, and very often the FSF conduct many investigations at a time, they might be open to a collaboration.

    Why don’t they give it a try?

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Insurance, GPL violations, FSF

     

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