Commercial Open Source Software

Updates from July, 2008 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Roberto Galoppini 11:00 am on July 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  European Open Source Observatory and Repository, EC considering Open Source Migration, German Migration Guide available: links 05-07-2008 

  The Open Source Observatory and Repository opens up – The OSOR provides a platform for the exchange of information, experiences and FLOSS-based code for the use in public administrations, everyone is invited.

  EU: EC considers study on migration to Open Source – The European Commission seems considering doing research on whether it should migrate to Open Source software or not. Carlo Piana commented saying that the Commission should be more thorough in following their own policies.

  EU: SUN and Novell to governments: there is plenty of Open Source support – Simon Phipps says there is enough support available for Open Source projects of any scale. It sounds a bit over optimistic.

  DE: Manual for migrating to Open Source updated -The German Ministry of the Interior has published the third edition of its ‘Migrationsleitfaden’, a manual for public administrations  migrating to Open Source. The guide was first published in 2003. It has been downloaded 150,000 times so far and has been translated into several languages.

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

   

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  Roberto Galoppini 4:05 pm on July 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Open Source Development: About Community and Sponsored Projects 

  Classifying Open Source production models is not an academic curiosity, as result from recent conversations on how the development model affects at large the software life-cycle and, more important, the business strategy.

  Theodore Ts’o opened a conversation about organic vs non organic open source development, following a Mozilla’s organic definition. Matthew Aslett later reopened the discussion further exploring the bee keeper analogy, getting some reactions from Stormy Peters and James Dixon (original author of the Bee Keeper model).

  Are all your developers corporate-sponsored? by camera_rwanda

  Beyond definitions, the way open source firms cope with their communities, and how their business is affected by the relationship, worth some attention. The relationships between firms and communities in open source software has been analyzed by very few academic papers so far. Dahlander and Magnusson in their paper “Relationships between open source software companies and communities: Observations from Nordic firms” distinguished three different approaches to handle the firm–community relationship: symbiotic, commensalistic, and parasitic. Managerial issues vary depending on the chosen approach. The symbiotic approach seem to be the most promising in terms of the possibility to influence the community, but firms adopting it are also confronted with challenging managerial issues related to decision rights and control.

  West and O’Mahony in “contrasting community building in sponsored and community founded open source projects” investigated how changes in building and attracting an “external” when open source firms spin out internally developed code. The following table from the paper reports key issues for community-led and sponsored open source projects.

  	Community initiated	Sponsored
  Reasons for Initiation	Solve a problem Create a “free software” alternative to proprietary solution	Achieve greater adoption Get development help on areas that are of ow priority for the firm (e.g. special dialects)
  Key Issues	Garnering Resources Building healthy community, attracting talented developers Distributing software Gaining “mindshare” with minimal marketing	Gaining legitimacy Building healthy community, attracting talented contributors Resolving ambiguity about control and ownership
  Contributor Motivations	To make software happen To gain fulfillment To build and learn new skills To Solve personal and professional problems	To complete areas that are of high priority for contributors To gain visibility by prospective employers To influence sponsor’s alignment with complementary projects
  Control	Democratic, transparent, usually meritocratic Some leadership and stratification	Varies but usually sponsor retains direct or indirect control

  The paper suggests that ongoing relationships between the sponsor and the community face a trade-off between appropriating returns from the commons versus providing incentives for external participants to join the community. As a matter of fact unilateral decisions and legal obligations make difficult recruiting contributors. On the contrary governance mechanisms enabling the sponsor to determine project’s evolution through pluralistic support are definitely of help in this respect.

  Apache, the Collaborative Software Initiative, Eclipse, OpenOffice.org or SAKAI seem to follow very different approaches to community building, technology transfer and fostering open source ecosystems. That is for another post, maybe more than one: I will make some interview before reaching any conclusion, in if any.

  Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, community-driven, collaborative software initiative, open source projects, SAKAI, Dahlander, Magnusson, OMahony, West

  Open Source Development: About Community and Sponsored Projects | OSS Spyglass, Roberto Galoppini, Joel West, and 1 other are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
  • 

    James Dixon 4:52 pm on July 4, 2008 Permalink

    These are great points Roberto.

    Based on my own experience I don’t agree with West and Mahony’s items in the Contributor Motivations section. I have contributed to both commercial and organic projects in the past and my motivation is the same regardless of the model: I have a need for the software that the project produces but I am stalled or blocked by a documentation, design, or coding issue. I participate in the project to unblock myself and in the process I contribute my changes to the project.

    In terms of how I select the packge in the first place I try several projects and choose the one that has the bet fit for my needs (this includes functionality, architecture, community etc). I don’t care whether it came from JBoss or Apache or Sourceforge.

    James Dixon, CTO, Pentaho

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    Roberto Galoppini 6:52 pm on July 4, 2008 Permalink

    Hi James, it is great to hear back from you!

    I quoted the West and Mahony’s original table fully, and I agree that the Contributor Motivations section is probably not the most interesting (Lakhani and Wolf are my first choice in this respect).

    I agree that open source software selection is a very interesting topic. I will cover this issue at some extent talking about how super-communities fit into the open source development picture, and your feedback is welcome!

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    Joel West 11:21 pm on July 15, 2008 Permalink

    I would tend to agree that the motivations section was not the strongest part: it was less our own work and thus heavily derived from the prior research of others (including Lakhani and Wolf). The main focus we had — what we thought the contribution was — was on governance of sponsored projects and how that differs from independent ones. This is consistent with Siobhan’s work on community governance and my own interest in openness as a source of competitive advantage.

    Given our focus, we may have simplified away James’ case where he needs the technology and therefore does something to make it happen. This is very consistent with the story of Brian Behlendorf and the Apache contributors.

    However this is where I’d draw the distinction. Brian was contributing because as an employee of a user company — i.e. a company running a website. The data collection for this study focused on IT vendors, normally companies that want to give away X so they can sell Y. So the motivations here tended to be more strategic: we’ll assign 2.5 bodies to support project X to make sure it is available for us when we need it.

    I can certainly see how the line gets blurry for IT vendors: IBM support Apache on principle, but a particular bug needs to be fixed by next week so that WebSphere 12.7 won’t crash. Still, for big companies there’s normally a requirement to get permission to work on OSS projects (at least during work hours) and so the decision to participate in a project would have to be approved as fitting the strategic goals of the company. Presumably a CTO (especially in a non-public company) would have more discretion than a bench-level engineer.

    Joel West
    San Jose State

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    Joel West 11:31 pm on July 15, 2008 Permalink

    Oops, now I can see the source of the confusion.

    The paper quoted in this blog posting is the one that Siobhan & I wrote in June 2004 — effectively our first draft.

    The paper I was referring to one published in April 2008. The newer paper reflects many months of working out the governance issues that distinguish sponsored from independent projects.

    Joel

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    Roberto Galoppini 4:26 pm on July 18, 2008 Permalink

    Hi Joel, I am really glad you joined the conversation.

    I tend to spend part of my blogger’s time and effort to spread the word about academic researches and EC-funded projects, often unknown due to poor dissemination. I think it is a great thing that you spend some time blogging about your findings.

    I took the chance to report about your newest paper on another post about open source communities, maybe raising other issues about what I call hybrid production model.

    Getting back to your comments, I believe that IT vendors are the most important open source actor, but not the only one. Actors like the Collaborative Software Initiative are just trying to industrialize bottom-up processes seen with Apache before, and later with organizations like SAKAI.

    I guess that open source ecosystems in the next future will be seeing consumers playing a much important role.

    Do you agree?

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  Roberto Galoppini 4:48 pm on July 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Open Source Survey: About OpenLogic Census 

  Six months ago OpenLogic announced the Open Source Census, an initiative to quantify the global use of open source in enterprises. On the 16th of April OpenLogic eventually launched the collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software, and recently announced the first results.
  Complete Lego Census by Cavalier92

   

  • Ubuntu is the top Linux distribution on machines scanned to date – Various versions of Ubuntu accounted for almost 50% of all Linux distributions installed on participating machines. Debian accounted for 14%; SUSE Linux accounted for 12% of install base; Fedora Core 7%.
  • International interest in Census – 66% of machines scanned in the first two months were outside the U.S. U.S. participants represented about one third of participants. Active global participation in the Census came from areas such as Europe, Canada and Australia.
  • Top open source packages – The top 5 installed open source packages were in order were, Firefox, Xerces, Zlib, Xalan and Prototype.

  I asked my twitter and blog buddy Stormy Peters , Director of Community and Partner Programs at OpenLogic, some feedback about the Census initiative. OpenLogic is an open source firm providing services to help customers to manage open source governance, taking advantage of the frequent lack of open source corporate actors. Apparently launching this survey OpenLogic is doing Forrester, Gartner or IDC job (the last is one of the sponsor of the initiative).

  Why OpenLogic decided to launch an opt-in survey?

   

  As OpenLogic worked with large enterprises, we realized that companies did not know how much open source software they were using. To help address this problem, we developed an open source tool, OSS Discovery, to allow companies to inventory the open source on their systems. As we started working with customers to conduct these inventories, we felt that it would be useful to aggregate this data in an anonymous way. From this experience, The Open Source Census was born. Most research firms use traditional surveys (of software vendors or of end users). Unfortunately, these methods are inadequate for open source since it is downloaded freely and companies do not always know how much open source they are using. IDC sponsored The Open Source Census to supplement the data that they get from other research methods.

  Traditional surveys, basically done by phone calls to software vendors, simply don’t work: OSS procurement is done by clicking on a download button, most of the times. OpenLogic conducting such a survey sponsored by IDC is definitely a sign of the time.

   

   

  What can you tell about the OS census so far?

  We are happy with the initial response to The Open Source Census with almost 1500 systems scanned as of Jun 30. To date, most of the participants in the Census are individuals scanning and submitting data for one or two systems. This is expected since these participants primarily came from press when we launched The Open Source Census. We are now working to actively recruit large enterprises to scan a sampling of machines. We expect that many of these enterprises will scan hundreds or even thousands of machines. The sponsors of The Open Source Census are currently recruiting enterprises and we expect these activities to pay off in the months ahead as enterprises submit large blocks of scans to the Census.

  Enterprises scans will tell us a lot of interesting things, I am not sure Firefox or Xerces will still be in the top ten, though.

  Any comment about the reaction to news of Microsoft’s Support of Open Source Census?

   

  From the beginning, we knew that we wanted The Open Source Census to be a collaborative effort – not just specific to OpenLogic. We felt that collaboration was critical to making The Open Source Census successful. Prior to launching The Open Source Census, we began the process of reaching out to a wide variety of participants in the open source community and ecosystem. The list included large platform vendors, commercial open source vendors, open source communities and organizations, law firms and analysts. Because this is an open project, we did not limit or exclude anyone from sponsoring or participating – as long as they agreed with the goals and process for The Open Source Census. We welcome all sponsors who might want to participate and help make The Open Source Census successful.

  Beyond Stormy’s diplomatic answer all the fuss around Microsoft’s sponsorship is spreading the word about the open source census, and Matt Asay, Savio Rodrigues and Sean Michael Kerner posts are of help in this respect.

  Side effect or not?

  About The Open Source Census:
  The Open Source Census is a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in enterprise. Founded by OpenLogic, the Open Source Census has a number of sponsors including OpenLogic and IDC. The Open Source Census initiative has open source tools designed to scan individual enterprise computers for all installed open source software. The results of these scans can then be contributed anonymously to the Open Source Census, where the aggregate data is published.

  Technorati Tags: commercial open source, openlogic, OpenLogic Census, IDC, Gartner, Forrester, StormyPeters

  Boycott Novell » GMOME, OpenLogic, and the Microsoft Connection is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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  Roberto Galoppini 2:12 pm on June 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Open Source Mobile: Funambol keeps growing and raises 12.5 Millions in Venture Capital 

  Congratulations to the Funambol team for raising 12.5 millions of funding in a series B financing led by mobile-focused venture capital firm Nexit Ventures, along with Castile Ventures (new investor) and was joined by existing investors, Walden International and HIG Ventures.

  Investors are banking in a long term perspective, while Funambol is cash flow positive from the beginning of this year, so I asked my friend Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, the following question:

  How is this money going to be spent?

  A tight-rope walker (funambol) by hdc.

  Our plan is to use the cash to scale up the organization. In particular, around sales and operations. Commercial open source companies tend to have leads in every part of the world, which is a great thing. However, in order to follow the leads through, you need people on site (in particular if you are selling a product to service providers). Therefore, we are opening a few more offices world-wide, where we already have customers, to properly serve them and expand our presence.

  Sometimes easy questions are a valuable tool to get interesting insights. Open source ISVs facing the “turning OSS users into customers” are likely to meet Lead Users – a term coined by Eric Von Hippel referring to users of a product experiencing needs actually unfulfilled and who could significantly benefit from the solution to those needs – from all over the world. If thinking global is the natural choice for open source firms, acting locally requires individualization and customizations to your customers’ needs, yet a local structure to effectively implement such needs.

  As mentioned in my first interview to Fabrizio, Funambol addresses only the “top of the pyramid” (carriers, large ISP, etc), enabling also the base of the pyramid – the “free” Customers – to generate value for Funambol, as it is happening with AOL who just selected Funambol to help with synchronization of its own online and mobile mail.

  In the meantime Funambol ignited also a partnership with SpikeSource, in order to address through SpikeSource and their partners other layers of the “pyramid”. Fabrizio himself commenting the partnership said:

  This partnership with SpikeSource enables every company, regardless of size, to benefit from the simple implementation of Funambol’s mobile open source application.

  Funambol besides fostering its community and delivering its wireless sync application for the iPhone, is creating an open source (mobile) ecosystem around its platform, as every open source firm should do.

  Kudos to Fabrizio and his team!

  Technorati Tags: Funambol, SpikeSource, Spikeignited, Venture Capital, Nexit Ventures, Castile Ventures, Walden International, HIG Ventures, FabrizioCapobianco, lead users, free customers, pyramid market

   
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  Roberto Galoppini 4:15 pm on June 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Open Source Government: France beats Italy 4-0! 

  SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, a competitiveness cluster aimed at developing the local economy and enterprises’ competitiveness, using partnership and training to produce and deliver enabling innovations, just run its third internal convention. Among the five thematic groups, since October 2007 has been included a technology-oriented working group on open source (Logiciel Libre).

  Paris, capital du logiciel libre by Koninho

  Roberto Di Cosmo, professor at the university of Paris-Diderot and president of the Logiciel Libre working group, invited me to join the event to learn more about what is going on in the Paris area in the free software arena.

  Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva’s CEO, is the vice-president of the open source thematic group, while in the council are sitting representatives from big firms like Cap Gemini, Bull, C-S, along with people from INRIA, university Pierre et Marie Curie and Nuxeo.

  Roberto explains that the goal of this group is to help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area by federating research laboratories, SMEs and big firms through R&D projects, partially supported by public funding in the standard scheme of competitivenes clusters.

  The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors. On the other side, this framework has been put at work in the particularly fertile ground of the Paris area, that hosts 50% of the ITC R&D of France, with a significant presence of Open Source ISV, a large number of research centers and Universities with IT laboratories, that have a long tradition of contributing to Free Software, and an exceptionally high concentration if IT expenditures.

  Roberto, how System@tic allocates resources to the projects?

  A distinguishing feature of the R&D projects in a competitiveness cluster, is that they must bring together at least two industrial partners and a research laboratory. In the case of our group, resources are allocated in the following manner: 59% SMEs, 26% laboratories, 15% big firms. The projects go through a rigorous evaluation process, first inside the group, then at the level of the cluster, and then in the services of the ministry of Industry, the region, and the departments of the Paris area.

  During the first year public investments sum up to less than five millions euro, less than half of the how much has been allocated for open source software by the Italian budget law last year, this year and next one. Italy is investing more money actually, but it is still unclear how such investments will eventually benefit the IT Italian ecosystem, though.

  Italy is still missing a clear strategy about how to foster the Italian open source ecosystem through training, education, research and outreach, while France apparently has found its own path for developing it.

  Dominique Vernay, Systematic president, during his opening speech congratulated the Open Source group for the speed with which it has started 4 high quality R&D projects, integrating quickly in the Systematic infrastructure.

  Marc Lipinski – vice president of the Conseil Régional de l’Ile de France for higher education, research and innovation – gave a particular importance to the role of this group while addressing the over 400 delegates present in the room, stressing its creation as one of the most significant events in the last year for Systematic.

  During coffee-breaks I spoke with few French open source actors, among others Cedric Thomas (OW2), Ludovic Dubost (Xwiki), Stéfane Fermiger (Nuxeo), Daniel Schaefer (Kalis), but also with open source customers, like Denis Teyssou (AFP) or Marie Buhot-Launay (Paris Region Economic Development Agency), inward investment adviser for ISV companies wanting to invest in the Paris area.

  People had a very positive feeling with regard to the approved open source projects, and looking at projects like scribo is easy to share their thoughts.

  SCRIBO – Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies – aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents. SCRIBO has a total budget of 4.3M? and is partially funded by the French administration. It brings 9 participants together: AFP, CEA LIST, INRIA, LRDE (Epita), Mandriva, Nuxeo, Proxem, Tagmatica and XWiki.

  Italy beat France on a soccer field, but on the open source ground we have a lot to learn from them.

  Technorati Tags: France, Italy, Open Source Government, ecosystems, DominiqueVernay, RobertoDCosmo, MarcLipinski, FrancoisBancilhon, Scribo, System@tic

  Open Source mobile edition and Djordje Lukic are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Djordje Lukic 12:08 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink

    Hm… I wonder why the hell Di Cosmo didn’t tell his students about this …

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  Roberto Galoppini 6:42 am on June 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Open Source Monitoring: RRDTool 1.3 available, a chat with Tobias Oetiker 

  RRDTool, the round-robin database tool, announced the release of RRDtool 1.3. The new release includes additional capabilities and functionalities, and it has been rewritten to make it more modular.

  Tobias Oetiker, the author of many famous open source tools like RRDTool, MRTG and SmokePing holding a seat on GroundWork Open Source’s Project Lead Council, approaches software development from an hacker perspective: to scratch a personal itch.

  
  Tobias Oetiker (on the right) by QFamily

  Since I had issues to solve and did not find existing software to do it. Then because I use OSS almost exclusively in my work, I found it only fair to share the results of my work too. After all OSS only works when several parties throw their goods into the basket.

  How all this started?

  I wrote MRTG and SmokePing because I needed the functionality. So essentially I wrote them for myself. And since I like to see people enjoying using my tools, I put them out there. In the case of rrdtool, I did not need it directly, but based on the experience from writing MRTG I had a pretty clear vision as to what tool is missing from the system managers toolbox.

  So the motivation for writing rrdtool was primarily drawn from the positive feedback I got from mrtg users. As it turned out, I had actually hit a nerve with all three of my tools since they all got pretty good use across the net.

  For most of the time while developing the tools I have been working for ETH Zurich and did the tool work mostly in my spare time. Since I had a fixed income from the University I did not explore commercial opportunities.

  Originally economic incentives weren’t the cause behind such code developments.
  What about the economic incentives, today?

  I found that publishing software as OSS has the nice effect of triggering more feedback than in a closed environment and also draws contributions every now and then which is a very nice plus the economic value is in me being known quite well for my work which makes it very easy getting contracts, because people assume I know stuff, which is not entirely a wrong assumption <smile>.

  There are also direct benefits, in the sense that some companies contract me to develop additional features for the OSS packages. I always draw up the contracts such that I can include the results back into the mainline. Most of smokePing extensions have been created in this way.

  Tobias was the typical hacker described by researches interested in understanding motivations (intrisic motivations). Later Tobias was also also motivated by financial rewards (extrinsic motivations), coming from selling consulting services on his products, and he eventually ended open his own company.

  Which are your source of revenues, besides consulting?

  Well I am trying this with the sponsorship approach, the idea is that companies that profit from the products become a sponsor who just gives money to encourage the future development of the product. I use this money to pay for maintaining the products and developing some additions which are not covered by some other contract, just because I think they are necessary a further source of income is google ads which works quite well due to the high traffic on the website.

  Which are the advantages for your customers? And for you?

  The big advantage of this approach is that the customers normally have a clear vision of which problem they want to solve, and since I know the tool well I can integrate an optimal solution which will continue to evolve even after the contract ends, since the extension is now part of the product.

  This leads to a forth motivation to do it all. Being the author of these well known tools gives me a certain standing in the industry, which comes in handy when bidding for contracts, since customer assume (rightly) that I know stuff and I am able to finish projects.

  Our biggest contract last year had nothing to do with any of the tools but the customer asked us only because he had seen my name mentioned in connection with monitoring.

  Tobias creates tools in a way that users can get along without needing any extra support contract. The software is enriched as part of their service offerings, and as time goes by they enhance their toolbox. They do not sell tools, but the stuff they make the tools for.

  Oetiker + Partner AG is a pure IT service company, for some probably the highest form of open source firm.

  Happy hacking Tobias!

  About RRDtool
  RRDtool is a freely (as in freedom and in beer) available software tool for the collection and graphical display of time series data and is deployed to monitor computer networks and network traffic. Installed at hundred thousands of sites world wide, RRDtool monitors everything from small local networks to large IT infrastructures of internationally operating telecom providers. RRDtool is included in the family of Open Source tools developed by Tobias Oetiker, which also includes MRTG, and SmokePing, which is used for the measurement and display of line quality parameters in Internet connections. For more information about MRTG, RRDtool and SmokePing visit: http://oss.oetiker.ch

  Technorati Tags: TobiasOetiker, Open Source Monitoring, Network Management, GroundWork, RRDTools, MRTG, smokeping, motivations

   
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  Roberto Galoppini 6:24 pm on June 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  OpenOffice and Mono, MySQL Italian Webinar, About going hybrid at Microsoft: links 15-06-07 

  OpenOffice-based applications with Mono and MonoDevelop – Miguel de Icaza teaches you how to build OpenOffice solutions with Mono and MonoDevelop.

  Italian Webinar – Materiale, Domande e Risposte per il Webinar “Guida alla scalabilita’ di MySQL” – Ivan Zoratti Q&A session held during the Italian webinar on MySQL scalability.

  Go hybrid – Paul Bach is looking for projects hosted on CodePlex interested in participating a research aimed at designing Codeplex support.

   
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  Roberto Galoppini 8:44 am on June 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Forresters on Open Source usage, SIP Standards adherence at Microsoft, Open Source European Tour: links 14-11- 

  Forrester survey finds lack of interest in OSS? – Savio on Forrester’s findings, interesting.

  Port 25 fighting the good fight: A story of SIP compliance and standards adherence at Microsoft Corporation – James Governor reports about s Sam Ramji’s efforts to ensure Microsoft’s SIP softphone work with Asterisk open source PBX and SIP Server.

  Open Source European tour – Matthew Aslett is taking a look at open source policies and deployment projects in some European nations.

  
  

   
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  Roberto Galoppini 3:12 pm on June 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Open Source Business Models: let’s start from the production of code 

  I would like to join the the ongoing discussion about open source software business models driven by Matthew Aslett who in turn was answering Savio Rodrigues‘s post on how to fix the ‘broken’ open source business model.

  Production by The Library of Congress

  Before getting into the conversation, it is useful to recap what is an open source business model. Researchers, tech writers and consultants often taxonomize open source business models mentioning just the license scheme and what is sold the most. The result is that the vast majority of the open source firms seem to use just the same business model. Under this approach we might consider firms like Zenoss and GroundWork as if they were applying the same business model – i.e. differentiating on features their commercial and community products. But the two firms are using different open source production models, resulting in different core capabilities and configuration of activities (2 of the 9 building blocks used to describe a business model).
  Zenoss develops its own platform, building it with the classical corporate production model, where all stages of software production are carried on within the organization using some open source plumbing. GroundWork has adopted an hybrid production model, relying on existing projects and contribute directly to them, and also indirectly spending effort coordinating some inter-projects collaborations.

  Differences like these can affect what customers choose to buy, eventually ending to better determine your customer segment. For example customers interested in Nagios, could be not happy with an open source project supported by a services organization. Instead they might prefer a software company offering subscriptions services along with a corporate community support. Others in order to avoid lock-in risk might want to buy only from a community driven open source firm, privileging one of the ISVs delivering services on Nagios.

  Open source customers are more right than others.

  Business models are a simplified representation of how a company makes business, and elements to describe it have to be choosen carefully.

  Technorati Tags: commercial open source, Zenoss, Hyperic Nagios, Groundwork, subscription services

  Roberto Galoppini, GoodDebate, and GroundWork Blog » Blog Archive » GroundWork & Open Source Business Models are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    GoodDebate 8:22 pm on June 16, 2008 Permalink

    Seems like the open source debate is heating up. PacketTrap Networks had a similar debate with others in commerical open source several months ago. The debate continues i guess. I tend to agree with Goodman from PacketTrap in his post here:
    http://www.packettrap.com/blog/index.php/june-16th-2008-commercial-open-source-debate/

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    Roberto Galoppini 10:07 am on June 19, 2008 Permalink

    I read the old “debate”, and also their position paper on open source. They do not distinguish between corporate and hybrid production models, so that open source is always about communities in their perspective. Moreover in their opinion open source is always about coordinating volunteers, while just open source network management projects like MRTG or RRDTool are developed by a single developer.

    Their theorem is pretty clear:

    PacketTrap’s position that IT departments should be skeptical of POSS vendors (i.e. Hyperic, GroundWorkOpen)because shareholder profit motive overrides community and, for this reason, the long term viability of these companies is questionable

    On the contrary Tobias Oetiker seems to be happy with GroundWork sponsorship, and I believe that asking Cacti guys and others we might get similar feedback.

    Talking about long term viability, I am afraid that small proprietary vendors are a much more risky bet, though.

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  Roberto Galoppini 10:14 am on June 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Open Source Government: Ideas for ForumPA 2009 

  Leo Sorge, editor-in-chief of some important italian IT magazines, after my open source round-table at ForumPA contacted me for an interview for 01net magazine, and I took the chance to talk about what is missing here.

  Open Source: our potential? by Kimberlee della Luce

  As a matter of fact the Italian IT market is highly fragmented, just like by other European countries the vast majority of IT firms are small, or very small. As results from a survey recently conducted by the Observatory of the European SMEs the dimension of a company is a critical success factor:

  Overall, the larger the enterprise, the more likely it is to have turnover from exports: almost hree in ten – 28% – of LSEs, but only 7% among micro-enterprises reported exports.

  Barriers to innovation are always the same:

  EU SMEs regard four factors as constituting equally important barriers to innovation: problems in access to finance, scarcity of skilled labour, a lack of market demand and expensive human resources. The larger an enterprise, the more likely it is to report problems in finding the necessary human resources, and the less likely it is to report difficulties in getting he financial resources that are necessary for innovative activity.

  Mind the Bridge and similar initiatives can help Italian startups to get VCs’ attention, people like Fabrizio Capobianco are the living proof that there is a way to get funded by North-American investors. ForumPA can definitely take advantage of his experience to help other Italians to follow his path.

  Competence networks, incubators and technology valleys are very important to deliver innovation and to access the required information to conduct business, as results from another survey of the Observatory:

  The following barriers to networking, specific to smaller high-tech firms, can be identified: (i) Often there is a lack of a ‘co-ordinator’, which might be an agency or a larger leading firm. (ii) Small firms, in contrast to large ones, have a short-term perspective and expect quick and concrete results. But research networking is comparably time-intensive and results are not immediately visible. To reduce efforts co-operation is kept simple and built with only very few partners. (iii) It is difficult to find a balance between the privacy of information and the necessary knowledge sharing.

  Roberto Di Cosmo in Paris is leading an entrepreneurial hub bringing together local SMEs and local public administrations. I believe that his experience could be of great help to foster communities of interests to develop products and solutions for the Italian public administration market.

  Last but not least I think that Italy should learn from others’ experiences, listening to ‘veterans’ like Petri Räsänen to understand possibilities and challenges using open source to help regional growth.

  Gianni, we got start to work on it as soon as possible. Right?

  Technorati Tags: PetriRäsänen, FabrizioCapobianco, RobertoDiCosmo, competence center, open source hub, public administration, observatory of european smes, forumpa, mind the bridge