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

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

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

    I asked Ross Turk some feedback on the awards:

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

    Open Source Think Tank 2008: some feedback 

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

    all togetherThis is the open source season by Philisopher Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Related posts: Chris Coppola – Chris Keene – Chris Marino

     

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

    European Open Source Projects: more on Qualipso 

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

    Read the full article, by Marco Fioretti

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

     

  • Carlo Daffara 2:54 pm on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: open source competence centers, OSS adoption   

    OpenTTT, collaboration and new models for open source competence centers 

    It is widely known that despite many significant advantages, “explicit” use of OSS is still not as widespread. One of the many approaches designed to help in overcoming the adoption gap is the creation of “OSS competence centers”, that provide support and knowledge to facilitate open source software adoption.
    (Either JavaScript is not active or you are using an old version of Adobe Flash Player. Please install the newest Flash Player.)

    Creating a competence center may take years, especially when it is necessary to create everything from scratch. But as I wrote in a recent presentation, it may be more efficient to “piggy-back” on top of existing IT incubators or IT districts, leverage what has already been produced in other projects and especially offer mediation as a service, because it is clear from the many surveys that companies need significant hand-holding when performing the first open source migrations. We will test this approach (after several trials) at the FutureMatch event colocated within CeBIT,

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ross, what about the SourceForge Advisory Board?  

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

      Dominic

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

      Hi Dominic,

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

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

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

  • Carlo Daffara 2:36 pm on February 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    A survey of European OSS research projects 

    The EU has for a long time supported research on open source software, first with the creation of the European Working Group on Libre Software, by sponsoring studies and research and through various EU branches, like IDABC (the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens). Among the most interesting activities:
    IDABC OSS observatory: a long term activity, that provides news and information on OSS with a focus on Public Administrations. It provides news, a software repository, a taxonomy of software applications, a list of OSS competence centers, and several resources and papers related to legal and adoption processes for Public Administrations.
    The IST research area of the Commission has a long history of research in OSS, including past projects like SPIRIT (open source healthcare) or the FLOSS study (one of the first longitudinal study of OSS participation and development). More recently, projects like COSPA researched the real costs of migration of public administrations to OSS, and provided the data for later research like the EU study “Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU” that had a significant impact. Other significant projects were CALIBRE (open source in industrial applications) and EDOS (Environment for the development and Distribution of Open Source software).
    Several new projects focusing on OSS software quality were funded, like SQO-OSS, FLOSSMETRICS and QUALOSS, collectively grouped on a coordinated initiative called FLOSSQUALITY. While in the beginning the Commission was more interested in “stimulating” OSS production in under-represented areas (especially those that are more relevant for EU at large, like embedded systems, security, development tools like TOPCASED) now most research is devoted to other areas like economic impact and business models, along with the many projects that are using OSS licenses to disseminate the results to a wider population.
    This is just a small outline of the most recent activities, and I will provide a small summary of the results of individual projects in future posts.

     

    • Egor Grebnev 4:30 pm on February 8, 2008 Permalink

      Carlo,
      Thanks for a helpful overview. It makes a nice entry point to the European FLOSS activities.
      I am however still lacking a more critical review of what has been done. It seems that nobody has written such a review in Europe simply because all the experts are already involved and they cannot remain unbiased. Outside of Europe there are not many people who can properly understand nor evaluate what has been done since the matter has been researched in the EU deeper and more thoroughly than anywhere.

    • Carlo Daffara 9:47 am on February 9, 2008 Permalink

      It is true that it is difficult to be impartial with the project you worked in… but I can talk about those I was not involved in, and maybe Roberto can write about the others? I will prepare a post with links to most of the projects I know of, and we can start from there.

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:26 am on February 9, 2008 Permalink

      Egor,

      I will definitely start writing also about those EC=funded projects. Considering that I have never been involved with any of them I believe I could be considered an unbiased source.

      Carlo I have been writing about COSPA few times, what-s next?

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

    Open Source Meetings: RedMonk’s Birthday Party 

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:03 am on February 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Projects: Qualipso Conference (part II) 

    The second day of The First International QualiPSo conference – “Boosting innovation and growth by fostering Open Source Software trust and quality” – I arrived just in time to attend the “Legal issues in OSS” debate, moderated by Stéphane Dalmas (INRIA).

    A new beginning?The end or a new beginning? by kreativekell

    Stéphane insistently asked the panelists why Europe should accept what he called “US-centric FOSS licenses”, eventually ending to let the audience yawn at the second question on the same topic. I bring some statistics on the table, saying that roughly 75% percent of open source software, at least on SourceForge, is released under GPL/LGPL (of which about 65% under GPL), and I don’t see the point to create a (European) license when EU is definitely not a software house.

    I also asked Till Jaeger, of JBB Law in Germany and one of the driving forces behind the Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software, if the AGPL was going to take over in his opinion, at least among small European OS firms. Till represented FSFE in Germany and Harald Welte in GPL enforcement cases, and he said that among the local firms he is advicing AGPL is an emergent phenomenon.

    Last but not least Phil Robb introduced the audience to HP vision to setup methodologies, process and tools to manage licenses’ complexity.

    The following forum – “Business models and strategies” session – was moderated by Franz Kurdofer, Principal Consultant at Siemens, who opened the session saying that QualiPSo future work would be to recommend the best open source strategies depending on selected business models.

    Jean-Noel de Galzain, CEO of Wallix, started apologizing because, he said, he had to set up his presentation in the ten minutes he had before. His speech basically was about Wallix, a promising European OS firm I didn’t know before, but we lost the chance to hear from his voice a definitely much more interesting story.

    Diego Lo Giudice, Principal Consultant at Forrester, being the only analyst among the panelists was supposed to be the keynote speech of the session. His taxonomy of open source business models was basic [slide 19] (SaaS, Product Focused, Service Focused) and filled with inaccuracies, such as listing OpenLogic among SaaS-based firms or citing Funambol’s ten million downloads mark (a number I really wish Fabrizio to reach before doomsday!). He eventually closed his speech with a slide about real truth about the future beyond 5+ years, displaying only a big ‘?’.

    Do we have to think that Forrester analysts have no idea of what will be the possible evolution of the OSS market? This may explain why just a few years ago most of the consulting firms were convinced that OSS was a “flash in the pan” and would have never reached significant market share…

    Björn Lundell, chairman of the Open Source Sweden, a one-year old industrial Swedish Open Source Association, showed a slide [30] relating “commodification” of FOSS, ranging from not differentiating to differentating, to cooperation, from intra company to inter company.

    Cédric Thomas, CEO of the OW2 Consortium, talking about productized services said that the subscription is a healthy market, and that despite there is a lot of traction for SaaS he doesn’t see it replacing the dominant purchase and license mode.

    I asked the panelists about the Sun-MySQL deal, and I noticed that none of them spoke about open source business models, mentioning only specific aspects like licensing. The result was that the company’s strategy, or how a specific firm differentiates itself and deals with the competition, was not effectively described, neither understood.

    Jean-Pierre Laisné, Bull, formerly Chairman of the Board for the ObjectWeb Consortium, moderated the last forum “A network of OSS competence Centres“. He was the only one conducting the session proactively, posing interesting questions to the panelists and doing so eventually catching the audience attention.

    Petri Räsänen, President of COSS, one of the oldest European FOSS competence centers, stated:

    Are you trying to create a compentence center from scratch? It takes years!

    Petri said that the COSS is stimulating FOSS firms to work together with a common “vertical” goal, agreeing with me about the importance of avoiding horizontal aggregation of firms. In this respect I suggested Jean-Pierre to look deeper into the horizontal vs vertical debate, considering the lack of information about consortia and associations in QualiPSo’s deliverables.

    I asked Marco Fioretti, Linux Journal Editor, a comment about the conference:

    In several moments the conference sounded to me like some LinuxWorld show of 6/7 years ago; sure, OSS is a very smart business strategy both for producers and corporate users, but we already knew it and even Qualipso knows it. Personally, however, I have the feeling that Dana Blankenhorn is right when he says that this may be the best way to make EU officially accepts OSS as soon as possible. I’m not necessarily happy about it, of course…

    (Just to recall, Dana wrote “the insights aren’t that deep. They don’t seem to be much more than what you would get from an hour’s worth of Googling.”)

    Summarising:

    • Considering that QualiPSo aims at facilitating the reusability of the results of the project to let the QualiPSo competence centers able to deliver consultancy services on FOSS based business models, a better understanding of business models is a must;
    • Getting involved people from FOSS communities is also a must, especially to avoid self-referentiality. Talking about OSS and not presenting what self-sustaining communities (like Debian or KDE) are doing restrict the range of observed phenomenons (consider that half of the linux kernel is community-developed…)
      .
    • While it is encouraging to know that the Commission is investing quite a lot in OSS, it seems that smaller and more focused projects have obtained in the past (and are obtaining now) more “bang for the buck”.
      .
    • Up to now, most competence centers across EU have demonstrated little impact on the creation of a regional/national OSS market. What Qualipso is doing in improving the situation?

    • For your next conference, organize your roundtables so every panelist has the opportunity to show its true competences…

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, qualipso, EC funded, StephanéDalmas, TillJaeger, PhilRobb, Jean-PierreLaisné, MarcoFioretti, Petri Räsänen, CédricTomas, FranzKurdofer, DiegoLoGiudice, Jean-Noel de Galzain, Björn Lundell, Open Source Sweden, COSS, INRIA

     

    • Davide 2:37 pm on December 4, 2008 Permalink

      Pay attention to the legal session…. Phil Robb did not attend the conference… probably you are speaking about Martin Michlmayr…

    • Roberto Galoppini 9:10 am on December 5, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Davide, nice hear from you.

      Both Phil and Martin attended the conference, and it was a great pleasure to speak with them about FOSSology and FOSSBazaar.

      Phil was indeed invited to join the panel, as clearly results from his own blog at FOSSBazaar.

      I suspect you didn’t attend the legal session yourself.. 😉

    • Martin Michlmayr 2:13 pm on December 9, 2008 Permalink

      Davide, this blog posting is about the QualiPSo conference in Rome earlier this year where Phil gave a presentation. It’s correct that he didn’t attend the recent event in Paris.

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:12 am on December 10, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Martin,

      if you think that the last QualiPSo conference raised interesting issues I’d be happy to write about it. Let me know.

      Ciao,

      Roberto

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:38 pm on February 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Microsoft Italy meets the Italian blogosphere 

    Microsoft Italy invited some Italian bloggers to talk about the present and the future of the IT market, (permanent) interoperability and open standards, technological and business trends, web 2.0 and software+services.

    It will be also a chance to talk about Microsoft’s products and strategies with Mario Derba, recently appointed Microsoft Italy CEO. I am looking forward to know if Paula Rooney is right being doubtful about Zimbra’s future.

    Follow me on twitter tomorrow, from 6 PM (GMT+1)!

    Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Open Source Strategy, Open Standards, MarioDerba, Italian blogosphere, Italian bloggers, PaulaRooney, Zimbra

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:52 am on February 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Linux on Desktop? European Organization represents EU OS firms, Open Positions: press, facts and figures 2-02-2008 

    Myself interviewed by Marco Trotta for “Il Manifesto” – Is finally the Linux on desktop year? I doubt, likely Linux in 2008 will take over in the mobile phone market though.

    EU: Organization to represent Open Source SMEs – If I am not wrong Rishab Gosh told me something about it.. meme to myself: send an email to Rishab now!

    FR: Government economic commission recommends Open Source – France should increase the use of Open Source software, says an economic commission headed by the French economist and policy adviser Jacques Attali.

    Attention Yahoos! – Ross suggests Yahoos to join Socialtext!

     

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