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  • Roberto Galoppini 4:04 pm on June 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Developers: Fabio Marzocca 

    Fabio Marzocca

    Fabio Marzocca of the Baobab fame, is an Italian Ubuntu-developer with an amazing background, ranging from being a technical writer by an historic Italian magazine named Mc Microcomputer to developing a program for music composing, known as the Muzical Wizard.

    Few days Fabio posted few comments on my blog, and we happened to know each other, below the interview that followed.

    How did you start getting working with GNU/Linux?

    It was 6 or 7 years ago when I became very sad looking at my old portable pc that was slowly dying of a broken heart under the constant resource-demanding policy of a proprietary operating system. I didn’t want to throw it away so I gave it a chance with a linux kernel. From that point on, my experimenting and curious approach towards things of life made the rest. Those were the years of the geek, but then I realized that GNU/Linux was a sort of safe and extremely comfortable house to live in. You are surrounded by a crowd of very active fellows who are there to support you, to accept your criticism, to implement your suggestions and to share their and your work.

    How did you manage to bring Baobab accepted into GNOME?

    Baobab was first introduced in Debian repositories as a deb package. In 2005 I was contacted by Benoit Dejean (a gnome developer – libgtop) and he asked Olaf Vitters to host baobab source tree on gnome cvs. I then started using gnome tools, polishing the code to fit gnome standards, and so on, releasing regular versions. Later that year I met Paolo Borelli, a great gnome-developer who joined Baobab project giving it a strong code enhancement. Paolo was (and actually is) a real milestone for the project. At the beginning of 2006 Emmanuele Bassi, gnome-utils project maintainer, asked me to merge Baobab into gnome-utils as Disk Usage Analyzer, so we started the gnome adventure. Then Alejandro Castro and his Spanish team of Igalia joined the project, adding the beautiful ringschart view to Baobab. I have found Gnome community a great ecosystem for a software project: very professional, skilled and committed people, always available to suggest, integrate and cooperate for the common target.

    What about Ubuntu?

    In 2005, together with other 2 fellows, I founded ubuntu-it the italian support Community to Ubuntu. We started setting up the basic tools to provide assistance and support: a web portal, a forum, a mailing list and an IRC channel. Since then, the community has grown very rapidly and now the current organization helds up more than 10 separate working groups. I recently gave an interview to Italian national TV explaining the significance of the recent Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 8.04.

    Congratulations to have been able to bring Ubuntu on Italian TV! I am hoping that a “pubblicità progresso” open source awaraness campaign could eventually help us to regularly spread the word about open source.

    What are the advantages of the community when it comes to product development?

    The strong and large barrier between you (the user) and the authors of a software project are knocked down. Whenever you may need, you know that you can send an email or join a chat channel to ask which will be the future plans of a product and its new features. You will never do that without a strong ecosystem such as an open source community. The communication channels with the users are a strategic resource for the community: each comment is deeply evaluated and frequently it becomes a code improvement. We should not either underestimate the “social” effects that collaboration produces on its participants: the more they cooperate, the more they feel themselves motivated to hit a common target.
    Another main advantage fo the community on product development is quality control: it often happens that several communities join their efforts together when the release time for an application is getting closer, to check the code and push on debugging. New features release happens only when the community has taken a common decision.

    Fabio talking about the (positive) social effect associated with a tight communication channel between users-developers and authors raises an interesting point, adding something to what Simo Sorce reported about his experience with Samba.

    Happy hacking Fabio!

    Technorati Tags: open source developers, ubuntu, gnome, baobab

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:33 pm on May 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: About the Open Source session at ForumPA 

    The objective of the round-table “Between cooperation and competition: the necessary synthesis to help open source dissemination” recently held at the ForumPA was to facilitate a better understanding of what is missing in the Italian open source market from the public administration perspective.

    ForumPA, the greatest Italian event of and about the Public Administration, represents the largest community of practice in the Italian Public Sector, gathers more than 120.000 stakeholders of the public sector through the conference and by emailing the newsletter.

    In the CrowdIn the Crowd by Pensiero

    I am honored to have been asked by Gianni Dominici,Vice General Director of ForumPA, to chair the only open source session. I invited selected speakers to contribute on topics often not well covered by other nationwide open source gathering.

    Davide Gorini, Director of the first Italian open source business incubator, told the audience all about the business incubator offering facilities and consulting to entrepreneurs engaged in Free/Libre Open Source Software services and products.

    When OSS Incubator project was born we fixed three goals; giving support to FOSS startups, create networking and relationships with the suburb area, facilitate the encounter between software manufacturers and public administrations.After just one year since the launch the assessment is very positive; the response from entrepreneurs is enthusiastic and the structure is nearly full; companies have different business models, from CRM platform to GIS software and that helps the natural collaboration and internal networking.

    Contaminations with the suburb area are giving interesting feed-back; there is a growing exchange of ideas and participation to events and activities in order to spread the values and concepts of free and open source software.

    The third goal has been achieved and the result is the involvement of the incubator and of the companies working within it in projects of software development, training and support together with local and central PA.

    The conclusion is that such initiative has proved to be very effective and should be encouraged from local and Central Public Administration interested in promoting models of local development, knowledge diffusion and innovation.

    Italo Vignoli, OpenOffice.org Italian Marketing Manager, gave a very thoughtful speech on the need to marketing open source products, showing the audience OpenOffice.org marketing results. I took the chance to mention again ClamAV as example of good open source product with poor branding and hence little diffusion, proving the need for an open source awareness campaign.

    Getting back to OpenOffice.org Italian success, wearing my OpenOffice.org community hat I asked CNIPA representatives to fund our association with some money to help us to develop an OpenOffice.org add-on to digitally sign ODF document as required by CNIPA regulations (Adobe is already doing it).

    I asked Flavia Marzano, Strategic consultant for public administration innovation and long-time consultant on open source for public administrations, to talk about the story of free software in Italy, below her short recap.

    What can we say as a summary of the “story”?
    Since 1941 Italy has laws that help Public Administrations in buying free software, since 2004 Regions begun to make laws on free software for PAs, since 2006 Italian Government put money on free software for PAs… in 2008 we are still waiting for free software in PAs! Let’s go on…

    Paolo Zocchi, Senior Adviser of the Minister of Regions and Local Authorities by the previous Italian government, instead has adopted a much more positive tone, maybe even too much in respect of the actual Italian open source ecosystem.

    The round-table was interesting because of the diversity of the experiences of the speakers, and attendees could pose questions and get answers for about twenty minutes at the end of the session.

    My intention for the next year is to run it as an unconference event, do you agree?

    Technorati Tags: open source government, gianni dominici, davidegorini, italovignoli, flaviamarzano, paolozocchi, open source dissemination

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:57 pm on May 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Legislative Observatory: Commission’s Report on Copyright Harmonization 

    The European Legislative Observatory sends to subscribers a list of changes, I found interesting the Commission’s report on the application of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

    Read the Commission Staff Working Document (PDF). Oddly Italy is mentioned just once, while as far as I know we are having a “sophisticated” approach to the copyright matter.

    Technorati Tags: European Legislative Observatory, Copyright Harmonization, Italian Copyright law

     

  • Paolo Zocchi 4:01 pm on May 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Italy and Open Source: a Political Perspective 

    In the last few years, the open source software has transformed itself from a niche reserved to the “happy elected people” to an effective and mature business model. Maybe the course of this process has followed a path which has been different from what was thought at the beginning: in general nor the push of the public sector neither the “ideological” perspective have brought important results to the cause of the OSS. Much more has been done from the development and growth of a widespread network of SMEs (Small and medium enterprises) which gave birth to a large community and to a cluster of applications which can be used with effectiveness from every users, starting from the PC alternative to MS Office, Openoffice.

    In many cases, mainly in Italy, OSS has been considered in the past as a fashionably way by politicians at all the levels in order to proof their attention to the innovation topic to their own audience. That has not been in general a good way to help the open source growth. During the last decade, lots of municipalities have passed bills or deliberations on OSS: in most of the cases, very little activity followed those political acts, and, even in the cases where a project would follow, migration problems and red tape have been more a hurdle rather than a way to make the process smoother. In general terms, this was the result of an ideological approach to the OSS (Free software vs. proprietary software, Linux vs. Microsoft….) which, while stimulating generic political positions, deranged the focus from the technical and organizational issues that OSS brought with it and with the real point, to build up a concrete business model for the OSS.

    So, migration was one of those issues and maybe the most important of all. As many experiences have demonstrated, migrating from a proprietary system to open source is not only a political choice and something immediately convenient from an economic point of view, but also an organizational effort which could be often lasting and difficult. As Munich experience have shown, the results should be not always effective and satisfying.

    However, the stuff works and today the OSS has become a real alternative not only from a budgetary perspective or as an inferior total cost of ownership, but also because it represents a more effective way of writing appliances, maintaining software, updating and get results. I.e. a new business model whose many small companies could use in order to become bigger and to produce more added value.

    Indeed, the very shift between a generic, empty and ideological approach, to a business model, came when many small enterprises began to face migration problems and to create new applications based on OSS rather than trying to transform overnight complex systems based on proprietary software in OSS eldorados. But a big part in this frame has been played by the consolidation of the contractual forms (mainly the GPL especially the last releases) which are now a corpus regulating the OSS adoption and use.

    Furthermore, the OSS affirmation comes at the very moment when the big corporate who are still running on user licenses business model, are rapidly losing ground and turnover, especially in the public sector. The music in the balance sheet of the IT multinational like Microsoft, Oracle and so on is still how many license are sold, and not how many web services could be developed for the customers. It’s easy to forecast that in the next years, and maybe quarters, who’ll have the more delays in changing this antiquate model, will be the loser in this special dance contest. Some blip of it is already on the radar screen: it’s probable that this new OSS music will became soon the main song in the ballroom.

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

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:22 am on May 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: OpenOffice.org Italian Association welcomes Microsoft’s decision to support ODF 

    Microsoft announced that it will update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5 and PDF/A. Microsoft will also join the OASIS ODF working group and the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group, actually on duty for ODF maintenance.

    Promise of a new dayPromise of a new day by ۩ QTR974 ۩ عـــبـــدالله ۩

    Andy Updegrove, Erwin Tenhumberg and NoOOXML seem happy about that, while John MCreesh is of different opinion advice.

    OpenOffice.org is a large community, the Italian OpenOffice.org Association has taken part in the process and is expressing its opinion directly from the voice of its President, Davide Dozza.

    The Italian OpenOffice.org Association PLIO could not do anything else than welcoming Microsoft’s announcement, considering our openness to dialog and cooperation with Microsoft expressed in our open letter on the 22th of February, expressed also at the OMAT conference on the 2nd of April.

    The public dialog strategy is paying off, PLIO and Microsoft Italy today are bringing an important contribution to the software community as a whole.

    Today users are winners.

    Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, Microsoft, Microsoft Interoperability, ODF, PDF, OASIS, ISO, DavideDozza, PLIO

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:48 pm on May 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Mobile: Why Funambol is launching a New Forge 

    Funambol, a provider of open source push email and PIM sync solutions for the mass market, announced the launch of a new forge.

    The new Funambol forge will be a unique access point for Funambol-related open source projects, resulting in a central collaboration site for developers and community willing to share code and technical tips, as well as downloading software and documentation.

    A New Forge
    A New Forge by carlos.benjamin

    I asked my friend Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager, what is going to change from before.

    The new Forge is a tool that Funambol community members deserve. For a complex project as Funambol is, all my efforts are in the direction of giving to contributors a place where it is easy to find things like code, samples, support and documentation. The main obstacle to newcomers is the quantity of data accumulated, the legacy of the project, that looks like a big knot. The new Forge builds on top of this legacy, which is good stuff, to create a better environment for collaboration. This is the reason why I made an effort to migrate in the new system all archives of past years email in Funambol lists.

    I understand archives are important, and a little more tweaking is still needed likely. Take the chance to make your product roadmap as easy as possible to access, potential users and customers might be interested into it, despite Debian lives without it.

    How those changes will affect your job?

    Contributors and community members will have their life at Funambol easier and I wish I will too 🙂 Or better, now that the new Forge is up, I’ll be able to focus on the development of Funambol more closely on one hand, and on the other hand to spend more time talking to the community because there are still many Code Sniper bounties to be collected.

    I am a great fan of sniper programs, and considering how micro-contributions are key to Funambol success, I believe you did a very smart move setting up your own forge.

    Technorati Tags: community manager, funambol, code sniper, stefanomaffulli, open source forge

     

  • Bud Bruegger 2:09 pm on May 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Identity Management: eID Cards’ Spec Finally disclosed! 

    In Europe, Italy is one of the forerunners of smartcard deployment and not surprisingly, it has a long-standing history of eID cards and a noteworthy rollout. Together with Spain it is the first big European country to ready to start the general roll-out of eID cards to all citizens.

    The “e” in eIDs is really only as good as the services that the card provides access to–without services, an eID card is nothing but a piece of plastic (with a chip).  To enable a card to use services requires software, namely something called middleware that interfaces the web browser to the smartcard.  Maximizing service access and thus the value perception by citizens, means to “eID-enable” as many environments and applications as possible.

    What will seem natural to most Open Source people out there, but often less so to government organizations, is that a single organization cannot easily support all desirable/necessary cases very easily–this is a simple conseguence of the ever increasing scarcity of resources.

    Applied to eIDs, most governments provide eID middleware for the “major platforms” which can range from only Windows to a maximum of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux on Intel.  Do you want to access an eID-protected service from your mobile device running Symbian, or from some embedded device that runs Linux on a Strong ARM processor, or even only from Linux on PowerPC?–well, don’t count on governments to help you out any time soon.

    So a key factor to using eIDs ubiquitously, and thus create value to citizens, is to enable third, non-government parties to develop and distribute middleware where it is missing. Unfortunately, this is not possible in every European country.  While some national eID projects have published their technical specs from the very beginning, others have treated them as confidential and thus prohibited third parties from filling in the gaps.  Considering that ID documents are related to “national security” and that government decision makers more often come from a legal than a technical background, this is not as surprising as it may first seem to computer security experts.

    In view of the significant negative consequences of unnecessary confidentiality, it is very nice to observe that decisions can indeed change!  Italy was one of the European countries who considered the spec of their eIDs confidential.  This has in the past prohibited the support of Italian eIDs on non-Windows platforms.  Also, the current middleware [that is part of the pilot project and may be replaced for the general roll out] does not play well with Mozilla Firefox (even on Windows). Thankfully, all these are now restrictions of the past since the full spec was indeed published yesterday. I believe that this is the merit of many unnamed people, acting behind the scenes, who used many ways and various opportunities, invested an enormous amount of personal energy, to drop by drop hollow the stone and remove the rocky mountain that blocked the way to freedom.  This is the moment for gratitude and for encouraging others with the message that it is not easy, but it is possible and at times it succeeds.

    So what will the gained freedom bring us and the citizens who have an Italian eID in their pockets?  Here is my take on predicting the future:  In a relatively short time, support for the Italian eID card will be added to OpenSC that already supports most other European eIDs and the American PIV.  This will provide multi-platform middleware for use by Firefox browers, Virtual Private Networks, Secure Shell, Linux logon, and other applications. Also, commercial players will more easily be able to provide out-of-the-box eID-support in their operating systems or on their devices (such as set top boxes).

    I hope that this foreseeable positive development will become a visible experience that demonstrates the benefits of openness and influence those countries who still keep their specs confidential: The community can amplify resources and thus achieve what a single player (in eIDs mostly a government) simply cannot even hope to do.  So let us work on making this a reality, let the community provide significant help in making eIDs a success, and from time to time let us remind people that it is openness that made this all possible.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Identity Management, eID, smartcard, eID spec

     

    • Emanuele Pucciarelli 8:47 am on May 27, 2008 Permalink

      I hadn’t read your take before doing this, but it turns out to be correct. There is a patch adding support for CNS/CIE, and I hope it gets into trunk soon, so that the next release of OpenSC features support as well.

    • Bud P. Bruegger 11:24 am on May 27, 2008 Permalink

      About two years ago, I wrote OpenSC support for CIE and had also submitted it to the Ministry in order for them to publish it on their open source repository (I had an NDA, never received the spec, and it was never published). Haven’t had time to port it to the latest version and for legal reasons, couldn’t publish it (and the same for my python library to access CIE, pyCIE), but Roberto Resoli (Comune di Trento) has started to work with my old code. But let’s just work together to create a single PKCS#11 for CIE and CNS (the current CIE ARE different from CNS in some respect..). Some people officially involved with CNS are also interested in this work. Let’s join and produce a single well-tested solution.

      -b

    • Roberto Resoli 4:00 pm on May 27, 2008 Permalink

      The CIE filesystem is a great new for everybody, like me and Bud, interested in open source as a way to lower the barrier between citizens and eGovernment. It seems that a lot of already done work is being unlocked (Bud, Emanuele, who else? 🙂 ).
      CNS and CIE are indeed different beasts, but they MUST[1] be interoperable.
      The main difference, apart form external appearance, is that CIE does not have a Digital Signature service on board, even if the last rules (November 2007, the same that stated the filesystem disclosure)
      specifically indicate this possibity.

      CNS is not the best practice around, from the Open Source point of view.
      It is currently not possible to support it, because some operations (Digital Signature in particular) are protected using symmetric cryptography
      (“Secure Messaging”) whose secret keys are embedded in the card, and then in the opaque, proprietary software that deals with it.

      The need of protection (but not its implementation) is mandated by an EU regulation about Electronic Signature[2], which sets the level of security (CWA 14169 -> Common Criteria, EAL4+) for “Secure Signature
      Creation Devices” (SSCD). Technically, a “Trusted Path” and “Trusted Channel” must be estabilished between SSCD and SCA (Signature Creation Application).
      The actual running implementation is such that CNS cards coming from different manufacturer (and even different batches of cards from the same manufacturer!) are not interoperable (even if all the specifications
      involved are the same, the secret key is not!).

      The corrently under study European Citizen Card proposes a different approach; in related technical (CWA 14890, chapter 8) a protocol involving asymmetric cryptography is outlined, in which the key for Secure Messaging is generated on the fly, more or less in an SSL/TLS fashion.
      May be this could be the next step on the way of a really open and interoperable eID infrastructure.

      If someone wants to go deep in the subject, i prepared a package[3] collecting several of the regulations quoted here, along with a presentation I made for the last Italian Free Software Conference.

      [1] CNS on CNIPA web site (in italian).

      “La completa corrispondenza informatica tra CNS e CIE assicurerà
      l’interoperabilità tra le due carte e la continuità di servizi
      all’utente che passi della Carta Nazionale dei Servizi
      alla Carta d’Identità Elettronica”

      that is:

      “The complete informatic match between CNS and CIE will assure
      interoperability between the two cards and continuity of service
      to the user moving from CNS to CIE.”

      [2]”COMMISSION DECISION of 14 July 2003
      on the publication of reference numbers of generally recognised standards for electronic signature
      products in accordance with Directive 1999/93/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council”

      PDF on Interlex web site (in English)

      [3] zipped package from the “SmartCards, eGovernment and Free Software” workshop on the ConfSL08 website.

    • Saurabh 1:43 pm on November 30, 2009 Permalink

      Hi Roberto,

      We are trying to Replace MS Identity Lifecycle Management for an Organization of 8000 employees, is there any solution you suggest ?

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:45 pm on December 1, 2009 Permalink

      I don’t know an “out-of-the-box” open source replacement for that, sorry.

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:34 pm on May 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    ForumPA: Creativity Forum, A Forum for Ideas 

    ForumPA, the greatest Italian event of and about the Public Administration taking place in Rome from the 12th to the 15th of May, today hosted the Creativity Forum session, chaired by Fiorello Cortiana, representative of the Italian delegation at the WSIS.

    Trying to grasp that ideaTrying to grasp that idea by El Buen Matador

    ForumPA, the Italian exhibition to meet up representatives from central and local Public Administrations, this year is running also some unconferences, freely inspired by the barcamp phenomenon.

    Unfortunately I couldn’t join the unconference from the very beginning, but I really enjoyed Renzo Provedel speech about open innovation, as I liked Stefano Quintarelli gave a very interesting talk on the network infrastructure as a commons. I also enjoyed Guido Scorza telling the audience how difficult is to share creative commons in Italy.

    I started my very short speech speaking of the big “news”: free software exists and there is a lot of it. While open source is doubling every year, a very tiny fraction of it is known from the public. Despite Linux or OpenOffice.org are well known – don’t miss my round table tomorrow if you want to know more about OpenOffice.org Italian success – many people totally ignore the existence of a number of valuable open source packages. I mentioned Clam Anti Virus, an effective open source anti-virus whose performances are widely unknown, as resulted also from researches conducted by a student I was advising for his thesis.

    Considering the existence of funds to sustain open souce innovation, the new Italian government might consider to launch a “pubblicità progresso” campaign in order to let people know about open source software.

    Am I a dreamer? I hope not!

    Technorati Tags: open source government, open source dissemination, Italian public administration, pubblicità progresso, guidoscorza, stefanoquintarelli, fiorellocortiana, renzoprovedel

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:47 am on May 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Italian Open Source Commission relases draft Report 

    Last June the former Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, announced the creation of the second Italian Open Source Commission, and last week the commission coordinated by professor Angelo Raffaele Meo released a first draft of the report (Italian).

    Neapolitean coffee The Neapolitean coffee is finished. Any more coffee? Valpopando (LYJR)

    The commission, composed of sixteen members and supported by the National Center for Information Technology in Public Administration and the Department of Innovation, would have probably needed more time to define procurement policies for IT Public procurement of open source software.

    Will also the next Italian government take good care of open source?

    Technorati Tags: open source government, open source procurement, Italian government, open source report

     

    • Flavia 8:49 am on May 3, 2008 Permalink

      Provided that the first Open Source Commission (http://www.cnipa.gov.it/site/_files/dm_021031.pdf) was established by the previous Minister of Innovation and Technologies, Mr. Stanca, and provided that Mr. Stanca will probably be the new Minister, I can guess that he will “play” some more on that issue!
      Let’s hope.

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:28 am on April 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Conference: The Italian Conference on Free Software 

    The second edition of the Italian Conference on Free Software will be held in Trento from the 16th to the 18th of May.

    The ConfSL 2008 has multiple working sessions, addressing different point of view about Free Software (Open Session, Academical Session, a brokerage event and a mapping party).

    1. Open Session
    Dedicated to the widest audience, it aims to disseminate basic concepts around Free Software, with a special accent on  well (and less) known aspects about its practical usage.

    2. Academic Session
    The primary scientific goal is to catch the state of art of Free Software; seminars and workshops will afford to give an all-around survey about it in a multi-disciplinary fashion.

    3.  Open Source 2008 – brokerage event
    It is a partner event of ConfSL (managed by Trentino Sviluppo) member of European IRC (Innovation Relay Centre) network. It will be held friday afternoon and it will offer specific opportunites to exchange and transfer knowledge, know-how and experiences between Enterprises, Technology Providers, Associations, and Public Administrations. The main goal is to create concrete partnership opportunities, both commercial and technological, between participants.

    My speech on standards conformance has been accepted, and I am glad to join the event both to talk about the importance to prove that software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications and to do some networking. See you there!

    Technorati Tags: confSL, Italian conference, open standards, Trentino Sviluppo, European IRC

     

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