Updates from February, 2008 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:43 pm on February 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org: The Italian OpenOffice.org Association welcomes Microsoft’s move to open its API 

    PLIO, the Italian OpenOffice.org Association who support and promote the Italian open source office productivity suite OpenOffice.org, today after Microsoft’s announcement wrote an open letter to Microsoft.

    Welcome, Microsoft.

    Following yesterday’s announcement, we are ready to co-operate at the promotion of open formats in order to support this new endeavour in the area of office suites. We are ready to co-operate, but we will criticize you for every uncertain or false step.

    Inside interoperability there isn’t any space left for tricks: interoperability means that you have chosen to be on the same side of the users.

    We believe in your good faith more than the EC doesWe trust you more than the European Commission, as they have told the world who highlighted that this is the fourth time that Microsoft makes an announcement about interoperability, without any impact – until today – on the company strategy.

    We sincerely hope that this time, for a number of reasons – including our proactive opposition to the fast track standardization of Office 2007 file formats, which will go on until all the necessary changes will be made, the chances that mere words are going to translate into facts are higher than in the past.

    At the same time, we invite all the companies that support the ODF format together with us – and those that belong to the OpenOffice.org community: Sun, IBM, Novell & Red Flag – to work for a full interoperability, as the technical and legal obstacles are going to disappear soon.

    Users should be able to exchange transparently Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org documents, in both directions.

    The software industry, which is not based just in Redmond, must demonstrate a true commitment to make ODF a more widespread format.

    If this will happen, users will win, and the market – i.e., all of us – will win.

    Associazione PLIO (Italian National Linguistic Project OpenOffice.org)

    Today at the international event ECOySOL – Semana de promoción científica y tecnológica para el desarrollo del Ecosistema Digital y del Software Libre – I had the pleasure to share our strategy with the attendees, including our very last decision to open a constructive dialog with Microsoft.

    We just broke up 1,000,000 downloads last week, but I told them also where the story starts.

    Five years ago we were already working hard to promote OpenOffice.org: cooperating with Italian free software organizations I managed to get our Minister of Education head up on the importance to tell Italian schools about OpenOffice.org. She eventually did it indeed, thanks to our common efforts and some media coverage.

    Media became very receptive to our news only later, when Italo Vignoli joined our community, and the story goes on.

    Fostering perception of the existence of OpenOffice.org is not an issue anymore for us. OpenOffice.org’s low end disruption is taking over in Italy, our users are not the innovators of the innovation adoption curve, but early adopters.

    Now we need help, and we are asking Sun (already paying a lot of attention to our open letters), IBM, Novell & Red Flag to work with us for a full interoperability, as soon as the technical and legal obstacles will disappear.

    Users demand inter-applications interoperability, let’s do it now!

    PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project, is the Italian community of volunteers who develop, support and promote the open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office applications (standard ISO/IEC 26300) and is available on major computing platforms in over 90 languages, available to 90% of the world-wide population in their own mother tongue.
    OpenOffice.org is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL), can be legally used in any context.

    Technorati Tags: PLIO, OpenOffice, disruptive innovation, Sun, Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft, interoperability, OpenOffice.org

     

    • Stefano 8:24 am on February 26, 2008 Permalink

      I believe there is a mistake in the translation where it talks about trusting Microsoft more than EC?

      The Italian version of the letter says something ‘we believe in your good faith more than the EC does’, it doesn’t talk about trusting more one over another. Please correct this text before it spreads further and offends our allies in Bruxelles.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:41 am on February 26, 2008 Permalink

      Stefano,

      I promptly corrected my post, and I informed Italo about your kind remark.

      I believe that Italo’s mistake was done in good faith, likely to spread the word fast. I see myself in him, blogging in English is a continuous learning process.

      Thank you!

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:50 am on February 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org 2.3 break through 1,000,000 downloads! 

    The OpenOffice.org Italian Association is proud to announce that the Italian release of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite has experienced a surge in demand for its software since the launch of OpenOffice.org 2.3 and with the follow-up Release 2.3.1.

    OpenOffice.org experienced more than 1,000,000 downloads in less than five months, this put the Italian release of OpenOffice.org in a leading position in the worldwide office productivity application market.

    Davide Dozza, Association’s President and Co-Maintainer of of the Italian Native-Lang Project, commented:

    I’m very proud about this result. It demostrates that the community effort can yield amazing results, especially when such community is composed of eterogeneous and expert people.

    How do you like Italian open source? 🙂

    Update: Italo Vignoli, PLIO Marketing and Communication Manager, wrote:

    Apologies. On September 18, 2007, while announcing OpenOffice.org 2.3 we boldly stated that during the following 6 months the software would have been downloaded by one million people.

    At the time, it was a brave announcement, as the previous million of downloads took exactly nine months, from January 18 to September 17, 2007, and the total of the previous 30 days was a meager 116.405 downloads.

    And, in fact, we were wrong, as it took only 151 days (i.e., four months and 28 days) to get to that threshold: on Friday the 15th of February, OpenOffice.org in italian got to 1.001.185 downloads, at a daily average of 6.742,82 since September 18.

    Read his full post, is enlightening.

    [tags] OpenOffice.org, openoffice, PLIO, DavideDozza[tags]

     

    • Tara Kelly 12:37 pm on February 19, 2008 Permalink

      Hoorahh!!

      This is a happy day 🙂

    • Roberto Galoppini 2:51 pm on February 19, 2008 Permalink

      Indeed! 🙂

  • 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 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 2:47 pm on February 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Microsoft Italy launches Mclips 

    Yesterday Microsoft announced Mclips, an open blog to discuss with Microsoft Italy employees about technology & lifestyle, job opportunities and Microsoft’s initiatives.

    Jan van den BeldJan van den Beld by Digital PR

    About 30-40 Microsoft’s employees will be involved in this communication project, as explained Carlo Rossanigo introducing the new blogging platform.

    Unfortunately we couldn’t play with Mclips during the event, but I happened to speak with Mario Derba, Microsoft Italy CEO, about the future of Microsoft’s distribution channel, as reported by my friend Andrea Genovese (7th floor Director).

    I told Pierpaolo Boccadamo, head of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy by the Italian subsidiary, that we are looking forward to see Microsoft opening the Italian Open Source Software Lab (a sort of Port25 Lab).

    Last but not least I am glad Microsoft invited Jan van den Beld, the Secretary General of Ecma International. I had a chance to speak with about standardization bodies, OpenXML and many other issues. More on this soon.

    Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Italian blogosphere, Italian bloggers, Mclips, CarloRossanigo, PierpaoloBoccadamo, MarioDerba, JanVanDenBeld

     

  • 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 2:38 pm on February 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Projects: Qualipso Conference (part I) 

    The First International QualiPSo conference – “Boosting innovation and growth by fostering Open Source Software trust and quality” – took place in Rome on the 16th and 17th of January, with international speakers from 30 different countries.

    beginningRemember how it all began.. by .bradi.

    IT executives from major players were joining industry round tables, and public officers and agencies presented their views, but there were no free software projects’ representatives, and only one open source vendor (François Bancilhon, take a moment to read his open letter to Steve Ballmer).

    Unfortunately I missed the chance to meet the Minister Luigi Nicolais, who opened the conference emphasizing the role that Open Source can play in the society development. I really would have liked to ask him about the 10 millions euro open source funds.

    Getting back to the conference, the first session I attended was “OSS in the world – implementing open source for innovation and growth: experiences and practices“. Diego Lo Giudice, Principal Consultant at Forrester, talked about future trends, basically telling things in the know: OSS becomes a major ingredient for “commercial software” – apparently he is missing that Commercial and Open Source are still not antonyms – substantially agreeing with Gartner; OSS puts downward pressure on “commercial software” license pricing, etc. The Forrester’s survey on open source usage in Enterprise and SMB in America and Europe was pretty interesting, though (slide 6-8 of his presentation).

    Alfonso Fuggetta gave the same speech he gave at the VON Europe Conference. He concluded that embedded software and pervasive ICT are a huge opportunity, blue oceans are appealing.

    Yuan Cheng, Deputy Director for Information Industry Bureau of Heilongjiang Province of China, talked about China’s long term evolution vision about open source, putting everything in a totally different temporal perspective (100 years!). He also said that he looks at QualiPSo as a good starting point, being a chance to broaden networking opportunity. In this respect I also believe QualiPSo is playing an important role in this respect, but this specific goal could be achieved without EU spending big bucks.

    Roberto Di Cosmo gave a great speech, explaining why the OS industry need engineers and developers able to cope with communities (soon more on his idea of resumes FOSS ready) and briefing the audience about the Groupe Thématique Logiciel Libre, a French pole de competitivite (competence center) funding FOSS projects. He ended his speech saying:

    FOSS is here now, let’s make sure it will scale up.

    Stefano De Panfilis – QualiPSo project coordinator and Research and Development Laboratory Director at Engineering Informatica – closed the first day talking about “Leveraging OSS“. He said that we should move from rebellion to industrialized practices, keeping the freshness and enthusiasm tradition of free software projects. I totally agree with the statement, and I am looking forward to see more contamination at the next meetings, maybe inviting selected speakers from different communities. (to be continued)

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, open business, oss, qualiPSo, RobertoDiCosmo, DiegoLoGiudice, AlfonsoFuggetta, YuanCheng, François Bancilhon, StefanoDePanfilis, System@tic, Forrester

     

  • Carlo Daffara 3:19 pm on January 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenTTT days at CeBIT 

    After a quite successful meeting in Rome, (where Roberto was so kind to join and help me) the OpenTTT project will be hosting a matching event within the CeBIT FutureMatch.

    meeting pointMeeting Point by Varf

    From the CeBIT website: “The EU project Open TTT is supporting enterprises in finding, applying and developing the right Open Source Software to fulfill their specific needs. By collaborating with Open TTT the IRC Future Match 2008 has expanded its breadth to include the Open Source Software sector and thus offers a mediation platform for innovative Open Source Software offers and requests.”

    In the past event, FutureMatch organized more than 1200 one-to-one meetings between companies, and it is my hope that a significant number of those in the next edition will be for open source services between OSS providers and end-users. I would like to invite any interested company willing to be there to register at the FutureMatch site; please choose “Open TTT” as “Assisting Organisation” during your registration to receive free entrance tickets for the CeBIT 2008.

    The OpenTTT project is evaluating a novel approach to help in the OSS adoption process, by “industrializing” the matching process between the demand for software with the necessary functionalities and the offer (the whole set of suitable OSS packages). The mediation process is designed to find the best selection of tools and projects that can best match the expressed needs, and then we try to create one-to-one (or many-to-one, when more than one company is interested in paying for modifications or updates) business exchanges between the potential customers and the OSS-based companies that provide support or services on the selected packages. This approach has been tested in several workshops, held in France, Germany, Italy and Bulgaria and will be refined with the results of the FutureMatch event; we plan to leverage our experience to create a standardized approach to OSS mediation, eventually creating a “blueprint” for competency centers based on the OpenTTT model. Maybe this may be the basis for improving existing marketplaces?

     

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:49 pm on February 3, 2008 Permalink

      I enjoyed joining the Italian OpenTTT workshop held in Rome on the 14 th of January, as I found appropriate and interesting Carlo’s speech on open source solutions for horizontal and vertical needs needs.

      Talking about the audience I was disappointed by the small number of attendees joining the conference, and I spoke about that with Martina Desole (APRE agency).

      Martina, who opened the conference talking about APRE’s role and presenting the participation of OpenTTT to Cebit FutureMatch, on the contrary was happy because with 17 attendees they reached the established target (namely at least 4 members for every vertical “club” among Energy&Environment, Industry Production, Transport and Public Administration).

      I don’t know how these targets are defined, but I believe that four participants for each vertical segment are not enough to drive conclusions out of mere assumptions. OpenTTT definitely needs a broader audience to verify and test its OSS mediation approach, let’s see if Cebit FutureMatch could help in this respect.

    • Carlo Daffara 8:46 am on February 4, 2008 Permalink

      The reason for Martina to be happy can be traced probably to the fact that for traditional matching processes 17 attendees can be considered a good participation 🙂
      The project has reached an overall of around 100 companies that were audited, submitted requests, and for which a match was found. In this sense, the number is sufficient to obtain some results, like the fact that there is limited difference in the horizontal requests (across company size and across different countries) and that we were able to match 95% of the requests directly with a single project.
      The biggest problem found is that in Italy (less so in Germany and France) the number of interested OSS companies was quite low, and most were not interested in participating in the matching process. I suspect that here we have a confirmation of Roberto (and mine) hypothesis that Italy has a strongly underdeveloped commercialization channel, and for this reason the market itself is still immature. I estimate that we are 2-3 years behind France in this respect, and probably 5 years away from a “well formed” market for OSS companies.

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:27 pm on February 4, 2008 Permalink

      Carlo I believe that the underdeveloped commercialization channel it is a partial answer, since covers only IT firms. In my opinion vertical needs are potentially interesting for a broader audience, resulting in the ideal match for projects like OpenTTT.

      In my understanding projects like OpenTTT would need an appropriate budget to promote its events, otherwise technical findings could end to be a tool for (few) geeks.

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:34 pm on January 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Conferences: “What’s ahead in Security”, Whitfield Diffie 

    Tomorrow at the University of Rome, located in Via Salaria 113, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman – famous for their invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Ralph Merkle – will give a speech entitled “What’s ahead in Security”.

    The conference is organized by Sun Microsystems, Diffie is Chief Security Officer at Sun.

    Technorati Tags: Diffie Whitfield, Martin Hellman, public key cryptography, Sun

     

← Older posts

Newer posts →

c
Compose new post
j
Next post/Next comment
k
Previous post/Previous comment
r
Reply
e
Edit
o
Show/Hide comments
t
Go to top
l
Go to login
h
Show/Hide help
shift + esc
Cancel