Updates from April, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:38 pm on April 16, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Barcamp: Opencamp, a barcamp on Open Source and Open Minds 

    Last saturday Rome guested the Opencamp, an ad-hoc gathering to share and learn in an open environment about Open Source and Open Minds (i.e. Digital Freedom, Trusted Computing, Net Neutrality, Collaborative Web, Creative Commons, Politics and Tecnology, Web and Technology Standards, and more).

    opencamp logoOpencamp logo, designed by Stefano Federici Simone Onofri

    Opencamp, organized by “LSLUG”, a local Linux User group, is the second BarCamp held in Rome, and was quite different the first. Among attendees – not many to be honest – there were either industry professionals or IT students, with practical work experience on FLOSS (Adriano Gasparri, Matteo Brunati, Nicola Larosa, Andrea Martinez, Alberto Mucignat, Luca Sartoni, Giacomo Tufano and Italo Vignoli just to name a few), along with some stars of the Italian Blogosphere (Stefano Epifani, Alessio Jacona, Nicola Mattina, Antonio Pavolini, Tommaso Tessarolo, Leo Sorge, etc).

    I took the chance to give a speech completely different from “Free as in Business: lucrative coopetition“, and instead of being informative on open source business model taxonomies, I chose to share some reflections to open the debate.

    Considering that Italian VCs are not open to invest in open source firms because of the “weak” intellectual property asset, I suggested hackers to keep into consideration the following arguments:

    Software, Free Software is a digital good, whether SourceForge’s marketplace will work or not, the Web can help to agglomerate geographically dispersed market segments–the proverbial ‘Long Tail’.

    Hackers have a chance to become contributors, may be even committers, and eventually open up their shops. They can also simply get hired by software firms or, more likely in my opinion, IT customers willing to get the “open source promise” – be independent – granted.

    If you can catch Italian have a look at RobinGood posts (OpenCamp Part 1 and OpenCamp Part 2), a very good example of how online video might be used to deliver live contentusing ustream.tv.

    Last but not least, special thanks to SanLorenzo for its free – as in good vine – food!

    Technorati Tags: barcamp, commercial open source, marketplace, opencamp, robingood, sourceforge

     

    • Fabio Masetti 2:34 pm on April 19, 2007 Permalink

      Ciao Roberto, sono fabio, organizzatore del RomeCamp e del prossimo VentureCamp a giugno dedicato al Venture Capital. Purtroppo non sono potuto venire all’OpenCamp ma ho letto il tuo post e quello del Senatore Cortiana. Ho visto che hai partlato di Venture e spero di incontrarti al prossimo barcamp. ciao ciao

    • Simone Onofri 11:55 pm on April 20, 2007 Permalink

      Il numero dei partecipanti non influisce direttamente sul successo o no di un BarCamp, lo stesso Fabio (oramai un esperto in questo) ha detto in un recente post che i BarCamp esteri hanno un numero limitatissimo di partecipanti.. consideriamo poi che il tema è specifico il target stesso è più ristretto… insomma… pochi ma buoni!

      PS. il logo dell’OpenCamp l’ho disegnato io 🙂

  • Carlo Daffara 2:03 pm on April 6, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Business Models: a Taxonomy of Open Source Firms’ business models 

    Within the context of the FLOSSMETRICS project we are performing a study on the business models adopted by companies that are leveraging FLOSS source code, and how the model changes with respect of licenses and commercialization approaches.In this post I present a draft of the result of 80 FLOSS-based companies and business models, conducted using only publicly available data. Feedbacks and suggestions are welcome!

    taxonomyPractical taxonomy by ellen’s attic

    Methodology

    An initial list of 120 companies was prepared during the first two month of 2007 using some popular open source news websites as source like FreshMeat, Slashdot.org, OSNews, LinuxToday, NewsForge and some blog sites devoted to FLOSS business models like those of Matt Asay, Fabrizio Capobianco, Roberto Galoppini. Additional information was retrieved from Google searches. this list was further refined by eliminating companies that were not really adopting FLOSS, even using a very relaxed definition. In the specific, any company that allowed source code access only to non-commercial users, or that did not allowed for redistribution was dropped from the list; also, companies for which no information was available, or for which no clear product or service was identifiable was equally eliminated. One of the companies included (Sourceforge, from the OSTG group) is not open source in itself, but represents an example of an “ancillary” model, as the site itself hosts more than 100000 open source projects and provides supporting services like mailing lists, source code versioning systems and file distribution. Also, companies that have a significant OSS contribution, but for which FLOSS is not the core business model were not included (this for example includes IBM, HP and Sun; all of which are important FLOSS contributors, but for which open source software is just one of the overall revenue streams).

    Results

    The final result is summarized in a table (pdf), the 6 main clusters identified are:

    Twin licensing: the same software code distributed under the GPL and a commercial license. This model is mainly used by producers of developer-oriented tools and software, and works thanks to the strong coupling clause of the GPL, that requires derivative works or software directly linked to be covered under the same license. Companies not willing to release their own software under the GPL can buy a commercial license that is in a sense an exception to the binding clause; by those that value the “free as in speech” idea of free/libre software this is seen as a good compromise between helping those that abide to the GPL and receive the software for free (and make their software available as FLOSS) and benefiting through the commercial license for those that want to maintain the code proprietary. The downside of twin licensing is that external contributors must accept the same licensing regime, and this has been shown to reduce the volume of external contributions (that becomes mainly limited to bug fixes and small additions).

    Split OSS/commercial products: this model distinguish between a basic FLOSS software and a commercial version, based on the libre one but with the addition of proprietary plugins. Most companies adopt as license the Mozilla Public License, as it allows explicitly this form of intermixing, and allows for much greater participation from external contributions, as no acceptance of double licensing is required. The model has the intrinsic downside that the FLOSS product must be valuable to be attractive for the users, but must also be not complete enough to prevent competition with the commercial one. This balance is difficult to achieve and maintain over time; also, if the software is of large interest, developers may try to complete the missing functionality in a purely open source way, thus reducing the attractiveness of the commercial version.

    Badgeware: a recent reinvention/extension of a previous license constraint, that is usually based on the Mozilla Public License with the addition of a “visibility constraint”, the non-removability of visible trademarks or elements from a user interface. This allows the company to leverage trademark protection, and allows the original developers to receive recognition even if the software is resold through independent resellers.

    Product specialists: companies that created, or maintain a specific software project, and use a pure FLOSS license to distribute it. The main revenues are provided from services like training and consulting (the “ITSC” class) and follow the original “best code here” and “best knowledge here” of the original EUWG classification. It leverages the assumption, commonly held, that the most knowledgeable experts on a software are those that have developed it, and this way can provide services with a limited marketing effort, by leveraging the free redistribution of the code. The downside of the model is that there is a limited barrier of entry for potential competitors, as the only investment that is needed is in the acquisition of specific skills and expertise on the software itself.

    Platform providers: companies that provide selection, support, integration and services on a set of projects, collectively forming a tested and verified platform. In this sense, even linux distributions were classified as platforms; the interesting observation is that those distributions are licensed for a significant part under pure FLOSS licenses to maximize external contributions, and leverage copyright protection to prevent outright copying but not “cloning” (the removal of copyrighted material like logos and trademark to create a new product). The main value proposition comes in the form of guaranteed quality, stability and reliability, and the certainty of support for business critical applications.

    Selection/consulting companies: companies in this class are not strictly developers, but provide consulting and selection/evaluation services on a wide range of project, in a way that is close to the analyst role. These companies tend to have very limited impact on the FLOSS communities, as the evaluation results and the evaluation process are usually a proprietary asset.

    The remaining companies are in too limited number to allow for any extrapolation, but do show that non-trivial business model may be found on ancillary markets. For example, the Mozilla foundation obtains a non trivial amount of money from a search engine partnership with Google (an estimated 72M$ in 2006), while SourceForge/OSTG receives the majority of revenues from ecommerce sales of the affiliate ThinkGeek site.

    Technorati Tags: , ,

     

    • Seth Grimes 6:53 pm on May 18, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto,

      Looking at http://www.robertogaloppini.net/documents/businessmodels.pdf —

      – I believe that EnterpriseDB does not provide ANY OSS. They sell only closed-source extensions to PostgreSQL.

      – Given that you have SugarCRM, why not also list CentricCRM, which provides a good contrast?

      – And given Pentaho & JasperSoft, how about SpagoBI or all of Spago?

      – If your going to list Red Hat, then you should list Novell rather than SuSE Linux.

      – I’d suggest that “dual licensing” is a better term than “twin licensing.”

      Ciao,

      Seth

    • Carlo Daffara 2:15 pm on May 21, 2007 Permalink

      Seth: many thanks for your comments. On EnterpriseDB, the reason for inclusion is related to how we evaluate “open source” companies; that is, if the company sponsors in a direct or indirect way an open source project that is the basis of his work, then we consider the company to be a “marginal” open source one. The inclusion of EnterpriseDB is related to the direct funding of most of postgresql developers, through employing. In this sense, while not directly “selling” an open source version of postgresql, they are creating a market model that is similar to the split oss/commercial ones.
      On Novell/Suse you are right; the longer title was “novell Suse linux” to distinguish from the other novell activities, and simply got cropped.
      CentricCRM is simply not open source at all; the license explicitly states that “You may not redistribute the code, and you may not sublicense copies or
      derivatives of the code, either as software or as a service.” and as such it clearly is not meeting the definition of open source software.
      As for SpagoBI, Engineering seems at the moment mainly touching the waters with his OSS offer; I will wait a little bit to see if I can obtain balance sheet data on how much is obtained through OSS offers.

    • James Dixon 4:21 am on May 22, 2007 Permalink

      That is a lot of research.

      If you are interested I have developed a model to describe the open source model used by companies that write the majority of the code (JBoss, MySQL, Alfresco, Pentaho, SugarCRM etc).

      http://www.pentaho.com/beekeeper

      James Dixon
      Chief Geek / CTO Pentaho

    • Martin 6:19 pm on May 31, 2007 Permalink

      James… I love the beekeeper analogy. The paper has helped to crystalise my own thoughts on successful software projects.

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:53 pm on May 31, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Martin,

      I also enjoyed the metaphor, really amusing.
      Quoting your comment about your attention:

      But one observation really got my attention. In POSS projects (or even FLOSS projects), the end user (/customer) is engaged at a much earlier stage in the process, thereby ensuring that design defects and unexpected use cases are brought to surface before it is too late.

      I don’t believe that is typical of FLOSS listening to users, Microsoft and many other proprietary vendors do listen too, sometimes even more than some OS firms (just have a look at many OS products’ forums, you’ll sort it out by yourself!).

      OS applications’ ecosystems? May be, but they can be effective only under certain circumstances, definitely not an easy game to play, though.

  • mfioretti 8:58 am on April 1, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    File Format: Hidden traps in OpenDocument (or any other open standard) and how to avoid them 

    (Note: this post is an excerpt and a follow-up of an article published in December 2006 in the monographic issue on the OpenDocument Format by Upgrade, the online version of the Spanish magazine Novatica. The whole monography can be read online)

    It is almost sure that, eventually, all major producers of both proprietary and Free software in the office files space will support OpenDocument. In and by itself, however, that standard is open to several ways to keep monopolies possible, or to nullify its usefulness for long term archiving.

    Technically speaking, OpenDocument is very powerful and useful because it can be extended. The standard doesn’t mandate, however, nor it should, that all extensions are licensed in the same way as the standard itself. Even ignoring future extensions, the standard as it is today has plenty of backdoors for proprietary traps. Some examples are (see the full Novatica article for details):

    • digital signatures
    • macros
    • embedded images, audio or any other multimedia object embedded in texts spreadsheets and presentations
    • in-file databases

    Objects of this kind can be placed inside an OpenDocument file even if their format is accessible only through patent-covered or otherwise proprietary software. Nothing in the OpenDocument specification prevents this (and, again, it shouldn’t!).

    The practical consequence is that it is possible to have a perfectly Free as in Freedom XML container which is full of patent-ridden components. A container, in other words, which is culturally, economically and politically useless to guarantee long term preservation of information, public ownership of public documents or a really free market in the software industry.

    If anything, the fact that an office file standard is not owned and controlled by one vendor may make it even easier, not harder, than proprietary extensions appear to keep end users locked in, at least in some scenarios.

    Does this mean that OpenDocument is useless?

    Not at all. Personally, I am still convinced that OpenDocument is by far the best possible solution for a very serious problem. To the best of my knowledge, OpenXML is still much worse than OpenDocument both in terms of feasible support in third party applications and in terms of space left to reinventing the wheel and unnecessary proprietary extensions . For these reasons, I remain convinced that it is necessary, at least for creation of new public documents, to just say no to OpenXml (available to unregistered users by the end of April).

    At the same time, I am convinced that it is necessary to stop, at least in the public sector, to just “switch to OpenDocument” and feel happy about it without looking behind the corner. I believe that further steps need to be taken, steps which, by the way, are not specific to OpenDocument.

    What is the right solution?

    OK, so “100% OpenDocument (or OpenXML) Compliance” isn’t enough to guarantee that an OpenDocument report or law proposal stored today will be completely readable and usable 20 or more years from now. The real solution, however, is not a technical one. Technical ways to apply it once it exists are available, and they are mentioned in my Novatica article.

    This said, this is not a format specification issue. When present, technical extensibility of a standard is (and must remain) neutral with respect to intentions. It would be very inefficient, if not plain wrong, to place specifications of a legal nature inside what must remain purely technical documents.

    What I believe to be necessary is to establish and enforce:

    • in the first place, some official “OpenFile” trademark or equivalent label which can be legally applied only to files in which no component has restrictive licenses or uncomplete documentation
    • immediately after that, laws requiring that OpenDocument files can be stored by, or exchanged with public Administrations, libraries and so only if they carry this “OpenFile” seal. Exceptions to this rule should be temporarily granted only in really exceptional cases, when there really is no alternative

    What do you think? Are these conditions enough? Who should define the “label”? Governments or standard bodies? Who should enforce its usage? Which exceptions could or should be tolerated? Please let me know: I am very interested to hear your opinion and to participate in any future discussions on these issues!

    (Thanks to Roberto for suggesting that I write this post and for hosting it!)

     

    • Llorenç Pagés 9:59 pm on April 18, 2007 Permalink

      I think that your arguments are very interesting and the dilemma you are posing very challenging.

      I have translated your message into Spanish and posted it onto the ATI debate forum devoted to Open Document Standards

      I am planning to summarize and post that summary here, if exist, the most interesting opinions we collect on the ATI forum.

      Thank you very much Marco for giving me permission to make that translation.

      Llorenç Pagés
      Chief Editor of Novatica and Upgrade

    • Hikari 4:59 pm on February 19, 2012 Permalink

      Well, the features you listed are needed, and some of them can’t be open.

      Digital Certificate code can be open, I believe its hash data can also be, does ODF formats support it? But, AFAIK, there’s no open software to handle DC, and editor must access its proprietary DLL to sign the document. In the same way, to validate the sining we must access its AC. Would we wanna give up on signed documents and DC?

      Macro is editor-related in the way that it automates editor features, it can’t be standardized because it’d limit how editors work. Well, we need macros to automate our work, and when we decide to use it we know it will be bound to current editor and we’ll have trouble porting it to other editor, even the same model in different version. The solution would be ODF formats support multiple macros in them, related to specific editors, in a way that one editor can’t change or delete other editor’s macros. OR, macros be completely banned and each editor create external files to store its macros.

      Embedded multimedia data is also trouble. HTML 5 supporters are having hard time for years to define which formats will be standardized. Of course, any user worried with long time storage will use properly formats for their multimedia data as they do with their text, be we also can’t stop users from storing proprietary formats, because they’d get angry and go to Micro$oft ones.

      In general, I think ODF formats don’t need to force “openess”, they just need to support and allow it, and each user uses it in the way it’s better for them. Let’s not forget GIF, whose support is gone for years but is still largely used and supported by readers and editors.

      What we can’t allow, at any cost, is that editors add proprietary data inside ODF files without user explicit knowledge and acceptance, because if that’s done the user will only find out years later when it’s too late.

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:22 pm on March 30, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Observatory news – 30 March 2007 

    IDABC‘s Monthly Open Source News Service has been just released. The Open Source Observatory ‘s monthly new service keeps us updated on news related to the use of FLOSS in the European Public Sector.

    Some interesting spots:

    IT: Umbria to promote Open Source in schools
    Open Source News – 27 March 2007 – Italy – Policies and Announcements

    The regional government of Umbria is investing 100.000 euro to promote the use of Open Source in local schools. The Italian region will soon train students, teachers and education management in the use of this type of software.

    DK: Open standards made mandatory
    Open Source news – 19 March 2007 – Denmark – Policies and announcements

    Denmark is making the use of open standards mandatory in state, region and municipal governments starting next year. This was announced on February 23rd by Helge Sander, minister of Sciences, Technology and Innovation. His plan comes eight months after a resolution in the Danish parliament.
    FR: OpenMairie, competitive Open Source services for medium-sized cities
    Open Source News – 15 March 2007 – France – Deployments and Migrations

    OpenMarie, a French Open Source project aiming to develop governmental applications for medium sized French cities, is increasing the competition in the market for applications for public administrations.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, IDABC, Italy, Denmark, France

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:05 pm on March 29, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org new release: The Italian OpenOffice.org Association announces version 2.2 

    “OpenOffice.org 2.2 just released”

    Trieste, 29th of March 2007 –The OpenOffice.org Italian Association (PLIO) is proud to announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.2, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. OpenOffice.org 2.2 also protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users’ PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web sites set up by, malicious individuals.

    In version 2.2, users will immediately notice the improvement in the quality of text display in all parts of OpenOffice.org. The reason for this is that the previously optional support for kerning, a technique to improve the appearance of text written in proportional fonts, has now been enabled by default. OpenOffice.org’s unique pdf export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and support for user-definable export of form fields.

    openoffice.orgOpenoffice.org ads by factoryjoe

    (More …)

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:57 pm on March 18, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Prize: Google Summer of Code deadline is approaching 

    If you are a student interested in participating to Google Summer of Code 2007 – no longer accepting applications from open source organizations – you have to submit your applications by the March 24th deadline. Thomas Cort succesfully participated last year and he is sharing through his blog some suggestion for your applications.

    summer of codeSummer of Code Brazilian poster by omaciel

    explain what the project is and what will be accomplished, explain why you are perfect for the project, convince them that you won’t drop out half way through, show some previous Free software or school work you’ve done so that they know you aren’t full of crap, popular projects ideas may get many good applications so choose your desired project carefully, become familiar with the organization that you wish to participate in, and know what you are getting yourself into. The best way to do the last two is to actually read through the project’s website and browse some of the code.

    By the way no student has applied to the province of Rome contest yet. If you live here please take your chance!

    Technorati Tags: Google Summer of Code, Open Source, Rome

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:37 pm on March 12, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Open Source Researchers: Carlo Daffara 

    Carlo Daffara is the Italian representative of the European Woking Group on Libre software, he worked in 7 EU research projects related to FLOSS, including one of the largest migration experiment for European Public Administration (COSPA).
    I asked Carlo to join the conversation to tell us more about Open Source and Research.

    How did you start your activities as ICT researcher within EU funded projects?

    My first Commission activity was with the EU WG on Libre Software, where we [Barahona and I] prepared an article on the economic potential of FLOSS. It had quite an impact, and was also used as basis for many legislative actions and other research activities. I then started working in EU research projects related to OSS; the first one was SPIRIT, for open source in health care, where we prepared one of the first European sourceforge clones. Another influential one was COSPA, where we studied the real TCO/ROI of a migration to open source software on the desktop of European Public Administrations.

    Few weeks ago I asked Alessandro Rubini his opinion about “the” community, and as you might know he is quite skeptical about.
    What is your opinion about “the” community?

    Alessandro is right in expressing disbelief in a generic “community”; there are organized communities that can be recognized as such (Debian or Gentoo supporters are among them) but tend to be an exception and not the rule. Most software do not have a real community outside of the developers (and eventually some users) of a single company; it takes a significant effort to create an external support pyramid (core contributors, marginal contributors, lead users) that adds value. If that happens, like in Linux, or the ObjectWeb consortium the external contributions can be of significant value; we observed even in very specialized projects a minimum of 20% of project value from external contributors.

    It is worth to notice that both Carlo and I use the “pyramid” expression. While he is more focused on the contribution side, I used the expression to layer the market talking about Funambol business model with its CEO Fabrizio Capobianco. Funambol addresses users’ needs depending on their level up the value chain, where “free” customers are at the bottom of the pyramid and Carriers at the top – ISV, Wireless Manufacturer and Application/Internet Service Providers somewhere in the middle. Please note that now Funambol is available in two editions (used to be three), a sign that they are keeping moving and refining their business model.

    You stated that at least 20% of project value come from external contributions, I guess this information come from early FLOSSMetrics results. What about the project?

    FLOSSMETRICS is aiming at the creation of a set of tools and a comprehensive database of metrics related to open source projects, in a verified and stable way. It is planned that this will help future research on the software engineering aspects of OSS, and on the interaction of coding, non-code related activities, and social interactions.
    Our area of work is related on the sustainability of open source-based business models, extending the work we have done in the past 5 years in SPIRIT, COSPA and other projects. We will leverage the database of code to find how communities can find sustainable development models, how business can cooperate or start an OSS project in a sustainable way.

    Talking about business models, you are working from years on taxonomies and categorizations, would you tell us what is an Open Source firm in your opinion?

    My opinion is that code licensing cannot be the only important parameter; for example, a company that pays developers, during work hours, to work on open source projects does indeed benefit OSS in general, and should probably be considered as such. In this view, Google can be considered an OSS company even if it does not release much code under OSS licenses.
    It is important to consider that while it is understandable that claiming to be OSS when it is not true is negative for the market as a whole, the strong tension that is actually developing while debating OSSness is due to business reasons, as new entrants are trying to find a niche market (in some cases “faking” OSS capabilities) and OSS incumbents that are trying to magnify their “truer” OSSness for signaling reasons.

    Here you are bringing some salts to the discussion, I will soon come back on this, may be asking you more on the subject.

    Talking about public funded projects, me and not just me have been quite critical of some European funded initiatives. Do you see any problem in this respect?

    The problem with some EU projects is that they are not really “open”, in terms of external suggestions, interactions, criticisms and such. Some projects “blended” very well with development communities, like EDOS, by having a dedicated person that interacts with groups, companies and communities in a structured way; I would expect that any “open source” project should have at least this kind of openness.

    I totally agree. I think such approach should be used just everytime a significant IT public budget is allocated, it could be a very effective audit. I would also like to see EC evaluators be proficient with Open Source, and I know from my experience that applying is pointless if you are not in their know.

    I am not convinced that there is a need for public funded OS projects, nevertheless I am in favour of public funding in presence of a clear market failure. Do you?

    The problem is twofold: first of all, it is important to recognize the market failure, and this is not an easy thing to do; the second point is how to organize a project so that it is self-sustaining in the long term despite the market failure. This is in a sense an open research problem (that we hope to address during FLOSSMETRICS).

    Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts Carlo, you are always welcome!

    Carlo Daffara is head of research at a small italian OSS consulting company, he has participated in many other working group of IEEE, Internet Society and the EU ICT task force. He worked in 7 EU research projects related to open source and free software. Carlo has also been the Technical Director of the Italian Open Source Consortium for about three years, and he eventually succeeded to the Presidency when I left last year.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, FLOSSMETRICS, EU

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:53 pm on March 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Business Intelligence: IDC survey predicts little impact 

    Dan Vesset, research director for Analytics and Data Warehousing at IDC, wrote an interesting commentary about a recent survey conducted by IDC and DM Review on Business Intelligence.

    Toothpaste for dinner strip Toothpaste for dinner

    IDC’s research states that the Business Intelligence market moves in 15-year cycles:

    • from 1975 to 1990 characterized by production reporting on mainframes;
      .
    • from 1990 to 2005 characterized by friendy client/server solutions;
      .
    • the current market cycle, focused on expanding the reach of Business Intelligence.

    Talking about software upgrades, IDC noticed that:

    BA software vendors want and need rapid adoption of newer versions of their software to increase satisfaction levels and reduce support costs. It also ensures a steady stream of maintenance revenue. When adoption of upgrades slows greatly, customers are sending a signal that they do not see additional benefits in new products relative to the costs of implementing and supporting the new products. According to the survey, 45 percent of organizations upgrade BI software within the first year or as soon as it becomes available. Close to 80 percent of organizations upgrade their BI software within two years of release.

    IDC survey in other words says that at this stage in the BI market there is no much space for disruptive innovation – described as a technology having characteristics that traditional customer segments may not want, but interesting for marginal or new segment looking for a cheaper and simpler solution.

    Interesting open source BI software. It makes sense that a tool perceived to have just enough functionality at a low cost would be appealing to many companies with simpler reporting requirements. Several community projects and commercial companies have emerged to address the potential market for open source BI software. Interest among respondents for these offerings was modest, with 18 percent evaluating the products. However, the majority of respondents indicated no interest in the coming year. These tools will need to mature and prove themselves in the market before wider adoption can occur. Companies will continue to feel comfortable in allocating budgets toward commercial products, especially as system integrators largely choose to recommend these products and offer resources skilled in their implementation. The functionality available in open source products may be suitable as a replacement for commercial products, but skepticism still abounds. In markets where software is directly facing end users rather than just IT employees, open source alternatives have been slowly adopted. IDC does not believe open source BA products will have significant impact on the market in the coming year.

    The Open Source BI market need customers demanding for products not as good as the proprietary products currently in the market. Moreover System Integrators have to get proficient with Open Source BI products, otherwise uncertainty and skepticism will prevail.

    I know people from the Corporate Open Source project called SpagoBI, and I’m going to meet them next week in Sardinia. I’ll be back with more news about the OS BI market.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, Business Intelligence, disruptive innovation

     

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

    Open Source Prize: the province of Rome launches a contest 

    ColosseoColosseo by Screenweek

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

      Sounds like a great idea!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:06 pm on February 15, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Open Source developers: Alessandro Rubini (part II) 

    Alessandro Rubini, one of the most famous Italian hackers and representative person in the free software arena, yesterday answered few questions which get some local attention. Today I’m reporting the last of the two part interview.

    How are you targeting businesses? Since you work alone, how do you cope with extra work?

    Well, I actually don’t hunt for work. It’s usually the company that finds me. When a company looks for gnu/linux embedded expertise, they either go straigth to Montavista or they look around. If they look, they usually end up calling someone nearby. My recent clients are usually from my area, and that’s good: it means farther companies find other consultants (I know for sure they do). I’m not alone in my field, and demand is growing.

    In this expanding working environment, I tend to cooperate with other consultants. We are actually mates rather than competitors, and it’s common for us to deal with overloads by getting help from a colleague, with due signing of NDA’s when the client requires it (not often, in fact). It’s not a nation-wide network, though. Strict cooperation is within a handful of people, but we heard about a number of others. So we can at least suggest other names to call when we can’t deal with the task at hand.

    Alessandro’s network is the lightest form of association I can think of, a simple web page collecting people under the GNU Devide Driver umbrella. I’m happy to hear they take advantage of cooperation and I guess they don’t need to spend time and effort to write partnership agreements. It is a ring of trust, they all behave correctly and they naturally tend to do so.

    On the other hand their approach doesn’t scale, they don’t share commercial costs and they are bound to spend time to commercialize themselves. They choose freedom, even in this respect.

    Do you think Linux-embedded markets itself effectively to businesses?

    It’s the other way round: many companies in the electronic and telecommunication area are seriously switching to embedded GNU/Linux.

    Actually, it’s usually a little GNU and a lot of Linux (the kernel), but the reason they do that is usually the GNU GPL (freedom from lock-ups, more than cost issues).

    Most of those companies just want to master the subject matter, or ask external help for the first project but work to build internal expertise meanwhile. I feel we consultants cover a very small fraction of overall investments in embedded GNU/Linux. But sometimes a company finds itself on strict deadlines and the internal resource reveal scarse; so they unspectedly have a tough problem for someone skilled to solve.

    My suggestion, if any, to people willing to work in this field is to get expert in some field and publish the code they can contribute. This is the best way to get credits. Offering to help an established company (or consultant) nearby is a good bet nonetheless.
    It’s quite difficult for us to find the right people, in a world where everyone claims to be a computer expert — so it’s easier for the right people to find us.

    Alessandro feels that consultants cover only a tiny fraction of overall investments in embedded GNU/Linux, as he says his customers ask help just for the first project, but then they tend to internalize knowledge.

    I suspect that many vertical markets are doing that nowadays, it’s definitely a resource marketing inefficiency, likely due to a sort of market failure occuring with imperfect knowledge.

    How did your job changed during the last five years, and how will it change in the next five?

    Things are getting more complex. As CPU power increases, companies want to put more stuff in it: graphic interfaces, video streaming and the like, even in small ARM or PPC devices. There’s less “substance” (industrial automation) and more “appearance” (cool gadgets), at least as an overall ratio. I don’t expect this trend to stop, and I’ll personally try to stick to “substance” problems as much as possible.

    On a less technical level, it didn’t change a lot over time. There’s more work globally, as companies get more accustomed to free software ideas, but the basic points dind’t change much: they want to build their own expertise while delegating the first prototypes, and they come back when an unexpected problem occurs. Again, nothing disruptive is happening, it’s just the usual knowledge-related business practice. Which is a good achievement in itself, in my opinion.

    Thank you very much Alessandro, you raised many important issues, I really wish you happy hacking, please keep writing books and educating new GNU developers!

     

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