Updates from January, 2009 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:34 pm on January 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: differentiating technology, marketcetera, , , open source trading, royagostino   

    Open Source Trading: Marketcetera Platform 1.0 now Available 

    Marketcetera – the open source company providing open source software for automated trading systems – on the 14th of January released its new Automated Trading Platform 1.0.

    Open Source at Wall Street is getting momentum. The official 1.0 release, originally tentatively scheduled for the last quarter of 2008, has already been adopted by 20 financial institutions, proving that open source can do a lot for the hedge fund industry.

    (More …)

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 10:32 am on December 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Upcoming European Open Source Conferences: links 21-12-2008 

    Open Source Software Workshop OSEHC 2009 – A workshop “Open Source in European Health Care”.

    Netherlands Open in Connection Congress – The First Netherlands Open in Connection (NOIV) Congress will take place on 5 March 2009 in the city of Utrecht. The conference aims to inform and advice the Dutch public sector about the possibilities of Open Source software.

    OpenExpo 2009 – The sixth edition of Open Expo, the Swiss exhibition and conference for free and open source software.

     
    • Kris Buytaert 8:14 pm on December 21, 2008 Permalink

      Roberto,

      I`m trying to build a list of different European Open Source related conferences , currently I`m using my Upcoming page
      http://upcoming.yahoo.com/user/38401/
      To keep a bit track of what’s gooing on.

      What are your main sources ?

      greetz

      Kris

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:47 pm on December 21, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Kris,

      usually I keep myself and my readers updated following OSOR news, plus what I happen to know directly from friends and business contacts.

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:44 am on November 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    FOSDEM 2009 is coming, QualiPSo plays it again, GIS Open Source Conference: European Open Source Events, links 30-11-2008 

    Qualipso Open World ForumYet another QualiPSo Conference will be held at the Open World Forum. What food QualiPSo will cook for their open source thanksgiving?

    FOSDEM 2009 – The ninth edition of the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting will take place on the 7-8 February 2009, in Brussels. Differently from QualiPSo FOSDEM has no funds and is organized by volunteers, donations and sponsorships are welcome.

    4th International Conference on Geographic Information Systems – The 4th International Conference on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) will be organized by the Government of Valencia on 3-5 December 2008. The conference aims to demonstrate that the integration of Open Source technologies could offer professional solutions in the fields of GIS and Spatial Data Infrastructure.

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 4:52 pm on November 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source VoIP Conference: BBF Europe 2008, 2-4 December, Rome 

    Broadband Business Forum 2008, the meeting point for IP communications leaders, will be held in Rome on the 2-4 of December, in parallel with the first Italian edition of Expocomm, a fair trade dedicated to Information Technology, to telecommunications, digital media and internet.

    The main topics of the BBF agenda are broadband future, unified communications, next VoIP generation, as well as innovation.

    On the second day I will be the chairman of the “Open Source Software for the development of IP telephony” session, and we will cover open source trends in the EMEA region, hybrid case histories, costs savings and increased flexibility, advantages, disadvantages and best practices.

    Registrations are open.

    Related posts:
    Open Source VoIP: VON Europe conference

    Open Source VoIP: “Open source Sustainability from the business perspective” conference at VON Europe

    Technorati Tags: Open Source VoIP, BBF Europe, Broadband Business Forum

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 9:29 am on November 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Mobile: OSIM 2009, 11-12 March, San Francisco 

    OSiM USA returns for the second year in San Francisco, USA on the 11-12 March 2009.

    OSIM USA 2009 is part of the OSiM World Series: the only event series in the world dedicated exclusively to open source in mobile.

    This year breakout sessions designed for application developers and free exhibition passes available to independent developers.

    As seen with past editions specific workshops on open source mobile will be part of the event.

    Technorati Tags: OSIM USA 2009, OSIM, Open Source Mobile

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 10:02 am on October 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    MySQL Backup & Recovery Webinar, JanRain’s OpenID Hosted Service, Android Goes Open Source, Browser : links 23-10-2008 

    The Essentials of MySQL Backup & Recovery – Find out how to manage backup and recovery processes for MySQL using Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL. The webinar will take place on Thursday, November 6th 2008.

    Launch of RPXJanRain goes SaaS, launching the first hosted OpenID solution allowing websites to accept OpenID users.

    Android is now available as open source – Android goes open for real, Wind River commercially support it worldwide. About Android’s license (Apache 2.0) I am not the only one thinking it might be critical.

    CDT Report: Browser Developers Compete on Privacy Controls – CDT Report on Browsers’ privacy tools.

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 8:02 pm on October 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Identity Management: 14th Porvoo Group Meeting, 23-24 October, Cardiff 

    The 14th conference of the international Porvoo Group will take place on 23th and 24th of October in Cardiff, Wales, UK. The aim of the conference is to review electronic-IDs and its interoperability, as well as the development of eServices in Europe.

    Previous meetings of the Porvoo group covered interoperability issues and the development of the Porvoo Group’s Open Source eID Interoperability Demonstrator.

    Being eID cards and free software an hot topic in Europe, I am looking forward to report more open source news on the matter.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Identity Management, eID, Poorvo, Grosseto, BudBruegger

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 3:23 pm on September 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Systems Management: Hyperic generates Momentum Europe-wide 

    Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, is receiving growing attention in Europe, as results from an announcement about over seas expansion earlier this year, involving the European partner France’s Dalet Digital Media Systems.

    Jeff Santelices, VP of Business Development, gave me an overview about how Hyperic is building their channel and why partners like Dalet are partnering with them.

    How about Hyperic’s Europe expansion?

    Hyperic’s open source management solution has solicited tremendous interest globally. What we have found is that close to 50% of our download volume is from outside of the US. The download volumes we started to see in Europe – both for our community offering and our enterprise offering – have been substantial. We recognize that in order to serve this community effectively we need to have a more localized approach.

    Hyperic is experiencing download interest in Europe, but as matter of fact the “download obsession” is progressively going out of fashion, being actual users and potential customers two not overlapping subsets.

    Jeff, what is Hyperic doing to address the European potential market?

    From a Hyperic perspective, we have begun making investments to expand our direct presence in Europe. As an example, we recently hired an experienced technical support executive based in the UK – who will support our customers across Europe. And, as Stacey Schneider may have mentioned to you in the past, we have two community managers in Europe – one in Germany and one in Spain.

    Does the technical support executive take care of pre-sales?

    Our support manager will also help the direct team with pre-sales efforts until we hire further. She will be based in London and will stay focused on our Enterprise customers primarily, providing support as needed during local European business hours, and traveling as needed to support these customers in-person.

    Hyperic is strongly focusing on the OEM partner program, a win-win situation where companies having a substantial European or global customer base, can bring in interesting deals. This is just the case with Dalet, which customers needed management capabilities very specific to Dalet’s solutions and the Broadcasting vertical. Going Hyperic helped Dalet to deliver that capability with a fast go-to-market deployment and cost effective implementations.

    Even not knowing Hyperic price lists, it is easy to figure out that European IT SMEs are not the perfect partner. In fact the pricing model is driven by the number of servers under management, so the ideal reseller partner has customers with thousands of servers under management.

    Technorati Tags: Hyperic, open source management, jeffsantelices, partner program, OEM partner, reseller partner

     
  • 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.

  • Egor Grebnev 8:24 am on April 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Education: Progress of Free Software in Russian Schools 

    Not much has been heard after a loud announcement last autumn that Russia is going to migrate its secondary education to a Free Software operating system developed locally. There have been many announcements of this kind in past, and only few of them eventually led to some worthwhile results. For example, China’s Jiangsu deployment of Linux in secondary education was deemed to be the largest in history, but the feedback gained from it was so poor (only few messages were posted in the online forum that was taken down eventually) that there is almost no doubt as to the outcome of this project. It could have played its role, however, in trading China’s deal with Microsoft that now allows students in China to legally buy Windows+Office bundles for only $3.

    And what about Russia? Maybe the school project is just another example of someone’s ungrounded ambitions and poorly made estimates? It may be too early to say for sure, but there is already some evidence that the project will not remain unfruitful.First of all, first deliverables have already become available. Openly and publicly (Russian). Among others, you are able to download the specially tailored Linux distributions, including a version tailored for older PCs with 128-256 MB of RAM and P-233-class CPUs and a Terminal Server edition that allows to use older PCs as thin terminals provided a decent server is available in the classroom.Secondly, the information is now coming from more than one source, which indicates that the regional participants of the project have both freedom and willingness to act (Perm, Tomsk, Moscow, all in Russian). The most curious is the website of the Perm region, where a map of the integration progress is available. The numbers in black correspond to the total amount of schools (first number is for city/town schools, second is for rural schools), the numbers in red correspond to the schools where Free Software is already being used.

    And what do the teachers say? The forum threads devoted to FOSS usage in schools are numerous, and are thus hard to summarize. Those of the teachers who are FOSS proponents are enthusiastic, and they try to reaffirm their position by pointing to the work that is being done by the Armada consortium and ALT Linux in particular as its most visible participant. The attitude of their colleagues varies from reserved support to skepticism, which sometimes comes from their inability to make computer peripherals work properly under Linux, and sometimes from the belief that the Microsoft monopoly is unbreakable.

    Are these skeptics wrong? We will see by the end of 2008.

    Technorati Tags: open source education, ALT Linux, Armada Consortium

     
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