Updates from February, 2008 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ross, what about the SourceForge Advisory Board?  

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

      Dominic

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

      Hi Dominic,

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

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

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

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

    Open Source Meetings: RedMonk’s Birthday Party 

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

    European Open Source Projects: Qualipso Conference (part II) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Summarising:

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

      Hi Davide, nice hear from you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Hi Martin,

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

      Ciao,

      Roberto

  • Roberto Galoppini 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 2:08 pm on January 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , DougLevin, FLOSSBazaar, FLOSSology, , , , StevenGrandchamp,   

    Open Source Tools: HP launches FOSSology and FOSSBazaar 

    HP just announced the availability of FOSSology, an open source tool that can be used to track and monitor the use of Open Source software within an organization. The main functionality made available at the moment is license detection, more features will be added in the next future.

    At the Linux Meets Business conference held yesterday in Germany Christine Martino – Vice President Open Source and Linux Organization at HP – introduced also FOSSBazaar, a community platform to discuss best practices related to the governance of FOSS.

    I had the chance to learn more about HP open source plans just last week, when Martin Mychlmayr invited me to talk with him, Phil Robb – Engineering Section Manager in the Open Source and Linux Organization at HP - and Bernard Marclay, FOSS Marketing Manager at HP.

    HP wants to demonstrate its experience with FOSS Governance obtained in over 7 years for internal purposes, and it will be offering services related to FOSS Governance at large (e.g. defining open source policies, supporting the adoption process with its consulting division, etc).

    As a matter of fact they are partnering with many actors. Doug Levin – Black Duck software CEO – made some public statements welcoming FOSSology’s introduction. Steven Grandchamp - OpenLogic CEO – asked to comment the announcement told me:

    As a Strategic Sponsor of FOSSBazaar, OpenLogic is working with others to provide information and tools that help enterprises understand the issues around open source governance.  Sharing our open source expertise, along with tools like OpenLogic’s OSS Discovery (which produces an inventory of open source being used) and HP’s FOSSology (which uncovers licenses in open source), will help enterprises leverage the significant financial benefits of open source software.

    Also Stormy Peters is blogging on the matter, and others will come. While having dinner with HP people honestly I couldn’t come out with a firm’s name that they didn’t contact yet. We also spoke about the business side of the initiative, I will soon write on the matter.

    The man behind the FOSSBazar community. 

    Martin, a known Debian developer and fellow researcher, is the man behind the FOSSBazar community. He is the FOSSBazaar Community Manager, and he will be working with partners to define content, help members to conduct valuable and interesting discussions and debates, and he will be joining conferences all over the world to promote the FOSSBazaar community.

    I wish him all the best of luck!

    About Martin Michlmayr. 
    Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source software projects for well over 10 years. He acted as the leader of the Debian project for two years. In this role, he performed important organizational and coordination tasks within Debian. Martin works for HP as an Open Source Community Expert and acts as the community manager of FOSSBazaar. Martin holds Master degrees in Philosophy, Psychology and Software Engineering, and earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

     

    • Egor Grebnev 1:46 pm on January 28, 2008 Permalink

      You are doing a great job telling about the people who stand behind the projects, and not just the project themselves. Such information makes a very valuable supplement to the official websites and news articles as it makes everything much more ‘realistic’ and understandable.

      Having received your kind permission to translate some of your postings into Russian for INFO-FOSS.ru, we will be republishing this one in the international expert opinion section that we’re about to set up.

      I have a more general request, though. As you know, I am currently a member of two teams: ALT Linux, which is the largest Free Software development company in Russia and INFO-FOSS.ru, which is an information project on Free Software and Open Standards targeted primarily at government public.

      Both organisations are in need of cooperation with the international research community. As a member of ALT Linux, I would be happy to collaborate and share our experience on Free Software acquisition management in government contracts that we have gained in a series of research projects for the Ministry of Economy. As a member of INFO-FOSS.ru, I am interested in making the project part of the international research community and consequently move from borrowing information mostly from European publications to being involved in its production. There has been a number of FOSS-related developments in Russia recently, and I believe that such cooperation could become mutually beneficial.

      I will highly appreciate any help from you side as even partial implementation of these wishes will be a major step forward!

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:19 pm on January 28, 2008 Permalink

      Egor,

      I am glad and honored to be published on INFO-FOSS.ru, please link to the original for comments and suggestions.

      You might share your ALT Linux experiences with open source acquisition by public administrations with an international audience. If you wish so my blog is always open to your contributions, and you might get the attention of potential EC partners and eventually get info-foss.ru involved with FP7 and beyond.

    • Carlo Daffara 12:24 pm on January 29, 2008 Permalink

      Dear Egor,
      I share with Roberto the wish to help in strengthening the ties between Russia and Europe on FOSS technologies and approaches. I would be happy to help in bridging the work done in the past (in the COSPA, SPIRIT, OpenTTT and FLOSSMETRICS projects) if it may be helpful, and learning from you and your experiences.
      I am working on the new revision of our EU guide to OSS, and any addition and resource will be welcome.

    • Egor Grebnev 2:16 pm on January 29, 2008 Permalink

      Dear Carlo,

      Thanks for your message! Yes, sharing your experience on these projects will be very helpful. There is not a little information gathered already, and I often feel myself in need of someone to guide me through.

      I believe that it is the appropriate moment to make a summary of our achievements in an English presentation. Meanwhile, I will try to contact you via email.

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:46 pm on January 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , open business, , , , oss,   

    Open Source Jobs: Funambol got an Italian Community Manager, Stefano Maffulli! 

    Funambol – the Mobile Open Source company – few months ago started looking for a community manager, as I learned from Fabrizio Capobianco while he was in Rome to join the VentureCamp.

    A couple of days later I got a phone call from my friend and fellow blogger Stefano Maffulli, asking me for Fabrizio’s email. Below the full story.

    Roberto’s blog has been a kind of a Monster: a good daily read but also a way to extend the reach of a social network. When I pitched my CV to Fabrizio (Funambol’s CEO) I learned that the selection process had been going on for a while already and other candidates were being evaluated. Nonetheless I was invited to speak with Hal Steger, Funambol’s VP Marketing: I liked his attitude and he liked my multidisciplinary background (architecture, technology and the upcoming MBA). Funambol has a balanced mix of the good hacker’s culture I love and the necessary strength on financial and marketing management, something that I want to learn (and have been missing in my past work experiences).

    It wasn’t a long shot after all. It will be fun to work with Funambol’s growing community and the company.

    Stefano MaffulliArchitect Stefano Maffulli at work by Stefano Maffulli

    I am glad that the time I spent sometimes collecting open positions within open source firms and jobs was of some help. Few months ago I also started to display a widget on each job posted by considerati, that I happened to get in touch with via openbusiness, but unfortunately such distributed job site had a limited success.

    Stefano, are you already thinking of how to get off the best from programs like Code Sniper and Phone Sniper?

    We have some ideas on what has to be improved to help Funambol’s community but we are also open to suggestions. For example, our software is in many places and it’s not easy for newcomers to find what they are looking for. I’m interested in hearing experiences of Funambol’s users with the software, the mailing lists, the repository and the company: they can come to me and I’ll help if at all possible.

    Funambol’s architecture of participation welcomes small contributions, allowing individuals to more easily participate, I am looking forward to ask Stefano how is he doing in six months from now.

    For the time being I wish him and Funambol all the best!

    Read Stefano Maffulli‘s full profile on Linkedin.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:44 pm on January 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards, Open Source Funds, Open Source Mobile: my conversations, actions and conferences 12-01-2008 

    Ten challenges and priorities for free and open source in 2008 – Bob Sutor (via Raven Zachary) set his priorities. In my opinion both IBM and Microsoft are not addressing the real issue behind open standards: we urge to establish a certification body, on duty to certify standards compliance.

    Italian Open Source funds: the open letter – My buddy Flavia Marzano posted on our letter to the Minister for the Innovation in the Public Administration Luigi Nicolais, maybe I’ll get a chance to give him the letter at the QualiPSo conference, in Rome.

    The Implication of Microsoft’s Open Source like Strategy for Software Developers -  Next March on the 12th I’ll give a speech at OSIM USA – The World’s Largest Forum for Mobile Linux and Open Source – talking of Microsoft’s strategy and vision on open source. Stay tuned!

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Funds, Italian politicians, oss, open business, OSIM, Microsoft, IBM, BobSutor, RavenZachary, QualiPSo, egovernment

     

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