Updates from December, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:03 pm on December 9, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Barcamp: Piublog 2007 

    The fourth Roman barcamp – Piublog 2007 – took place today within the event “Più libri più liberi” (eng.: more books, more freedom), the annual fair of the independent Italian publishing houses, held since 2002. A good chance to meet again old friends or why not make new ones on a gloomy, raining day in Rome.

    Leo Sorge was a very nice host, embarrassed because the venue actually wasn’t totally appropriate for a barcamp, being just a single room and lacking of Wi-Fi facilities. Fabio Masetti opened the barcamp, later Riccardo Cambiassi – who originally “imported” the barcamp in Italy – impressed me with a cool slideshow on barcamping.
    In the afternoon I enjoyed Nicola Mattina on corporate blogging, and Piergiorgio Lucidi introduction to microformats and Semantic Web.

    I spent also time talking with people, among others Antonio Pavolini, Andrea Martines,  Feba, Giulio Gaudiano e Stefano Epifani. I met for the very first time Dario Salvelli and I suggested Nicola Risitano (LSLUG, OpenCamp) to have a look at the Open Source Guide for SMEs. Andrea Genovese was supposed to talk about his coworking project, but eventually Fabio Masetti spoke on behalf of him.

    Technorati Tags: barcamp, piublog

     

    • Riccardo 11:37 am on December 10, 2007 Permalink

      Ciao Roberto!
      È stato un piacere conoscerti. Grazie dei complimenti, immeritati.
      Le slide non abbiamo fatto in tempo ad esplorarle per bene ma le trovi su SlideShare se ti interessano.
      Spero di sentirti presto, fammi sapere quando passi da Londra!

      R

    • Dario Salvelli 2:42 pm on December 10, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto, i’am really nice to met you: i hope to talk more for the next time..

      Ehi, take care!!!

    • antoniocontent 12:45 pm on December 14, 2007 Permalink

      Nice to meet you, and sorry we could n’t spend more time for our chat.

      I wish you a quick recovery!

      Cheers,

      🙂

      a

    • Piergiorgio Lucidi 7:41 pm on February 4, 2009 Permalink

      Thank you for your feedback about my talk during this event!

      Thank you again for your feedback sent to Sourcesense: now I’m working in a real Open Source company 😀

      Ciao
      Piergiorgio

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:37 pm on November 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    The Future of Mobile: Tony Fish’s keynote speech 

    While at the Future of Mobile, the event organised by Carsonified Systems last week in London, I enjoyed very much Tony Fish‘s key-note speech.

    I asked Tony to pass me over his presentation in order to write an article for an Italian magazine, and here I am reporting just some of his notes regarding Digital Footprint.

    Enjoy also his full presentation.
    (Either JavaScript is not active or you are using an old version of Adobe Flash Player. Please install the newest Flash Player.)

    Footprints: Like Neil Armstrong we all leave footprints. 2.0 has a fascination with this data, in web 2.0 language ‘the next intel inside.’ I don’t associate footprints with identity. Footprints are about where we have been, for low long, how often and the inter-relationships.

    Therefore Digital Footprint is not identity, your passport, bank account or social security number. Digital Footprints come from mobile, web and TV – the digital data and metadata of who we are, the true value and why the ownership of this data is the battle ground to be won and lost, the reason why Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google wakes up thinking mobile before he looks at his email or worries about the value of double click or improving a search algorithm.

    However this footprint and its digital data I contend is mine. Google gets your hands off it, but who will I trust with my digital footprint if I don’t want Google to have it. I need a trusted, open digital footprint store. Collecting, collating and serving my footprints, through an open application protocol interface across all platforms. I want to share my footprint, as this will lead to service companies improving my experience as it will become personalized. But who should I trust and what should I trust them for. To understand this we need a small diversion to chat about advertising, as this is a model to justify your views and assertions.

    Advertising started with the age of assertion, “washing powder washes whiter than white”. It moved to the second phase of engagement, comparison and involvement – “look what your neighbour uses.” The current phase is about attitude – “Dirt is Good”, but advertising in what-ever shape or form requires channels and feedback, something it lacked until recently. Advertising is currently used to justify every business model, with the associated convergence or bundling issue of everything else is free. A symbiotic parasite. But the advertising to give you something for free requires an understanding of your personal data, based on your digital footprint. Therefore if I control your digital footprint, I control the advertising revenues. But as Google only controls the web footprint, control of the mobile is critical, especially when you consider Mobile adds whole new classes of unique data – location and attention.

    But there is a school of thought that says if I own my digital footprint data, I could sell this to advertisers directly, but this poses the difficult question of who would store it, how it is collected, shared and protected, great topics but not for now.

    I want you to consider line of sight advertising for a moment. Consider the following model. Suppose that a bill board, or a scene that it within your line of sight could be controlled by you mobile device. Advertising now becomes specific to the person looking? But how would it cope with the crowd. Would the utopia vision focus on those who are strong and marginalize the weak. The social gap becomes formed not by the technology but by those who don’t have the same opinion. We only get to listen to the voice we want – this is how you train a terrorist. As a design consideration – how about taking away the screen and then consider the uniqueness.

    Indeed, where is there value, is there more value in knowing what I am doing or who I do it with. The TV can provide some data, the web probably more, but the mobile would be unique.

    Therefore as you consider mobile and bring your experience – think about the context and where value is created, not why your doing it, but how others can and will extract value from it.

    Technorati Tags:   TonyFish, Future of Mobile, digital identity,  

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:20 pm on November 16, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Risk Management: a chat with Doug Levin, Black Duck’s CEO 

    Black Duck Software is an intellectual property management firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts delivering services to identify risks and vulnerabilities in an enterprise’s open-source code.

    Doug Levin, Black Duck’s CEO, today was available for a phone call to tell me more about how they help organizations use open source software and third-party code components while managing software licensing obligations and other business risks.

    Firms offering intellectual assets giving “horizontal” support, meaning companies that sell services not related to a specific package and not related to software development, could play an important in the European market.

    While Asia and USA are historically more acquainted with buying his services, Doug claimed that the European market would develop in the near future and he cited several open source project (Mandriva, ZEA and Alfresco among others) that the company has already worked both directly and indirectly. SourceSense among others is already partnering with them in three different countries, while other two medium sized IT German firms are also Black Duck customers.

    Software patents are not central to business accelerators for Black Duck; copyright and 3rd party and OSS license violations are central to Black Duck’s services, products and training.
    Talking about takers of GPL Doug stated:

    So far small gpl projects associated with FSF were the first to go. We are seeing GPLv3 adoption in relatively small numbers and not being adopted by large projects. SugarCRM and Sambva were exceptions in this respect.

    Doug and I agreed on the fact that SugarCRM made the best decision by not abiding to the OSI “badgeware approved license, and instead choosing the GPLv3, a license which is much closer to the community.

    I am looking forward to meet him soon in Europe, and let you know more about how Black Duck is going to help the European open source ecosystem.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, Open Source Risk, Open Source, Intellectual Property Management, Black Duck, Doug Levin, Software Patent

     

    • Mark Radcliffe 3:44 pm on November 17, 2007 Permalink

      While I have great respect for Doug, I know that you will soon see more commercial major commercial projects adopting GPLv3. I know that several of my commercial clients are seriously considering it, but are waiting for their next revision to make the announcement. I think that we need to wait until a year after the release of GPLv3 to understand the full extent of its adoption. For more thoughts on open soruce issues, you can go to my blog. http://www.lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com.

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:03 pm on November 17, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Mark, thank for joining the conversation. Today I just wrote about a mobile platform that will be licensed under GPLv3 terms.

      I agree with you, only educated customers can do such a choice at this stage, that is good for you, right? 😉

    • Doug Levin 7:50 pm on November 17, 2007 Permalink

      I enjoyed my convo with Roberto, love his blog and agree with Mark Radcliffe that in a year it will be a different license landscape. It will take time for software developers to figure out the merits of v3 relative to other OSI approved licenses.

      Black Duck tracks license trends at http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss. We are fastidious about only tracking deployed projects with licenses, not merely projects that express their intent to license in blogs and press releases.

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:37 pm on November 15, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Mobile: the (open source) Future of Mobile 

    The Future of Mobile took place yesterday in London. Among speakers Luca Passani (AdMob) and Andrea Trasatti (dotMobi) of the WURFL fame, and Dave Burke (google), to talk about Android.

    The event, organised by Carsonified Systems, now looking for someone to lead the Mobile event, was mostly aimed at developers and designers. Brian Fling – an apple-enthusiast – was the host of the event. The great key-note speaker Tony Fish asserted that “Digital Footprint is not identity”, with a fast and furious presentation that really impressed me.

    Luca talked about WURFL and WALL news, in terms of architecture and functionalities. The point on the new WALL NG was made with screenshots: Luca rebuilt the first page of Ebay UK for mobile and showed how the user experience was great on high-end devices, while degrading gracefully on older phones. He also spoke about the upcoming web application designed to simplify the contribution process, today mail-based.
    He raised the well known Vodafone issue – regarding the fact Vodafone is stripping out the essential device identification information that mobile phones send – receiving the applause of the audience. On the topic he remarked that W3C was not playing the “policeman role”, eventually arguing with a W3C representative attending the event.

    Andrea Trasatti explained the dotMobi strategy, and it came out that his open source attitude is not part of his new job at dotMobi. I took my chance to ask his opinion about Volantis going open source, and he told me that all these open source efforts (W3C included) are welcome. On a commercial tone, he believes that the dotMobi device database is going to make the difference, since open source projects like WURFL could fail to keep an updated database.

    But Volantis is the first (commercial) mover in this arena, and I believe that at the end of the day if their community is taking off, dotMobi might change its strategy.

    David Burke, defined as “frighteningly good looking“, got straight to the point showing the audience how easy it is to deploy a simple application with Android. He was really effective, as clearly results also from Mike Butcher’s live blogging.

    Talking about the Android technlogical club, David answered a set of questions about licensing and lock-down hypothesis the Android FAQ way, eventually failing to convince Mike:

    One questioner asked if Google would be subject to anti-trust allegations given that a lot of Google applications will come default with the handsets, but Burke gave the impression that this would be unlikely as handset makers could “swap out applications.” We’ll see I guess.

    So what’s the upshot of all this? In terms of content perhaps not a great deal. If one were to be cynical, one would say that this was mainly about a Google guy appearing in London (which has a big mobile community) at a conference aimed at mobile developers, and was in hiring mode…

    As a matter of fact the technological club behind the Open Handset Alliance seems unwilling to disclose the platform until they have eventually got their first mobile equipments on the shelf. For that we have to wait one year. A result that could be obtained also with a “deffered” GPLv2/v3. Apparently the club likes the apache license more, a risky bet considering OEM’s hystorical attitude to proprietarize the “commons”. See the “successful” Symbian fragmentation.

    I really hope Google makes it work, but lock-down strategies are enabled by not copyleft licenses, and this market has greatly proven to be unable to share any sort of standard, despite everyone yesterday spoke about that. And yes, I agree, “the Future of Mobile is not in the hands of Planet Mobile anymore“!

    Technorati Tags: Android, FOM, AndreaTrasatti, LucaPassani, WURFL, Volantis, Open Source Strategy

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:04 pm on October 24, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Open Source Developers: Simo Sorce 

    Simo Sorce is the Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer, hired by Red Hat in 2007 where he is a Senior Software Engineer, maintainer of Samba and expert on Windows Integration and Identity Management.

    Simo Sorce in 2001 has co-founded a consulting firm specialized around Free and Open Source Software platforms. He is also an international Free Software advocate.

    Simo Sorce Simo Sorce

    I asked Simo, who about six years ago when he supported my candidature as member of the Italian Free Software Association, to tell us more about his career and interest for free software.

    How did you become a Samba team’s member?

    While working part-time in the IT department of the University as a Linux/Unix administrator I was tasked with the job of making unix and windows systems talk together for file sharing and most importantly printer sharing purposes. Samba was the obvious tool.
    As I am naturally very curious I shortly started wondering how Samba accomplished to bridge the architectural differences between a Unix and a Windows system, especially from an Identity point of view. I knew both architectures and they are very different in some key areas. I started asking questions on the users mailing lists, and I was quickly told that the details were only in the source code.
    Being very naive I started reading the code thinking I could grasp everything in a short time. Soon I realized the code was much more complex then I expected but also realized the beauty of some of the challenges in that code, I was hooked.

    I started working on the passdb subsystem (the one that manages Identities in samba) and shortly saw the first few patches applied to the development tree. After some time I was contributing regularly and was gifted with the status of Team member.

    I asked Alessandro Rubini, Carlo Daffara their opinion about “the” community. What is yours?

    I think that “community” is an ambiguous term in the FOSS case, I see this world as a set of sets. Real communities exists only at the project level, and they are not necessarily very well defined at that level either. Usually the project community is composed by a more or less stable core set of developers, often employed by some company, and then a wide range of other people that contribute to a minor degree, or just uses the code and provide a lot of good feedback.
    The broader “FOSS community” is more or less the superset of all the single project communities. Not everybody recognize himself in this broader super-community, and some people tend to split it into something artificial like the Free Software vs the Open Source communities. What matters at a higher scale is the set of licenses used on one side and the field a project operates in on the other. Where the licenses are compatible we see a lot more interaction, when they are not a bit less and also some tension when two projects in the same filed need or try to interact. These interactions are the links that define the super-community, more or less, with obviously blurred edges.

    I think Simo raised very important issues here. Beyond licenses’ compatibility, that has its own role for example when it comes to M&A, but the idea of “super” communities is even more interesting. As a matter of fact many open source projects are using other projects’ outputs, and the way they interact will gain more and more attention.
    Samba is a “pure” community open source project, but the organization is quite different from larger communities like Debian, ASF or Eclipse. What about the project’s organization?

    Samba has indeed its own model, partially dictated by the project history and interactions with the industry and other projects. The Samba Team unlike the mentioned organizations is a very lousy loose group, membership is given by agreement of the existing members after on of the team members proposes a candidate.
    Historically the Samba Team has always been just the group of people that was trusted to have commit access to the shared CVS tree, and in fact was born only when Andrew ‘Tridge’ Tridgell and Jeremy Allison decided to start using a version control system.
    We tend to have a consensus-driven decision system. If most agree we all agree. We don’t take formal votes usually, if someone have a strong opinion against a decision it is his duty to speak in time and argue against it. As most of our decisions are technical in nature we tend to easily agree on a proposal and rarely we get contrasting opinion that we can’t easily settle. Also, usually, the opinion of the developer most intimate with the field being discussed tend to have greater influence than others. For non technical decisions we tend to follow the lead of the Team founders, Tridge and Jeremy.
    Recently we joined the Software Freedom Conservancy, and this gives us also a legal status. Before that we were legally just a bank account in Australia used to hold donations that we spent mostly to pay travel fares to remote samba developers that could not easily afford a trip to the 2 main yearly events in the Samba community, the CIFS conference in the US and the SambaXP conference in Germany.

    Rough consensus and running code, then. It reminds me the IETF’s approach for its working groups, a great one! I believe that this approach works well for a small group, though.
    Talking about open source firms, you worked for years by your own company, then you moved to the States and eventually joined Red Hat. Could you tell us something about your experience in this respect?

    The difference between working for a small firm in Italy and working for big corporations in the United states is huge. At an organizational level you have to change from a do-it-all mindset of the small firm to an environment where you have greater opportunities but also many more constraints. I enjoy being able to concentrate more on technical aspects and leave other aspects to dedicated professionals, but sometimes this means you have to play political games to do what you want.

    From the business point of view a small firm is agile, can easily re-focus and try to jump in new fields but is usually blocked by lack of financial agility. Here smallest firms are somewhat at an advantage compared to Italy, access to credit is much easier and you actually have real chances of getting funding if you have a very good business plan. But here things are also more brutal. Risks and rewards are higher. It is as easy to get in business as it is to get thrown out of it. Even in big enterprises you still feel the pressure on quarterly results, long term plans exist but there is a very short term focus that keeps all busy on quick results. In the previous company where I was closer to the sales people, a quarter was the life and death deadline, toward the end of the quarter sales got anxious and pushed you harder to help them sell. In Red Hat I am less exposed to this kind of pressure, but we have anyway very hard development project deadlines, from RHEL updates releases to Fedora releases to your own projects releases. You have to make your long term plans in a way that you can split them in short term milestones or it is very difficult to get away with a project.

    All in all I miss some of the features a small firm in Italy can give you, but I also enjoy the experience of working in a big global company. I think you have to try both to understand the benefits and the shortcomings of both, and then decide what you like most. If you are good you will have no problems making a living anyway.

    You are not alone saying that US is a better country for startups, but I agree with you that besides money a good business plan is the key.

    I see also another major difference here. While Simo was working by his own company he had to sell services only partially based on his favorite platform. Unfortunately the Open Source Ecosystem has still to develop a pyramidal approach. Until now System Integrators don’t act as “mediators” towards small specialized firms like his one. While I understand that it is not easy for them to set it up for a large number of OS projects, I really don’t see a reason to not do it with some of.
    Happy hacking Simo!

    Technorati Tags: SimoSorce, Samba, JeremyAllison, RedHat, Startups, Commercial Open Source, Open Source Strategy

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:45 am on October 20, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Development and Strengthening of Local and Central Public Administrations 

    I just got back from Sarajevo, where I participated as speaker to an advanced course in web communications in the Public Administration. The course, aimed at public operators from Bosnia-Herzegovina, was designed to be an in-depth analysis on the use of Open Source in Public Administrations.

    SarajevoSarajevo by Giuli@

    I had the honor of presenting two seminar sessions, talking about Open Standards and Open Source Software. I opened my first speech focusing on what is a software patent, and how they (could) affect open data standards. I spent an hour or so talking about on Open Source Requirements, Principles and Practices and making analogies with the real world (power plugs, etc).

    My second pitch was all about pragmatic open source. I started speaking about how Organisational Wiki Adoption could greatly help communications and information flows within Public Administrations. The audience was pretty interested and we eventually ended comparing email, Instant Messaging and Groove against a wiki, in terms of usability, synchronicity of interaction and ease of participation.

    Attendees were concerned about the Open Source perception, and open source support, and I showed them some useful tools to manage software selections. Since only few open source projects offer enterprise support, I make them familiar with:

    I really enjoyed being there. The audience, despite the latency due to the translation, was participative and willing to know more and more.

    Is a country of contrast, where people died together, and now try to live together. A very interesting country, and I really hope to get a chance to be back.

    About the Communications for the Public Administration course.

    The project “Balkans 2 – Development and Strengthening central and local PA in the Balkan Region” is aimed to 6 Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro) and continues the activities already started up and partly developed with the Balkans 1 project which was held from November 3rd to December 31st 2004. This is an integrated project of “Institutional and Capacity Building” aimed to civil servants and executives from central and local Balkan administrations, divided into diverse activities of technical assistance, classroom and on-the-job training, information and communications on themes which have been identified and agreed upon together with the institutional counterparts of the involved countries on the occasion of numerous missions and meeting realized during the first year of activities. The dedicated areas are the following:- Civil Protection- Management of Protected Areas- Cultural Heritage- Communications for the Public Administration.

    Technorati Tags: Sarajevo, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Open Source Government, Open Standards, QSOS, SourceForge

     

    • Ryck Lent 2:16 am on October 22, 2007 Permalink

      Another resource for open source, specifically for organizations considering enterprise open source solutions, is the EOS Directory. It contains over 300 enterprise-class projects with comments and an independent rating for enterprise readiness, in English and Deutsch.

      Ryck Lent
      Community Manager, EOS Directory

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:01 am on October 22, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Ricky,

      I didn’t know about the Optaros EOS Directory, thank you! I found interesting the “track your popolarity” functionality, may be a top 10 list or more would be even better.

      Keep in touch!

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:36 am on October 11, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Jobs: Alfresco and Funambol look for a Community Manager 

    The Mobile Open Source company Funambol, and Alfresco, the Open Source alternative for Enterprise Content Management, are both currently looking for a community manager.

    Alfresco at the present stage has a Community Relations open position, while Funambol has to fill the Funambol Community Manager role.

    The forceOur Community Manager by JJay

    Apparently there are no many open positions like that, looking at opensourcexperts or similar sites I didn’t find any. Despite uncommon, I think it is really wise from both of them trying to empower their communities. I think also that the Funambol community and Alfresco’s one are quite different.

    Talking with Fabrizio Capobianco – Funambol CEO – while in Rome to join the VentureCamp, I happened to know about the Code Sniper and Phone Sniper programs. Besides those programs, Funambol’s architecture of participation welcomes small contributions, allowing individuals to more easily participate.
    I didn’t get a chance yet to speak with Matt Asay about Alfresco’s practical approach to collaboration, but reading the two job descriptions I see a difference. Alfresco is looking for a marketing-oriented role, reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer, while Funambol’s position seems more technical.

    Will you take the challenge?

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Jobs, Job offer, Alfresco, Funambol, MattAsay, FabrizioCapobianco, Community Manager

     

    • Ross Turk 10:01 pm on October 11, 2007 Permalink

      Hey Roberto!

      When I was Engineering Manager for SourceForge.net, I lobbied for the creation of a Community Manager position. They let me take that position, and it paid dividends almost immediately.

      Community management has become a very important part of open source businesses because it provides a way for us to understand how individual contributers work, what’s important to them, and what we can do to make them happy.

      Ross

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:01 am on October 12, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Ross,

      nice to hear back from you!

      I believe a position like yours is pretty unique, you’re a Community Manager taking care of lots of projects.

      Tell us something more about your job!

      Ciao,

      Roberto

    • Community manager freelance 7:48 pm on January 13, 2012 Permalink

      Thanks for sharing ! excuse my bad english i’m an fench guy. It is possible to take your post in order to translate it on my frnech blog? Thanks. Best regards

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:19 pm on January 17, 2012 Permalink

      Feel free to do it, please link to the original website for reference.

      Best,

      Roberto

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:05 pm on September 27, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source VoIP: VON Europe conference 

    VON Europe Autumn – a European event where people from all over the world talked about where IP communications is going in Europe – today guested the “Open Source VoIP” conference.

    The conference “Open Source VoIP, sustainability of OS project in the business sector” was aimed at discovering how open source VoIP applications are doing in the ICT market.
    Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall, President of the Linux International association, opened the conference talking about “Telephone, Free Software and Emerging Economies“, introducing the audience to the Free Software and raising some important questions about emerging economies.

    Jon Hall MaddogJon Hall Maddog by Pizel y Dixel

    Alfonso Fuggetta spoke about Open Source business models. He raised interesting issues related to false myths, like the software commoditization. He eventually ended saying that proprietary and open source firms are offering basically the same services, despite Jon and I were giving him evidence of the opposite.

    Greg Vance – Digium Sales Manager – brought the discussion on a practical ground talking about “Asterisk: an OS project that has become mainstream. What’s new“, telling us about the product and the company, included the new CEO and other open positions. I asked him about Digium’s revenue and I learned that 85% of their incomes gets from hardware, than training, services and double-licensing do the rest.

    The co-founder of the OpenSer project Bogdan-Andrei Iancu, who magicly appeared from nowhere when was his turn, talked about “The OpenSer: from Universities to industrial applications”. It amazed me to know how spread is the usage of the OpenSer, especially by universities but not limited to them.

    Diego Gosmar gave a speech entitled “Beyond the Asterisk World..what’s around“, giving a good picture of the Asterisk ecosystem, made by many local small firms delivering basic services (installation, configuration, etc). We agreed that there is a need for a better organized ecosystem, going beyond the Asterisk partnership program, may be through marketplaces or productizing services.

    A Questions&Answers session was held at the very end of the conference, resulting in questions about GPL licensing. As a matter of fact, the public is getting more and more conscious about open source applications and pose practical questions.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Open Source SIP, Open Source PBX, Asterisk, OpenSer , JonHallMaddog, AlfonsoFuggetta, Bogdan-Andrei Iancu, RobertoGaloppini

     

    • Randy Claines 6:07 pm on July 19, 2008 Permalink

      I use VMukti for my vopi open source needs and has been nominated for the CCA 2008.

      Haven’t used VMukti yet? Well I bet you have a need for it already. VMukti is a Free, innovative, multi-point total communications, collaboration and conferencing engine with built-in support for access to platform features through Personal Customizable Web Interface, Widgets for 3rd party websites, Desktops, and PSTN/ Mobile/ IP Phones. VMukti has been nominated for CCA 2008.

      Help VMukti get the support they need from the user community to continue developing such a great project. You can show your support by recognizing this software in the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards. This recognition will help ensure that their software gets the attention it needs to continue to provide a great set of features to the software community.

      You can vote for the software on SourceForge.net by going here:

      http://www.vmukti.com/latest-news/vmukti-calls-on-community-to-win-prestigious-award.html

      Winning this award would mean big things for all the users at VMukti.

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:04 pm on September 14, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    File Format War: Microsoft spokesman answers some issues 

    Ten days ago OOXML vote in ISO/IEC JTC1 failed, as results clearly by the official ISO announcement.

    Approval requires at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25 %) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were achieved, with 53 % of votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 being positive and 26 % of national votes cast being negative.

    Since this vote is not the end of the process, that will go until February when another JTC-1 meeting in Geneva will take place, I posed some questions to Andrea Valboni, Italian Microsoft’s CTO (read the disclosure).

    Lighting from Bill's fingertipsLighting from fingertips would be a plus, by urbanbohemian

    Despite many O countries voted yes, only half of P members were favorable, why that in your opinion?

    The fast track process for DIS29500 [name for ECMA OpenXML] has catalyzed the interest of many NBs around the world, and this is a counter-proof of the importance that many countries sees in this fact. As a consequence the debate around this technical specification has been very healthy and the numbers of countries participating to the five months discussion has been fairly higher with respect to the approval of ISO26300. As expected, P members has been affected by an intense lobbying activity by both sides and some of them felt that the only way to have their technical comments being considered by ISO was to express a “conditional approval”, which means a disapprove vote that could change to an approve if the issues reported as comments will be addressed.

    Passing from 30 full voting members to 41 in six months could be a sign of democracy in action, but participating ISO processes it is far to be open, since you have to pay about 2000 euros.

    As Kretchmer clearly stated years ago, among the ten requirements that enable Open Standards Open Meeting is the first of the list. But the very first barrier for stakeholders to participation in the standardization process is just the economic one. Paying to become a member IS a barrier.

    About “the right” to stack a committee, while I have not been asked by Microsoft to join the ISO/IEC JTC1, I have been contacted by representatives of the opponent tribe who kindly offered me to pay my fee.

    Despite I am pretty sure that Andy Updegrove is right saying

    That vote was marred by accusations in many countries around the world of overly aggressive conduct upon the part of Microsoft alleges, but has not substantiated, similar charges against opponents of OOXML.

    I believe that sooner or later similar charges against opponents will come out.

    Getting back to OOXML Frederic Couchet, spokesman for APRIL, said that:

    The OOXML format contains significant design flaws [and it will be difficult to correct them] other than by starting again from scratch, or by enriching the already existing standard, Open Document Format.

    Do you think that Microsoft would be able to propose modifications at the next ballot resolution meeting to make national bodies wish to withdraw their negative votes?

    Standards exists in ISO addressing the same topic area, like networking or multimedia representation, all of them come from a different story and user requirements. The same applies to document’s representation, where ISO26300 coexists with ISO19005 (PDF/A) and DIS 29500 is just a different way to represent unstructured information, which reflect a different perspective on how information can be handled. Is it technically better than ISO26300? It is difficult to judge, only time can prove this and ISVs acceptance. We never criticized ISO26300 for technical imperfections; there are, of course, as in any technical specification, but this is not the main point: the two are just different. ECMA TC45 who worked on OOXML contributed significantly in improving the technical specifications, with about additional 2000 pages which added to the original 4000; we think the work of those people, coming from 12 different companies, should be respected and not simply stamp it as “significantly flawed”. The increasing numbers of developers and companies who are building solutions on this technical spec demonstrate that the standard is usable and not that flowed.
    As part of ECMA, Microsoft will provide its support in addressing the technical comments presented by different countries, but is ultimately ECMA job to provide satisfactory proposals to resolve objections. As far as our role in the national organization, UNINFO, we agreed on the proposal presented by Leonardo Chiariglione during the discussion period, to support the development of a reference implementation and testing procedures for DIS29500, to be released according to an open source model, in order to facilitate the adoption of the standard. This proposal is attached as a comment to the Italian voting position and we confirm our commitment in supporting this proposal within the ISO organization.

    I believe that the Association PLIO, who is actively participating the standardization process, would be interested to further investigate such opportunity.

    Thanks for your answers and.. happy hacking! 😉

    Full disclosure.
    In different time, I had some collaboration with Microsoft, since they need to better understand the free software principles and the business model and to validate their thoughts on how to find ways to cooperate with the free and open source world on interoperability, licensing schemas and possibly joint initiatives.

    Technorati Tags: File Format, OpenXML, JTC1, AndreaValboni, AndyUpdregrove, FredericCouchet, APRIL, PLIO, OpenOffice

     

    • Simon Phipps 6:02 pm on September 14, 2007 Permalink

      I believe that sooner or later similar charges against opponents will come out.

      I’m not sure that’s the point though, Roberto. In my experience of various standards bodies, paying for experts to be involved is relatively normal. I’m sure we’ll find that various companies engaged various others to represent them or at least to participate from previously known positions.

      The issue with the recent OOXML vote was less that people were recruited to the committees and more the numbers in which they were recruited. The recruitment may have been both within the rules and part of normal practice. But the scale of the recruitment was not.

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:42 pm on September 14, 2007 Permalink

      Simon,

      you are raising a very important issue, I believe. This time, much more than other times were the general public was less interested or aware on the subject, we saw an amazing lobbying activity. Despite I am a fan of ODF, I think it is fair to let people know that JTC1 commissions were under a simultaneous bilateral attack.

      Talking about real problems, I am afraid that ISO is publicly showing its limits. I really hope that all this will help us to get ISO’s participation and decision processes more similar to IETF.

      It is really great time for a change, now.

    • Dave 12:57 pm on September 15, 2007 Permalink

      Even if the “opponent tribe” was found to have used similar lobbying efforts, how does that make Microsoft’s actions any more positive? Also, why haven’t we heard about these lobbying efforts by now? I think that IBM, Sun and others definitely lobbied hard for ODF, but not using the underhanded tactics of stacking votes and buying support. There’s a difference.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:31 am on September 16, 2007 Permalink

      Dave,

      what I am pointing out here is that both sides managed to fool ISO, and it is not a big deal. ODF didn’t require a strong lobby activity as far as I know, and in this respect there is a difference, I agree.

      If you didn’t heard about opponents lobbying efforts I would suggest you to check out how many members get at the very end of the process in Italy, and how did they vote. Enlightening.

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:55 pm on September 4, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

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

    VON Europe Autumn will be held in Rome on the 26th and 27th of September, industry leaders from all over the world will talk about where IP communications is going in Europe. SIP, IMS, IPTV and Voice are all being covered at this event, along Open Source Telephony issues and perspectives.

    As chairman of the “Open Source Sustainability from the business perspective” conference I will be pleased to introduce Jon Hall ‘Maddog’ who will open the conference talking of “Open Source Telephony: the winning application in the Open Source world?”.

    Jon Hall MaddogJon Hall Maddog by Pizel y Dixel

    Next to him professor Alfonso Fuggetta will give a speech about “New Business Models and Open Source”, a topic he is looking into from a while now.

    Greg Vance – Digium Sales Manager – will bring us in the domain of Open Source PBX, talking about “Asterisk: an OS project that has become mainstream. What’s new”.

    Bogdan-Andrei Iancu – CEO of VOICE SYSTEM and co-founder of the OpenSER project – who on Wednesday 26 will held also a course on OpenSER Administration, will talk about “The OpenSer: from Universities to industrial applications”, an Open Source SIP server.Last but not least, Diego Gosmar, Giuseppe Innamorato, Stefano Osler, authors of the book “Asterisk e dintorni” will talk About Asterisk and beyond.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Open Source SIP, Open Source PBX, Asterisk, OpenSer , JonHallMaddog, AlfonsoFuggetta, Bogdan-Andrei Iancu

     

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