Updates from March, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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

    Italian Open Source Researchers: Carlo Daffara 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, FLOSSMETRICS, EU

     

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

    Open Source Business Intelligence: IDC survey predicts little impact 

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

    Toothpaste for dinner strip Toothpaste for dinner

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

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

    Talking about software upgrades, IDC noticed that:

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

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

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

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

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

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, Business Intelligence, disruptive innovation

     

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

    Italian Open Source developers: Alessandro Rubini (part II) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:41 pm on February 14, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Open Source developers: Alessandro Rubini 

    Alessandro Rubini is one of the most famous Italian hackers, he installed is first GNU/Linux distro just after getting his degree as an electronic engineer. He received a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Pavia, but he left the University because he didn’t want to write papers. He currently works as freelancer, he has several years of experience with writing device drivers for frame grabbers and other industrial devices, he also writes articles and books.
    For years he has been the strongest Free Software Italian advocate, and while he is not anymore involved with FSF Europe activities, he is still the most representative person in the Italian free software arena. I asked Alessandro to answer few questions about his job and about free software development, today I’m reporting his first answers, quite surprising indeed.

    How did you start getting working with GNU/Linux?

    It was 1994. I was enjoying Unix systems and free software at the University, so I started looking for something with pipes, gawk and gcc for my home computer. So I got that strange 0.99.14 thing in a pile of floppies. After that, I went shopping for something supported by that operating system, and upgraded the ZX-Spectrum.

    Having source code handy and being able to talk with the authors was great, both technically and socially. And it was a simple system back then, easily learned and hacked, although not as modularized and clean as it is now. I speak of the kernel, obviously, not about the GUI or similar things.

    How did it happen to you to write a book about Linux Drivers? Was it helpful to get new customers?

    I am an electronic engineer. Computers are tools that simplify moving physical things. I wanted to build my hardware and drive it. And I tend to teach others what I enjoy to do. So I began writing for Linux Journal, and then the editor put me in touch with the publishing house. They were looking for that kind of expertise. So I signed my contract and spent one full-time year on the text. No, it is not the taskI’ve been built for.

    Yes, it is helpful. At first I worked as a consultant for University deparments – I have a pair of acquisition systems running since then – then new clients found me on the Net, partly because of the packages I published, partly because of the book. Unfrotunately, publishing software takes a lot of time, so now I publish less.

    Do you enjoy your daily work? Do you work at home? What would you like to change about it?

    Yes, I find my work quite an interesting one. I work at home and in my own office, out of reach of my babies, where they wouldn’t pull cables and push buttons. Sometimes I also work in a University lab.

    The good point in self-employment is that you can manage your time. So you can take your days off when you need it. And your nights on, when the clients need it.

    The good point in working with free software is that you always with people more than with computers. Not only when teaching or helping people in solving problems, but also when studying new problems or finghting for your own bugs: the authors’ ingenuity, their choices and their preferences are always apparent throughout the code. Technology is created and dominated by people: it’s a matter of ideas and intelligence, and it’s great to feel and discover it every day.

    Alessandro’s attitude respect the main features of hacker ethic as described by Pekka Himanen in his Hacker Ethic: he has an passionate attitude to his job, and he likes to realize himself and his abilities. He also somehow enjoys to share his knowledge, but you need to read what he thinks about “tribes” to understand how much does he fit the Himanen model.

    What are the advantages of the community when it comes to product development?

    Well, I think the community doesn’t exist. There is no community as such, in my opinion, only a bunch of random hackers working on random stuff.

    No, I don’t deny the importance of people, as I said above. But I don’t feel a “community” is there: there is no common view or common goal, not even a common language. There are small groups that feel they are a community, but there isn’t such a thing as “the” community.

    Free software is like knowledge: it evolves and increases over time, slowly but steadily. Being involved in knowledge-production is difficult and it takes time.
    So product development should happen outside of such involvment, while respecting copyright and all the relevant licenses. The technical expertise out there is a great help, but most information found on the net is wrong or subtly incorrect. For some problems you need to ask the authors, on the relevant mailing lists for the specific project, but this is not the community, is individual people.

    So the advantages of distributed development is that knowledge advances over time without being controlled by a person or a company. Not unlikely what happens in other fields. It may look strange, but that’s only because software development used not to work as it should (and as everything else develops).

    Alessandro couldn’t be any clearer about what he thinks about open source communities, in his opinion product development is definitely not related to community participation. In his opinion there is no such thing like the symbiotic approach, I guess because of the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. Corporates want to respect milestones, while communities are more interested in doing it right, when feasible.
    On the other hand the states that distributed – and not coordinated – development turns in knowledge advance over time without being controlled by a single entity.

    That’s the Freedom Alessandro talks about.

    (To be continued tomorrow)

     

    • vincos 2:18 pm on February 15, 2007 Permalink

      Molto interessante ! L’ho rilanciato sul mio blog. A presto

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:32 pm on February 8, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Stallman starts a campaign promoting Ogg Theora 

    Today reading Robin Good I happened to know that Richard Stallman asked him to remove from YouTube his video clips showing Richard’s interview, because

    [..] it doesn’t work with free software!

    Robin Good is an independent reporter trying to spread Stallman’s ideas:

    While I am fundamentally a supporter of Richard Stallman’s views on free software and democracy, I am also an indipendent reporter trying to spread and divulge his ideas, concepts, plans which nonetheless his huge popularity are still completely unknown to the greater part of my readers.

    But who knows Stallman knows how important is popularity to him:

    The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular.

    Despite Richard often forgets that GNU popularity wasn’t supposed to be a goal, he always made clear that the ultimate goal is users’ freedom.
    Preventing people from knowing about him and FSF, is a means toward that goal?

    The Ogg Theora “standard”. Ogg Theora is an open format supported by an application released under a BSD-style license, but so far there is no format’s specification other than the source code of the program.

    No wonder the format has not been approved by any standardization body yet.

    Open standards may impose “reasonable and non-discriminatory” royalty fees and/or other licensing terms on implementers of the standard and are harmful for OSS implementations.

    Besides licensing issues there are other important issues within standardization bodies policies, like the ten rights reported in Krechmer’s paper “The meaning of Open Standard”.

    Standardization bodies should be able to decline to certify subset implementations, or to place requirements upon extensions, as suggested by Perens in his Open Standards and practice, in order to avoid predatory practices.

    Richard, Freedom is about knowledge, and file format specifications matters!

     

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:15 am on February 9, 2007 Permalink

      Stefano, President of the Italian Chapter of Free Software Foundation Europe, wrote a post (Italian) talking about the issue. While he understands the reasons behind Richard’s decision, he looks concerned about it. Others are quiet critical about it.

    • Simo 3:54 pm on February 9, 2007 Permalink

      Richard didn’t ask him to actually _remove_ the videos.

      Robin took a general statment which can be summarized in: “please don’t publish videos that can’t be viewed with free software”, and made it into a scandalistic article.

      If you read the article to the end, you’ll find out that Robin was at least deceiving, as he admits that Stallman, after direct request, didn’t deny him permission to post the video on YouTube, he just stated a preference not to.

      So what is it this all about? Just bashing RMS as usual … it seem a national sport nowadays.

    • Robin Good 6:24 pm on February 9, 2007 Permalink

      Hello Simo,
      I am not into bashing Stallman at all.

      That’s not my goal.

      As I have clearly stated in the beginning and end of my article I am actually in full support of the ideas and principles he is defending.

      Re making a scandalistic article from a supposedly gentle and open-minded offer, let me just cite again for you what Stallman titled and wrote in his first email:

      “Please remove the clips from YouTube!

      …please remove those video clips from YouTube. Please post them in a way that works with free software, or NOT AT ALL.”

      My point is that I should not be restricted to post these video clips in a largely unknown and unsupported format, which does not allow for direct streaming from within a browser. I do not write for an audience of geeks and many of my readers don’t even know who Richard Stallman is. If I make it too difficult for them to even find out what free software is really all about I don’t really see what’s the benefit I am bringing to them.

      What perplexes me the most is that if these very video clips were allowed free existence and distribution across all formats and video sharing services, just like it has been happening right now, Richard’s and the FSF message would reach the eyes and ears of thousands more people.

      If we expect individuals to use their head, to reason and make sense of Stallman’s logic and principles and then to take action with it, how can we pretend that these same individuals learn and discover these messages if we make it so hard for them to get at them?

      So, if pretending to have the freedom to post my video interviews on the media I prefer and without restrictions of sort is considered “bashing Richard Stallman and writing scandalistic articles” I am definitely gulty of these horrible sins.

    • Simo 2:09 pm on February 10, 2007 Permalink

      I was just criticizing the way you put it down.
      While I agree myself that Free Software compatible formats should be used whenever possible, I also agree with you that spreading information, in some cases, is more important.

      You, as media writer, know very well that the way you tell a story make a lot of a difference in the way the public perceives it. That’s the point, not your freedom to put a video on YouTube.

    • Roberto Galoppini 9:11 pm on February 12, 2007 Permalink

      Simo I believe Robin told the story the way it is. I suggest you to read again the article, it has some interesting updates you might enjoy.

      Robin’s article raised an important issue within FSF and it might eventually have helped a process: stay tuned!

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:08 am on March 1, 2007 Permalink

      More interesting updates from Robin, no doubt he helped the process eventually, finding tools and services to upload and to watch video using free software. I would call it a nice gift to Richard and Free Software’s friends from Master New Media.

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:00 pm on February 6, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Consortia: Measure twice, cut once 

    The Open Forum Europe (TOF-E) is a group of European suppliers told to trial a franchisee approach. Googling around I found the following (old) news about the TOFe EC funded project:

    The Open Forum-Europe (TOF-E) raises awareness of open source software and the benefits it can bring to European public and private sectors. TOF-E will accomplish this goal by establishing Internet portals that will help users select software based upon their current and future needs.

    The declared aim of the Open Forum Europe project is:

    The aim of The OpenForum Europe (TOF-e) project is to put certainty and commercial clarity into the whole Open Source process. It will assist SMEs, Enterprises and the Public Sector in the pragmatic adoption and support of OSS by intermediating between business users and the OSS developers, integrators and support community across Europe.
    TOF-e represents the specific market validation phase of this eTEN project to rollout TOF-e across Europe and consists of 3 local portals in Denmark, Ireland and the UK.

    I must admit the portal doesn’t help much, it contains a link to OpenOffice.org website, a practical course in StarOffice 8 that you can buy there 38.50€ and, last but not least, a “useful tool“:

    Certified Openâ„¢ is designed to help measure and encourage competition through the provision of a framework for evaluating technical and commercial lock-in where that may reduce the ability of suppliers to compete in the provision of software, hardware and services.

    Unfortunately the site doesn’t offer any further information about the “useful tool”, so far it looks like if we can’t get much out of the portal. The EC-funded projects, started in September 2005 is supposed to close soon (February 2007) and I am afraid we have no real chance to see the TOF-E promise realized:

    In Europe there is perceived to be substantial opportunity to create new ICT opportunity for SMEs, and for the creation of a new ICT market, particularly in new Member States. However, independent research, including that undertaken by OpenForum Europe has observed that a number of inhibitors to success remain. Key amongst these is current lack of a comprehensive, yet locally available, access to advice and guidance; perceived lack of skills both within the user and with support partners.
    TOF-e is being launched as a commercial electronic intermediary focussed on the needs of government and business and aimed at the Director, Senior Management, Business Users and their Business Advisors (Accountants, Administrators, Legal and Financial Advisors, Procurement Officers, Banks and SME business advisors) based in a particular community. SME potential users and suppliers will be particular beneficiaries.

    Getting back to the title, if you are not running an (externally) public funded project, I agree with Gianugo advising on using consortia to do actual business:

    [..] my experience shows there’s nothing harder than have individuals with a strong personality such as entrepreneurs sit around a table and agree on a detailed common roadmap. Democracy is definitely a poor governance model when it comes to business: a strong company, with proper hierarchies and delegation structures in place, is much more effective when it comes to getting to the market.

    It just doesn’t work, no matter how I love my fellow Orixians. Consortia are great for networking, getting to know each other better, share experiences and market approaches, understand joint business opportunities and work on actual cross-company business: that’s great stuff, but don’t try to push the boundary, as when it comes to concrete business it’s just too hard to cope with the sheer amount of management that kicks in. It’s a full time job.

    Yes, it’s a full time job, in two years I spent more than 600 hours on consortium’s activities when I was the president of the CIRS Italian consortium, and I must admit it’s true that SMEs tend to have short-term perspectives. Members usually can’t afford medium to long term investments and look for quick results, making difficult if not impossible sharing a common strategic approach.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:27 pm on February 3, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Public Thank You to Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems 

    Dear Simon,

    I’m glad to hear from your voice that the Italian dictionary and thesaurus will be soon included in the offical version of our beloved office suite OpenOffice.org.

    Hi Roberto.

    I’ve looked into this and the problem was that, by using the GPL rather than the LGPL for your contribution, it was necessary for Sun’s legal team to conduct an extensive discussion about the implications of distributing it with OpenOffice.org (which as you know is licensed under LGPL), and that discussion was disrupted by staffing changes in mid-stream. Some delay in public comment was inevitable because of the fact you’d used a license the OpenOffice.org community has not chosen and because seeking legal advice in the US is necessarily a confidential matter under US law. I apologise for the extra delay that was unavoidably caused by the staffing changes.

    I have now received legal advice that gives me confidence that inclusion of this great facility will be OK from a licensing perspective, and it will proceed forthwith. I’d like to thank you and your team for both your important contribution to OpenOffice.org and for your patience waiting for the process to complete.

    S.

    On behalf of the the Italian Native-Lang Project team, who yesterday announced to have become an Association, I wish to thank you publicly for your job, you have been able to solve a problem we were dealing with from months.

    Mille grazie! (Thanks a lot!)

     

    • Conficio 4:50 am on February 5, 2007 Permalink

      Congratulation to the Italian Native Language project to get your contributions for OpenOffice.org included.

      K
      Chief screencast(er) t Plan-B for OpenOffice.org

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:11 am on February 6, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Kay,
      I had a look into “Plan-B for OpenOffice.org” a public beta test support website in the form of animated software manuals. It looks really interesting.
      Is the framework open source as well? Has the project a free-entrance mechanism?

    • Savio Rodrigues 2:58 pm on February 6, 2007 Permalink

      Nice work Roberto & team!

      I wonder whether the time it took Sun to accept the code also had to do with checking for IP & copyright ownership.

      I’ve experienced how long such a task can take when a large vendor is involved with distributing OSS code. Large vendors are large litigation targets and need to protect themselves by doing a good deal of due diligence.

      I’ve written about my experience with IBM WAS Communality Edition here.

    • Roberto Galoppini 3:36 pm on February 6, 2007 Permalink

      As far as I know legal advice took time, no copyright check had been done about the dictionary or the thesaurus (no code inside, but copyright still applies indeed) as far as I know.

      By the way I happened to know that a public funded Italian institute did the dictionary and/or the thesaurus used by Microsoft’s products, but for copyright’s reasons it has not been donated to OpenOffice.org.

      We don’t hear much about those “background checks” because (I guess) OSS vendors don’t do many checks. Indemnification sounds an insurance business to me, not that big indeed..

    • backgroundcheck 5:57 pm on June 20, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Roberto –

      As an Italian speaker and user of openoffice.org, I appreciate your efforts to get Italian included!

      Thank you –

      Trina

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:09 am on January 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Franchising (Matthew Aslett) 

    Few days ago Matthew Aslett wrote a post Open Source Franchising, commenting Matt Asay considerations about the franchise model.

    Aslett reported some remarks from the EU study, saying:

    As an example of a more recent development in business models, which could provide a future scenario for SMEs in general even beyond the FLOSS sector is the Orixo network of mainly small and micro-enterprises in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, UK and Switzerland specialising in massive mission-critical web server applications based around customising the FLOSS web server Apache and related Java/XML technology (such as Cocoon) for large users. Orixo works by each national SME member acquiring national customers and partners in other countries supporting each other’s clients.

    As founder and former president of the first Italian consortium of Free and Open Source companies I believe that lousy coupled organizations, like consortia, are easy to create, members are required to spend a limited effort, but its management might be complex and time consuming.
    Hierarchies are needed for the coordination of continuously generated change, and commercialize products and solutions is definitely not an activity modular in nature.

    I shared my ideas about consortia’s management with Gianugo Rebellino, Apache Vice President of XML and former partner of Orixo, and that’s what he told me:

    I must admit the least important part in the Orixo experience has been doing business as a common entity. Orixo was able to attain quite a few notable goals: we met, we got to know each other, we exchanged experiences and business ideas, and we did a few cross-company projects. two companies who met in Orixo went the extra mile, eventually merging and providing the initial step to our next phase, that is Sourcesense, which gathers as a company (not a consortium) three Orixo players.

    The EU study about says that Open Source firms to cooperate don’t need any complex legal arrangements, since FLOSS licenses provide a simpler alternative as reported by the study, but when it comes to developing common business opportunities Open Source doesn’t help much.

    As reported by the Observatory of European SMEs noticed that small firms have a short-term perspective and expect quick and concrete results, and a flexible and opportunistic – as the opposite of strategic – organization like a consortium is usually not efficient.

    Getting back to Open Source Franchising Aslett wrote:

    All the elements that make up a McDonald’s are freely available, apart from the McDonald’s system by which the burgers are put together and the fries are cooked and the staff carry out their duties, and of course the trademarks and copyright.

    It makes perfect sense to me comparing the Open Source Franchising to Mc Donald’s. Open Source franchising is all about marketing IT basic services to SMBs using OSS, with a fixed-time fixed-price methodology meeting clearly defined performance criteria (SLA).

    As seen with Geeksoncall, there is space for growing in computer services franchise arena, and no one has explored yet such potential market using commercial open source software.

    I believe that software/hardware vendors might run a franchising model more effectively than any other. Pure software vendors instead are eligible for the franchising model if and only if their products represent the first OS mover in an arena dominated by high priced proprietary products.

    Do you agree?

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:43 pm on December 27, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Letter to Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems 

    Dear Simon,

    much has been said about the importance of the establishment of a well organized Open Source Community to benefit the future of OpenOffice.org, and we do agree upon this goal.

    As Italian Native-Lang Project we believe that:

    • an open source project is about sequential innovation, it’s about contributing software, documents and tools to something as a community for the benefit of others;
      .
    • open source projects are open to the participation of anybody who can contribute value and is willing to work with the community, and volunteering demands big respect.
      .

    We have tried for seven months to get an answer about the hypothetic mismatch between OpenOffice.org license and the Italian dictionary and thesaurus released by Italian volunteers.
    The former is under LGPL, where textual resources are released under the GNU GPL license.

    We’re spending time and efforts from months to include such useful and powerful resources, while we could invest our energies in more important issues, like promoting ODF and OpenOffice.org along institutions, supporting users and developing and including more extensions.

    Should the Italian Native-Lang Project mantain a fork to distribute users a full version of OpenOffice.org, along with those textual resource?
    We do really hope not, and we’re looking forward to get your help with the legal review of licenses.

    The Italian Native-Lang Project team

     

    • Mirco 12:42 am on January 2, 2007 Permalink

      I’ve worked on Thesaurus please let it be uasble. Thanks a lot.

    • Simon Phipps 5:13 pm on February 3, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Roberto.

      I’ve looked into this and the problem was that, by using the GPL rather than the LGPL for your contribution, it was necessary for Sun’s legal team to conduct an extensive discussion about the implications of distributing it with OpenOffice.org (which as you know is licensed under LGPL), and that discussion was disrupted by staffing changes in mid-stream. Some delay in public comment was inevitable because of the fact you’d used a license the OpenOffice.org community has not chosen and because seeking legal advice in the US is necessarily a confidential matter under US law. I apologise for the extra delay that was unavoidably caused by the staffing changes.

      I have now received legal advice that gives me confidence that inclusion of this great facility will be OK from a licensing perspective, and it will proceed forthwith. I’d like to thank you and your team for both your important contribution to OpenOffice.org and for your patience waiting for the process to complete.

      S.

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:34 pm on December 18, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Dr Open Source – how I learned to stop worrying and love the GPL – 

    A couple of weeks ago professor Maria Lillà Montagnani invited me to give a speech along with Pierpaolo Boccadamo, head of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy by the Italian subsidiary, by Bocconi private University.

    I have already met Boccadamo when I took part to the Microsoft’s “Linux&Open Source Briefing” partner program as open source expert, and I was already used to openly discuss with him about technical ed economical differences of the proprietary and open source models.

    I spent part of the weekend to prepare my slides, and I was looking forward to listen to sudents’ questions to my statements and suggestions. The slideshow was starting with a picture of the famous movie Dr StrangeLove, a little parody I did to get their attention. After a brief introduction I got into the heart of the argument, talking about organizational economics aspects and other issues about innovation.
    To my suprise no questions were raised up when I was speaking firms and communities relationships, neither when I talked about disruptive innovation, and how it affects incumbents’ market leadership, nor when I mentioned sequential innovation and technology club partecipation.

    Than Boccadamo spoke about Google, Microsoft strategy, and many other things.
    Again, no question from the public.

    If Picasso was definitely right saying that:

    Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

    What about a class without questions?

     

    • zeno 6:07 pm on December 18, 2006 Permalink

      I’d say “what a sadness” but I studied in Bocconi and I know what you mean. There, people who ask (and think for themselves) is a niche. I don’t mind if this fact is common among the other univerties but, unfortunately, Bocconi is the cradle of the future italian management, of the economic structure so that I’m worried about our country.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:30 pm on December 18, 2006 Permalink

      You told that: Bocconi is the cradle of the future management, but what kind of? If they have no questions to ask today, they better to learn how to answer yes or no by tomorrow.
      I love Shunryo Suzuki-Roshi quotation
      “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few” and I hope it still makes sense.

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