Open innovation is taking over in many areas, and open source plays an important role especially in software sequential innovation, where each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors. Foremost, for the most of us before anything else software (open source included) is a tool towards a goal.
Hi Si,
good to hear back from you. I think the experience you gained with Opentaps in this respect might be enlightening for others. Let me know if you are open to tell your story, I’d be glad to write about it.
Is there a blueprint/roadmap for newbies to follow?
James Dixon – Pentaho Chief Technology Officer – about two years ago wrote the “Beekeeper model“, telling the word about how open source firms writing the majority of the code make business.
Now James released the first draft of the new version asking for comments, and I am glad to give him some feedback again.
These are very good points Roberto, I’ll try to incorporate them into draft 2.
Thanks,
James
Few days ago I joined the open source vendor debate remarking the importance of resolving the name confusion in favor of customers, and Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile shout-out saying that open core offers best opportunity for community and commercial Success.
Lines blurring between open source and proprietary vendors apparently invigorate the debate. I want to take the chance here to classify production model in function of the nature of firm-community relationship.
The lack of open source vision by the Italian government, along with attention paid by Obama to open source, brought my attention back to the importance Open Source Governance.
I want to strive for open source adoption by national and local governments. I want to take the opportunity here to share some thoughts about why a FOSS governance is needed, and how we could accomplish the goal to use open source software to develop innovative initiatives.
First Monday - the famous peer-reviewed journal – recently published an interesting paper on open source collaboration in the US Public Sector, resulting probably one of the first research covering open source governance in the public sector.
Before commenting its findings and see how and if they could be applied to the Italian situation, I wish to end to recap issues raised during the “Open Source Governance†held in Rome last October.
While Obama asked about the benefits of open source , the actual Italian Government shows little interest in open source, and it is time to talk back about the importance of the open source software governance.
The “Open Source Governance†conference – organized by the Italian Institute for advanced information technology at the end of October 2009 - an Italian event dedicated to the future of open source procurement, usage and management within the Public Sector.
MÃ¥rten Gustaf Mickos – formerly MySQL CEO and now open source strategist at Sun until the end of Sun’s fiiscal 3rd quarter 2009 – and Ulf Michael Videnius (aka Monty) – MySQL co-founder and CTO, now driving the development of Maria, the new storage engine Maria – both quit Sun Microsystems.
Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, on Monday announced the addition of an advanced business intelligence platform (Hyperic Operations IQ) to its web application performance monitoring offering.
After receiving growing attention in Europe, Hyperic lower the bar to systems management utility embedding the Jaspersoft Professional Edition into the Hyperic IQ framework, enabling executives to read web performance data.
A couple of days ago I happened to meet my old friend Idel Fuschini on the street, and we have been talking about things happened ten years ago or longer when working in the mobile VAS sector, when WAP was still to come.
Idel over the last ten years has been working on implementing mobile-based services using proprietary products like Volantis (nowadays pretty open source), Mobileaware, and Oracle Portal to go. More recently he started to use also open source platforms like WURFL, eventually ending to be fascinated by the open source side of software development.
What follows is not a research, neither an investigation including a quantitative evidence, but just a reportage of a programmer’s life and how open source can make a change.
Hi Roberto,
some news about my small project, one year after. Mobile community people started to follow me since I released some new features.
Simon Judge writing on his blog, helped me to raise interest in my work.
Updates in numbers:
300 dowloads per month
8 external contributions from people, both bugs’ corrections and requests for new features
Apache included my project, now listed among existing modules for Apache
4 companies wrote me to tell they have adopted my package for delivery mobile content.
At the end of the day I realized that to make a good open source piece of code, you must have a good idea and people like Roberto and Simon that help you. Thank you both for your help!
Gartner’s 2009 predictions have been widely commented over these days, leaving space and opportunities to rediscuss the open source mantra “we cost less”.
Migrate to open source seems the cheapest solution, at least on an individual basis, but enterprise migrations are not an easy game to play, and TCO doesn’t look like the ultimate answer.
Any similarity between the Fermat’s theorem and the cost benefits of open source?
Why do people /still/ cite Gartner. They are corruptible. E-mails from antitrust show them negotiating with clients what they’ll write.
Ciao Roy,
Gartner talks to CIOs, and they listen to Gartner, that is why everybody cites Gartner. This is fair enough as far as it goes, and I think that they deserve our attention for this.
Roberto,
I have some antitrust docs that I need to process and publish. They show Gartner and IDC negotiating with Microsoft what they’ll produce. There are prior examples of this that I published. I’m not vengeful; I’m a realist. CIOs will hopefully become more open minded because they are being sold mindshare.
Roy,
I am not saying you are vengeful, just mentioning that some analysts are more equal than others and therefore makes sense to comment them.
About being biased or not, I think that it is impossible to make general assumptions when we talk about big analyst firms.
Yes, size leads to generalisation.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Hi Roberto,
I think your comment about “standing on the shoulder of giants” is a really good one. A lot of people just think that an open source solution is a cheaper alternative. In fact, though, the greatest value of open source is the accumulated knowledge from all the users and developers on how software SHOULD be built (and also SHOULD NOT 🙂 ). This becomes a very valuable template for companies who want to build and extend a product/service based on open source software.