Italian Minister answers questions posed in our open letter (Italian) – Now that we managed to get an answer to our letter it is great time to pose more questions..
Myself interviewed by Marco Rossi (ADIT Innovation Network Association) (Italian) – Sequential innovation, coopetition and an analysis of the Italian IT market (Italian)
It is widely known that despite many significant advantages, “explicit” use of OSS is still not as widespread. One of the many approaches designed to help in overcoming the adoption gap is the creation of “OSS competence centers”, that provide support and knowledge to facilitate open source software adoption.
Creating a competence center may take years, especially when it is necessary to create everything from scratch. But as I wrote in a recent presentation, it may be more efficient to “piggy-back” on top of existing IT incubators or IT districts, leverage what has already been produced in other projects and especially offer mediation as a service, because it is clear from the many surveys that companies need significant hand-holding when performing the first open source migrations. We will test this approach (after several trials) at the FutureMatch event colocated within CeBIT,
OCR is one of the few markets that are not fully internationalized yet. An OCR that can decently process Cyrillic texts for now can only come from Russia. And there are no more than two at the moment: ABBYY FineReader and Cognitive Cuneiform.
Both trace their origins to the late Soviet-era government research projects that were commercialized in the nineties. However, Cuneiform started to lose its position in the consumer market by the end of the decade, then the application saw very little progress since 2000, and now it is generally unknown among end-users. Cognitive, who has by now shifted to systems integration market, has finally decided to open up Cuneiform, make it available as freeware immediately on a dedicated website and publish under an open source license in March, 2008.
What makes it interesting is that Cuneiform will be the second OCR system to be published as Open Source after years of development inactivity along with Tessaract published by HP in 2005. Thus, the market of Open Source OCR will quite unexpectedly become competitive.
The most probable idea behind the decisions of both Cognitive and HP is to put to work the unemployed resources so that they start producing at least minimal benefit. It looks like a simple ‘let’s see’ action, and no clear business model seems to be lying behind it.
But with the recent increase of interest of the Russian authorities in Free Software usage at middle schools, the demand for the liberated Cuneiform could become considerable. However, until the government’s plan to shift all schools to Free Software by 2009 is fulfilled at least partially, it is very difficult to say what this state-supported middle-school FOSS market will look like and what its rules will be. But if it comes to reality, Cognitive has all chances to be a player there by simply having used the available resources in a smart way at the right moment.
Ciao Egor,
I just search for OCR on ohloh, an open source network – that just went open source – aimed at providing visibility into FOSS development. I think you might sign up and become a contributor, promoting Cognitive as soon as it will be released as open source.
This is excellent news – I have no expertise in the Russian language and have been trying to do research on old propaganda posters in our library. Now I can try some digital translation tools on a few of the pamphelets I have around. Thanks so much for posting this!
Emily,
Glad to know it was helpful for you!
Very useful information for me. Thank you.
please send me OCR
I’m translating a book from Russian to English I want build a tools to do this for me. After having scanned all pages I will run this tool and watch it work it’s magic. This is great info. Thank you.
Few days ago I reported that funds allocated by the Italian budget law to foster innovation by Italian local public administrations through open source software are vanished.
A couple of day later my blog peer and friend Stefano Maffulli launched a campaign (see the logo below), asking other bloggers to join us. Up to now Debianizzati, Geekplace, PlanetGnome Italia, Stefano Canepa, Dario and OS Revolution.
What about the 10 millions euro? by Stefano Maffulli
I invite Italian bloggers – and among them Antonella Beccaria, Paolo Didone, Nicola Mattina, Dario Salvelli, Luca Sartoni and Italo Vignoli – to join the campaign and ask Italian politicians to tell us all the (open source) truth!
I really wish you all a great year!
Technorati Tags: Open Source Government, oss, Public Administrations, SMEs, Italy, Italian politicians, Stefano Mafulli
Many were surprised by the extraordinary sales of the eeepc, and Asus plans to have 3.8 millions sold next year. One single product seems to be capable of substantially rise the number of linux users worldwide in a single year. How is it possible? Can we do even better?
At the end of each year since 2000 we are bombarded with opposing views about the next coming of linux on desktops, or the growth or decline of open source software on servers, whether Apache is growing or IIS is regaining share. It reminds me so much about heated debates about football, or politics, or many other clearly undecidable questions; the debate has an entertaining value in itself, so despite the lack of any practical value it remains a common sport. As I would never leave such an entertaining opportunity unfulfilled, I will try to present a few opinions on my own.
Blue Ocean 1024 by Aube Insanite’
First of all, I strongly believe that the overall idea of a “tipping point” that happens in the short term (0-2 years) that shows a sudden switch from Windows users to Linux on the desktop has no factual basis. All the research on ICT and innovation diffusion shows that when the incumbent enjoys strong network effects (like Microsoft with the combination of economic incentives to its channel and latency of user base) and is willing to adapt its pricing strategy to counter external threats, it can significantly delay the adoption process of even technically perfect alternatives. This, combined with the fact that at the moment the channel for linux desktops does not exist (apart from some internal successes like IBM, or some external sales by Novell) means that my models predict a less than 5% adoption within 2 years for enterprise desktops if everything stays the same.
And what can change? The first important idea is that there are two ways of doing business, the “red ocean” (fighting for the same market and undercutting competition) and the “blue ocean” (searching for new markets and ideas). My belief is that abrupt changes are much more difficult in red ocean environments, as everyone tries to outsmart the others, and those that are capable of surviving for longer (for example, because they have more cash) are increasingly favorite by this competitive model. But “order of magnitude” changes are possible in the blue ocean strategy, because the space for exploring new things is much larger. Andy Grove of Intel once mentioned that:
in how some element of one’s business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off. There’s wind and then there’s a typhoon, there are waves and then there’s a tsunami.
Can we find examples of this “order of magnitude” change? Some examples are the Amazon EC2 (cost of one hour of managed and scalable CPU one order of magnitude lower than alternatives), the Asus eeepc (nearly one order of magnitude lower cost compared to other ultraportables), the XO notebook (one order of magnitude reduction in costs, one order of magnitude or more in planned audience); all were surprisingly successful (even the XO, well before shipping, forced companies like Intel, AMD, Microsoft to react and compromise in order to be able to participate in the same market).
Still with me? The missing piece is the fact that we should strive to facilitate the choice of open source at the change points; for example, it is easier to suggest an alternative when the current situation is undergoing change (like suggesting a migration to linux when people has to change its PCs). We should make sure that we propose something that has one order of magnitude less costs than alternatives, that can provide sustainable business models, and that satisfies the needs of users. We have to create a software/hardware/services assembly (as the XO was created from scratch) to replace and enhance what desktop PCs are doing now. Technically speaking, we have to create a hardware assembly that costs one order of magnitude less, software that costs one order of magnitude less to maintain, and services that cost one order of magnitude less to maintain.
How we can do it? The hardware part is easy: design for the purpose. Take the lead from what XO has done, and create a similar platform for the desktop. Flash disk is still too costly, so design a single platter disk, with controller and metal case soldered on the motherboard; think about different chip designs (maybe leveraging Niagara T2) by reducing the number of cores and adding on-chip graphics and memory architectures (when source code is available, more sophisticated manual prefetching architectures are possible). Software needs are in a sense easier: we still need to facilitate management (Sun’s APOC or Gonicus’ GOSa are good examples) and integrate in the system an easy way for receiving external help. Think out of the box: maybe LLVM may be a better compiler for some aspects of the machine than GCC? (think about what Apple has done with it) Leverage external network services (like the WalMart’s gPC and gOS). This means create external backups and storage for moving users; allow for “cloning” of one PCs to another when a replacement is needed, easily synchronize files and data with external services using tools like Conduit. Allow for third parties to target this as a platform, like Google is doing with Android; partner with local companies, to create a channel that will sell services on top of it. As the cost of materials goes down of roughly 10% for every order of magnitude in produced parts, an ambitious company can create a 99$ PC, with reasonable capabilities, packaged by local companies for local needs; the potential market can be estimated at 25% of the actual installed PC base (both new users and users adopting it as second platform or replacement platform), or roughly 200 million PCs.
The assumption that everything is going to be as today is just our inability to plan for a different future.
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.
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 whiteâ€. It moved to the second phase of engagement, comparison and involvement – “look what your neighbour uses.†The current phase is about attitude – “Dirt is Goodâ€, 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.
Today I took my time to zoom back over my last year blogging over open source. Commercial Open Source blog has just completed its first year of life.
In November 2006 I scrambled with the generous help of Antonella Beccaria and little advice of my new media mentor Robin Good to create the blog site you are just reading now.
A year in review by _mpd_
I was happy. I was excited. I could not hold myself in place. I felt that the time to share my ideas, some of my experiences, a bit of my know-how had definitely come.
I see the web as a venue for sharing, exchanging and making valuable conversations, and I thought that I had to make myself fully part of this.
One idea that significantly influenced my decision to take on blogging was the Open Source Franchising business model. As a matter of fact in the summer 2006 I had already written a paper describing such business model, which I had also submitted to Sun Microsystems. My desire, especially since Sun didn’t ever comment back on my proposal, was then to extend my quest for feedback and opinions from other authoritative open source thought leaders.
Matt Asay positively commented my idea, and many others followed, opening the conversation. It was my very first success as blogger, and it showed me the importance and effectiveness of using a blog to create an online dialog. The conversation went on for several months, until Simon Phipps – Chief Open Source Officer at Sun – fully embraced my idea to the point of taking up the flag himself.
Thanks to this and probably to some of my other writings, some initial gigs came through:
And that’s how I discovered how blogging could be helpful to get invited in meetings, events and conferences, eventually opening me doors and new opportunities. As I go forward in my blogging experience I am realizing that my use of writing to get greater exposure and visibility may very well be my very best marketing strategy.
Like it or not, I had also my share of ego-boosting. Initially mostly for psychologically reward, later on as an increasingly valuable meter of my own professional credibility, I have had spent my share of time checking up technorati and looking at google ranks, just as everyone else. And I learned a few things:
Last but not least, I wish to share some authors and bloggers I found inspirational:
I learned a lot from them, and with some I am enjoying regular conversations. After all the ultimate reason to keep writing daily for all of us is that it is really true that no man is an island, not even a blogger!
Thanks very much. I read and read again you post. Your blog is one of the more interesting in my blogroll.
Great work in this year, Roberto. Good luck for your future.
Thank you Stefano for your kind comments!
Antonella you helped me a lot, thank you!
Roberto, congratulations! 😉
Roberto, it’s great to read your views on the OSS marketplace. How time flies…I remember thinking that blogging was a waste of time a year ago.
But I’ve learned so much from folks like yourself and the others you mention in your post….Like I’ve always said, better to have smart friends than be smart 😉
BTW, advice #2 you received from Robin Good was great advice. I wish I’d thought about that before going with rand($thoughts) as my blog title…live and learn!
Happy 1 year anniversary
Thank you Paolo, see you around!
Savio I believe you’re right, blogging is all about conversations with brilliant people like you and the others. So, here I am tagging you with a blog-game named “my five open source blogger heroes”, it’s your turn.. 😉
By the way, thank you very much for your kindly notes of congratulations.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
Within the context of the “Festival della Creatività ” on October 26 and 27 took place in Florence the first edition of QuiFree.it, a two day event on free knowledge and open source.
QuiFree.it had a dense agenda, including regional and national political representatives, international speakers like Barbara Held from the European Open Source Observatory, Rishab Gosh from the United Nation University, Pekka Himanen, Derrick De Kerckhove and many others.
The Open Source conference, held on a hot Saturday afternoon, brought together many representatives of the Italian Open Source community. Among others: lawyer Carlo Piana gave a speech on Free Software Myths, Gianugo Rabellino talked about Open Development and Andrea Valboni spoke about Microsoft’s open source strategy.
“Open Source Enterprise” was the title of my speech, given as Secretary of FIDA Inform, the National Federation of the Associations of Information Management Professionals.
After mentioning some public and tv ads sponsored by the Italian Government, I reported some findings from the EC-funded project tOSSad – Towards Open Source Software Adoption and Dissemination. The project, aiming at improving the outcomes of the F/OSS communities, proposed to use mass media and branding of Open Source products to address identified weakness. The weaknesses of the F/OSS solutions perceived by the experts in the IT throughout Europe namely were:
Lack of awareness cluster, composed by answers which have identified problems in public knowledge about F/OSS solutions, included categories of answers like: “public is uninformed about OSS solutionsâ€, “no public interest and no marketingâ€, “low penetration of IST and Open Source in SMEs in the regionâ€.
The solutions proposed by the experts, ranging from “awareness campaigns about social and economical benefits†and “using mass media for advertising (by large F/OSS based companies)â€, to
addressing the younger generation, for example “involve schools and universities to promote F/OSS solutionsâ€.
Awareness campaigns might well be an enabling factor to empower the open source industry, as agreed by Fabrizio Capobianco and Alex Fletcher and James McGovern. Considering that the audience was supposed to be composed by local public interest groups, I took the chance to remember that the Italian Budget law assigned funds [30 millions of euros] to sustain innovation by local public administrations.
It’s totally new! We’re making possible a marketplace where IT goods and services are exchanged more effectively, where public administrations’ needs and firms’ competencies and skills on open source platforms might meet [Beatrice Magnolfi, undersecretary State for Public Administration Reform and Innovation].
Getting back to Open Source Enterprise, I mentioned Gartner’s findings. Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006 and predictions set the percent share to 27 in 2011, when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion. But look also at Saugatuck Technology, as reported by Matt, telling proprietary vendors how to survive the open-source threat. The Open Source Market is ready for prime time. At least customers are.
As results from another Gartner Dataquest graph, the compound annual growth rate of open source software will more than quintuple that of proprietary software in the next five years. More important, the growth of the emerging phenomenon of Internal Open Source Development.
Customers are getting themselves organized, because small to large Italian firms can’t accomplish their needs. The Italian ICT market is a fragmented archipelago, made by lots of micro-companies where only 0,2% of ICT firms employ more than 250 employees. Small IT firms sometimes employ also gifted hackers, but they can’t manage to keep them busy doing just what they are really good at. Medium to large ICT companies offer a suite or two, often based on third parties open source products, and have no connection with open source communities.
As shown by an OpenLogic study, a quarter of interviewed customers using more than 100 Open Source products can boldly affirm that they saved more than 60% of their IT budget. While 44% of customers using about 1 open source product answered that is “too early to tell”. At the end of the day, open source is not a magic wound, and you need an open source policy and strategy to really take advantage of.
But the Italian open source market, likely not differently from many other European countries, has almost no open source product firms. VAR are having big trouble to sell off-the-shelf Linux distro, and to retain customers is not easy as soon as they get technologically autonomous. System Integrators and ISV, no matter how big they are, have no capacity to define and sell packaged services yet.
The absence of a wide enterprise grade commercial support opened new opportunities, allowing firms like BlackDuck, OpenLogic, Palamida, SpikeSource and SourceLabs to offer “horizontal” services not related to a single package. For example, firms offering intellectual assets protection take deliver assessment services for many if not all packages.
Their business model might be considered “horizontalâ€, as opposite to the classical (vertical) business model, where a firm offers every kind of services for a single package/distribution.These companies will play an important to role in the developing of an efficient and effective open source ecosystem. Nonetheless traditional forms of partner engagement might not work, and things like Open Source Franchising will definitely come to play, soon.
There are still just two ways to make money from OSS: “invent your own recipe†or being proficient at “cooking others’ recipesâ€. If you don’t like cooking, you’re out of the market.The result?
(big) Customers cooking their own lunch.
Richard Stallman‘s article “Why “Open Source†misses the point of Free Software“ has now been eported and commented by Robin Good.
Apparently my opinions didn’t convince Robin, that says:
In reality, as Stallman points out very clearly in the essay here below, open-source advocates have long stopped promoting the fundamental issues of freedom that are the roots of the Free Software movement in favour of peddling a more commercial and pragmatical approach which looks more at issues like costs, reliability, security, innovation, and at the ability to have access and modify the source code of any software.
As an outsider viewer, I think he is right.
So I took my chance to better explain my thoughts, I report here my comment on his blog:
I didn’t really want to counter attack Richard Stallman’s attack on open-source. I was trying to say is that also open source advocates are contributing to software freedom. It is a matter of perspective: while Richard takes care of users’ freedom, (some) open source firms also take care of software freedom.
I disagree with Richard when he points out that open-source advocates have long stopped promoting the fundamental issues of freedom. He infers from the behavior of some of them a general statement. A the some extent I might say that “free software” is not consistent term because half of “free software” google-alerts are just about freeware and other no Free Software items.
What I believe is important to say here is that a commercial and pragmatical approach can also take into great consideration software freedom. The importance of share and more to keep sharing-alike software (copyleft) for open source firms is synergic with free software advocacy, as it insist on the same values (but for a different reason).
Are all firms interested in Open Source willing to stress the importance of software freedom? Of course not, some of them don’t care, while some end up licensing their products with proprietary licenses.
Open Source firms (may be) are created equal, but some are more equal than others.. let’s keep them as Free Software’s good friends, as they are.
As usual, comments and opinions are welcome.
Free Software, RichardStallman, Commercial Open Source, Freedom , RobinGood
Roberto, I just posted something which is relatively a propos to this article.
Looks like we’re on the same page.
Richard Stallman recently wrote a long article entitled “Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software“, explaining why free software enthusiasts have to say “free software” rather than “open source“.
Every Free Software activist knows very well this issue, and I did abide by the importance to stand for freedom for years when I was supporting the FSFE Italian chapter’s activities. Recognizing the importance of freedom and stand for it, doesn’t imply the need to not talk about open source, though. Here comes the reason of this post, let’s start with Richard’s words:
These freedoms [the four ones] are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users’ sake, but because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation.
I think it is really important to stress the ultimate goal of free software, just as he clearly pointed out here: sharing and cooperation. Richard dislikes Lakhani and Wolf’s findings on the motivation of free software developers, because apparently only a fraction of them are motivated by the view that software should be free. In his opinion it happens because they surveyed the developers on a site that does not stress the importance of freedom. While I don’t know if he is right or not saying it, I think a better understanding of why firms cooperate on open source projects is important.
An Italian research based upon 146 firms analyzed the role played by different classes of motivations (social, economic and technological) in determining the involvement of different groups of agents in Open Source activities. Here the conclusions:
We find significant differences between the set of motivations of individuals and those of firms. In particular, firms emphasize economic and technological reasons for entering and contributing to Open Source and do not subscribe to many social motivations that are, by contrast, typical of individual programmers. While one might expect these differences, it is interesting to observe that the more pragmatic motivational profiles of firms are accepted in the Free Software community, provided firms comply with the rules of the community.
So individual developers’ and firms’ motivations are inherently different in nature. Reading the variety of the answers comes out that the highest–ranking incentive for using Open Source software seems to be promoting innovation and emancipation from the price and licence policies of large software companies.
Sequential Innovation is the reason to share and cooperate, as seen also in a study conducted on the linux-embedded vertical market, showing that averagely 53% of code is revealed. Participation to a technological club has beneficial effects on firms’ business, because they share risks and costs.
Collaboration is an emerging pattern, and firms approaching software production in terms of sharing and cooperation are Free Software’s good friend. Commercial Open Source, as far as based on participation and fostering communities, is aimed at promoting just the same idea of freedom, no less.
Happy hacking, share and share-alike!
kfke, 
Idetrorce, 
Roberto Galoppini, 
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