Next week at the Open World Forum on the 30 September will take place the “Open Analysts summit: The 2010 barometer of Open Source“, a session bringing together leading open source analysts Matthew Aslett, Jeffrey Hammond and Mathieu Poujol.
To promote the event I created my first animoto video, feedback and suggestions are welcome!
The event is by invitation only, but you can request an invitation when registering to attend the Open World Forum.
Io Leggo Copyleft! – a two days conference dedicated to the copyleft world.Linux e il software libero per la Pubblica Amministrazione e il Terzo Settore (eng: Linux, Free Software for Public Administrations and the Third Sector) -Â case studies, experiences and analysis of free software migrations.
RomeCamp is back. This edition has been organized by Elastic (Nicola Mattina) and DigitalPR (Vincenzo Cosenza), Current is one of the sponsors and the website enlists many media fans.
The Free Software Foundation on Monday announced the release of version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License. The new version of the GNU FDL allows public wikis like Wikipedia to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 license.
This new permission has been added at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the Wikipedia project. The same terms are available to any public wiki that uses materials available under the new license. The Wikimedia Foundation will now initiate a process of community discussion and voting to determine whether or not to use CC-BY-SA 3.0 as the license for Wikipedia.
Lawrence Lessig positively comments the news:
TheFree Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3. Section 11 of that license now (essentially) permits certain wikis to be relicensed under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0)license, so long as the relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009. That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. (Here’s the FAQ for the amendment.
This is definitely an important change, I hope we will see more cooperation in the next future between the free software movement and the open source initiative.
Great move Richard!
OpenLogic just announced yet another webinar on open source scripting Languages for JVM.
Rod Cope, CTO and Founder of OpenLogic, will present this webinar, providing a comparison of key attributes for the most popular scripting languages for the JVM.
Open source scripting languages for the JVM like Groovy, JRuby, and Jython have become popular alternatives to programming languages like Java, C#, and C++ as well as traditional scripting languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, and PHP. Developers are increasingly turning to this new generation of scripting languages because code is faster and easier to write, read, and understand. Scripting languages for the JVM also provide the power of the Java platform without having to write Java code.
- Which languages are easiest (and hardest) to learn?
- Â What types of development are best suited to each language?
- Â How do the top languages compare in terms of ease of use?
- Â What are the strengths and weaknesses of each language?
- Â Which open source frameworks and other packages work best with each language?
Call for an international action day on the 11th of October, when many European will demonstrate against the total retention of telecommunication data and other instruments of surveillance.
After the rejection of the Telecommunications Package many activists are organizing an action day to to recall the remembrance of the historical achievement of civil rights and liberties as a heritage of the Age of Enlightenment and to support the trust in security in our free society.
Have a look at the concept, Rome is already enlisted among the cities supporting the initiative.
The Center for Democracy and Technology today released “Internet in Transition: A Platform To Keep the Internet Open, Innovative and Free,” a 1.0 version of the  organization’s policy recommendations on Internet and technology policy for the next administration and Congress.  CDT also launched a companion Web site that, among other things,  encourages  Internet users to review and  comment on the draft.
My friend and supporter of free software movement and movements against software patents Fiorello Cortiana forwarded me a link to the “I wouldn’t steal campaign“.
Whenever you rent a movie, the multinational media industry forces you to watch their propaganda. They claim that [downloading movies is the same as snatching bags, stealing cars or shoplifting]. That’s simply not true – making a copy is fundamentally different from stealing.
The media industry has failed to offer viable legal alternatives and they will fail to convince consumers that sharing equals stealing. Unfortunately, they have succeeded in another area – lobbying to adapt laws to criminalize sharing, turning consumers into criminals. They argue that their laws are necessary to [support artists], but in reality all they’re protecting is their own profits.
The Greens in Europe and worldwide has been opposing these laws. We believe that consumers are willing to pay if offered good quality at a fair price. We also believe that sharing is expanding culture – not killing it.
To protest against the faulty propaganda from the industry, we made our own film. The difference is – you can choose whether you want to watch this one.
Please help to spread the word.
Will the opened stay unbroken? – Dana on “open” standards.
Microsoft’s Hilf Opens on Open Source Strategy – Bill Hilf on Microsoft’s open source strategy.
Are Wiki’s ready for Enterprises? – James McGovern is skeptical.
Tracking the emergence of open source community governance – Alex Fletcher says that a community should be handled with care. I totally agree, open source firms have to pay attention. More.
The Drupal Association and the Software Freedom Law Center – Dryes Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, announces that The Software Freedom Law Center agreed to provide legal representation to the project.
The Government of Brazil is hosting in Rio de Janeiro the second Internet Governance Forum meeting. The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF.
HELOISA MAGALHÃES: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to talk in Portuguese. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am a Brazilian journalist from the “Valor Econômico,” and I am deeply honored to take part in this meeting. For us journalists in economics and finance, this issue is of utmost
importance. And for me as a Brazilian, there’s special appeal to this. We are a country full of inequalities, and the Internet has proven to be a means of overcoming the challenge. First, I would like to call upon Mr. Ronaldo Lemos, who will chair the session. However, before, I’d like to remind all of you that our intention is to promote a debate. This is to be an interactive session.Questions and answers — questions from the audience. I would like to invite those who are sitting at the back of the room to come up closer so that we can have a true interactivity, so that we can have a more joyous interaction. First of all, Mr. Ronaldo, I give you the floor.
Few days ago I wrote my first post about migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, but I want to start it all over from the very beginning, step by step.
Andrea Trasatti after my post asked me more details over a skype conversation, and I decided to translate and share a slide-show about Migrating to OpenOffice.org.
The slide-show was originally produced by Davide Dozza – PLIO President and co-mantainer of the Italian Lang OpenOffice.org Project – in collaboration with Carlo Daffara, involved with COSPA project, and myself. I eventually used it at a Java Conference back in 2005, when I gave a speech on the subject.
There are many reasons to migrate to OpenOffice.org, ranging from cost savings – apparently still the most appealing reason for a change – to legal motivations or social ones. Last but not least the escape from vendors’ lock-in, considering that the choice is getting wider. To be honest there is even another reason why firms look into OpenOffice Migration: ask Microsoft a (big) discount!
Whatever is your reason, you should consider to have a look at “supposed problems“, things that people are going to mention as big (unresolved) issues. Among them it is worth to highlight that one of them – functions appear to be elsewhere – is not as critical as before. Why? Just have a look at Office 2007, and wonder how long will it take to bring your employees to be productive using it!
You’re not alone, many others have already traveled your road, so please take your time to look to successes and failures as well. Look at the Market share analysis, despite the difficulties due to the informal OpenOffice.org distribution process, they are meaningful and, at some extent, encouraging.
Every migration involving end-users has to cope with psychological issues, because people don’t like learning to use new tools, and motivations are needed to overcome inertia to change.
As matter of fact Communication is important, in terms of Internal Marketing, and customized version of OpenOffice, peer-learning and intranet tools could greatly help in this respect.
Despite Big-Bang migration could sound cool, they simply don’t work. So once you have done a deep analysis of the situation, analyzed your documents and identified homogeneous class of users, you’re ready to go. Step by step.
Outsiders, i.e. technlogical leaders also known as “champions” in the COSPA terminology, are those people to whom colleagues ask for hints and tips about software tools. Those people are key in a migration, both because they can help others or, if unhappy, prevent the migration to succeded.
Migration tools and Enterprise management tool are still few, so if you use applications integrated with Microsoft Office don’t look for “packaged services” and consider go alone. But, if you are an IT firm, keeping in mind that European companies are often SMEs, and that the Public Sector – where office suite are often used as an individual productivity tool – is seriously wondering about OpenOffice migrations, consider that there is plenty of space to run a business on OpenOffice migrations.
Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, Open Source Migration
Thanks for detailing your conversion to OpenOffice.
I used a friend’s computer recently. He had MS Office 2007 and I didn’t recognize any of the icons or menus…talk about confusing! It’s a good thing I knew the keyboard shortcuts.
I think you make a great point that the change from Office 97/2003 to 2007 is a pretty dramatic learning curve, so “it’s different” isn’t a good enough reason for companies to reject OO.
Savio
You’re right Savio,
change is going to happen anyway, even if you want to stay with Microsoft Office. Honestly I see Groove as a quantum leap for knowledge workers but.. how many organizations are going to take advantage of it any soon?
I have started an Open Source migration withing our small company.
Thanks for the blog: this is really helpful.
We have just started last week, and I thought a travelog for our company’s journey to Open Source would be good. So, I created this:
http://open-source-journey.blogspot.com/
Nice to know Surajit,
I am really glad it helps.
Roberto Galoppini, 
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