OpenSolaris: more popular than Linux in 2007?
Paul Murphy talking about the predictable stuff wrote:
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community.
how did he know that?
Updates from January, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Roberto Galoppini
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Roberto Galoppini
Licensing: Ubuntu or not Ubuntu?
On the second of November the Free Software Foundation has unveiled a new Linux distribution based on Ubuntu named gNewSense. On the 30th of December an Ubuntu member wrote a public letter to FSF asking them to recommend Ubuntu instead of gNewSense.
The gNewSense project was started by two Developers, Brian Brazil and Paul O’Malley, who aimed to deliverthe stability of Ubuntu with the addition of freedom.
Unfortunately freedom has a big price this time, since many WiFi and graphic drivers don’t work at all, or at a minimal level, without some proprietary software. That’s why Debian (the code base of Ubuntu) developers felt that they had no choice but to do include proprietary device firmware.
Now that the Free Software Foundation is recommending gNewSense for beginners, Ryan Lortie has written an Open Letter to the FSF raising some issues.
Read the full story and comments.
I understand why the FSF do not support Ubuntu, Stallman has always been clear about it:
Are we working for freedom, or have we replaced that goal with the shallow goal of popularity?
So I fully understand omment I read after posting on digg, while I wanted to underline how different is the meaning of freedom by different OS projects. I already cited Shutlleworth saying:If you have an interest in being part of a vibrant community that cares about keeping free software widely available and protecting the rights of people to get it free of charge, free to modify, free of murky encumbrances and “undisclosed balance sheet liabilitiesâ€, then please do join us.
Yes, Dilbert is right: everyone is someonelse’s weirdo!
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Roberto Galoppini
Italian Open Source projects: WURFL
I heard many times people saying there are many Italian developers but no Italian OS projects.
There are no Italian Red Hat, but there are no OS firms like Red Hat in the whole world!Despite the absence of an Italian OS firm publicly traded, there are few stories to tell.
Few days ago I passed by a blog of an Italian developer and when I learn about his project I asked him to tell me more. Here it comes the WURFL project, a big repository of information that help to recognize browsers, devices and their capabilities about (almost) all known Wireless devices.
To know more about the project and its business implications I posed with questions to the mantainer, Andrea Trasatti.
How the project was conceived?
WURFL was born in 2001. Since 1999 there was a mailing list collecting people talking about WAP and WML issues.
As you might know every mobile phone had its own screen, any browser its own characteristics, and behaviors. Among us developers was quite straightforward to share information about mobile phones instead of buying all ones. That’s how WURFL started.So the software started, as pointed out by Raymond, by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
The message from the WAP Forum to wait for implementations to converge didn’t sound good to them, and that’s why they began to develop a database of device capabilities, the WURFL.
How did it grow?
Despite many people were sending useful information, mantaining the project was a time consuming activity. At that stage I was employed by BWare Technologies, and I was working in a project for an Italian mobile operator. Since I was developing a multi-channel chat web and wap based, I was in the position to get information about a lot of mobiles. That’s how I became the mantainer of the configuration file.
Luca Passani was there from the very beginning. He was employed by Openwave, and his company was interested to make WAP aware as many firms as possible.
Many other developers joined the project as long as they were interested in the problem, then they leaved, while others were coming up to help the project.
Everyone was using a different framework, but this was not a problem, since the format of choice was XML, and everyone might keep using his or her favourite tools. Many decided to share their libraries to access the data as well, and the project was growing.
Then Luca Passani designed and implemented the WALL tag-library, enabling the delivery of applications to all devices (WAP 2, old WAP 1.X, XHTML and I-Mode). Using his library firms with almost no knowledge of WAP could wrote their own applications for WAP terminals quite easily. As maintainer and author of WURFL I have been invited as expert to join the W3C Mobile Web Initiative.
How did the project affect your professional life as developer?
At the very beginning I was employed by BWare Technologies, and WURFL took me one hour a week, there was no reason to raise the issue. Then increasing the number of new mobile devices I asked to allow me to spend some time mantaining WURFL, and it was easy to convince them, since we were taking advantage of it by some customers’ projects. Then I left Bware Technologies and WURFL became a medium to create business opportunities.
While working by DADA, a leading European provider of mobile community and entertainment services, I used WURFL as a key tool and they allowed me to spend time to empower it.Nowadays I’m working with M:Metrics, their core business is about statistics.They’re really interested into WURFL, because it represents both a source of data and a marketing tool. Empowering content providers with a useful tool is a medium to help the Mobile market to grow.
Indirect funding then, to call things with their name. It’s worth to notice that M:Metrics sounds like the most interested in aiding WURFL development, where the system integrator and the content provider might look like the best suite candidates.
Who are the contributors?
Sometimes single developers, hobbyists, medium to large system integrators or phone mobile producers.
So the technological club, started from single developers, today encompass every kind of contributor. In terms of adoption today WURFL is likely more popular than pure UAProf solutions.
The idea of sharing a “standard” was really strong in their mind, they couldn’t wait for implementations to converge “naturally”. And they got big attention, as seen they were invited to join a W3C initiative, and they spoke clear and loud.
What about the coordination of production?
Our organization is simple. Luca Passani takes care of Java libraries and WALL, I take care of the PHP library. Then I manage all contributions, while he is busy with our web.
Both of us spend time reading the mailing-list wmlprogramming, he moderates it also.
We receive contributions from other developers in other languages, like ruby, perl, or .NET. Data are all free, while libraries are licensed with MPL, GPL or BSD.
The project is guested by Sourceforge, and source code is accessible via CVS.
Very few contributors have write privileges for their own modules.We’re very happy and proud of our results, and I believe many firms use it not only because it’s gratis, but because of its open nature, and our mission is to keep it so.
Thank you Andrea, I wish you happy hacking, and please keep WURFL cool!
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Andrea Trasatti
Thank you Roberto for the article, it was a pleasure to have this interview with you and chatting about open-source and business opportunities.
I think WURFL has a bright future ahead. Luca and I are working daily to channel the energies of the community to give more fire-power to WURFL.
The idea of open-source in Italy is often to have something for free and not even say “Thank you” to the original developers. I have taken a lot from the open-source world and it feels good to give something back. It is hard to find sponsors in Italy. DADA was an exception and it was good. M:Metrics is a US company and things are different again.
We should try to import the best from the foreign countries and not just hamburgers. 🙂 -
Roberto Galoppini
Andrea would you explain what do you mean by “M:Metrics is a US company and things are different again”, please?
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Andrea Trasatti
I have worked for Italian companies for more than 10 years now and most of the times we are talking about small companies that have grown from nothing to whatever they are today. This means that over the years the managers have saved the money they earned and spent it in new projects and development.
What I think is crazy is that in Italy there is very little investment (if nothing) in the research and development. Companies always invest internally in projects they feel safe will bring some revenue in the very near future. There is very little pure research.
Investments in new technologies in Italy is very little. Rarely happens that a company spends money on the learning for its employees.
A demonstration of this is the number of Italian companies participating in research activities such as the W3C. The W3C counts 3-4 entities from Italy, one is the CNR and another is Telecom Italia Lab.
Where are all the other companies?This is what makes me think that open-source can hardly find investments in Italy. Research and open-source today go side-by-side, in my opinion. A lot of research is done in open-source and a lot of innovation came from the open-source, look at PHP or JBoss.
Companies in countries like England, Ireland and France are spending much more money and time in research and development and this will bring them to even more advantage in the future.I think that the post from Fabrizio Capobianco describes some of these ideas too, in the “The Funambol model: US capital and Italian heart ” paragraph from BAIA invited post on the Funambol model. He is Italian, all the development is done in Pavia, but they had to go to the Silicon Valley to find some money to start working.
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Roberto Galoppini
It’s worth to notice that Italian VCs tend to invest only on sure bets. After all Italian Banks get money because medium to large companies pay 120 days after, so companies have to borrow money from them, an easy game to play.
Then you’re right, Italian companies do not participate to standardization bodies, and I believe there are a number of reasons, ranging from cultural aspects to linguistic ones.
About R&D expenditures I know that in other countries there are fiscal deductions for firms who invest in R$D.
This might help, I guess.My personal experience in Italy says that if you have a good project you might help from public institutions, like the Financial Investment Agency of the Regione Lazio (FILAS), who helped me to create a network between a roman university and my company.
I’m looking forward to interview Fabrizio Capobianco,stay tuned!
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Andrea Trasatti
I don’t live in Lazio so I don’t know them. According to the site they are focused on the Lazio-region only.
I have very little experience with public funding, but of course I know that in some cases they deliver high funds if we compare it to the economics of small companies and start-ups.
From your posts it seems like you have had a positive experience. I don’t have any, actually. What would you advise?
What did you get funding for?
What was the outcome?
How did you report on the results? Were the funds “a fondo perso” or was it a loan with a tiny rate?
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Roberto Galoppini
I believe almost every Italian region guest public institutions similar to FILAS, you better check it out through your local business innovation center. – there are 160 BICs in 21 countries sharing the goal of supporting SMEs development –
My experience: it took me six months to get the project – create a commercial open source product starting from a toolkit made by academic researchers – approved and funded.
I personally interviewed applicants along with FILAS and the professor involved with the project, and and I got three researchers paid for one year.
Besides that they sponsored a marketing research, and at the end of the day we did a very good deal spending some efforts to work on the business model in order to get it approved.If you have a business idea, give it a try!
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Roberto Galoppini and 
Andreas Mueller are discussing. 
Roberto Galoppini
Licensing: MySQL decided to stay with GPLv2
MySQL on the 22th of December refined its licensing scheme from GPLv2 or later to GPLv2 only.
In 2000 when MySQL AB licensed its software under the GPL, the choice was made because
the GPL was a license followed and respected by everyone. We have kept to it, because the GPL is the most palatable license, and poses the least friction for our user base.
..MySQL has been part of the GPLv3 Committee B advising FSF since the GPLv3 draft was announced in January 2006. For GPLv3, we have seen fantastic improvements and hope for GPLv3 to spread. Even though my activity level as co-chair for Committee B was by far higher in the spring than what it has been in the past few months,
Despite MySQL AB will keep working with the FSF for GPLv3, as they did from January 2006, they decided that
until we get clear and strong indications for the general acceptance of GPLv3 over GPLv2, we feel comfortable with a specific GPLv2 reference in our license.
Has FSF a problem to obtain broad acceptance of GPLv3?
Roberto Galoppini
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.
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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.
Mirco are discussing. -
Mirco
I’ve worked on Thesaurus please let it be uasble. Thanks a lot.
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Simon Phipps
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
Creative Commons: Lessig succeeded by Ito
Lessig, founding chairman of Creative Commons, after four years retired as chairman of the board, remaining as CEO.
Lessig talking about his successor, Joy Ito, called him the perfect next chairman, said:
The key to our success now, is to fit this project within an overall economy of creativity. We want to support and protect the sharing economy; we also want to build tools that would help support crossovers into the commercial economy. That will take the sensibility and insight that Joi has demonstrated in his whole career.
Creative Commons 4th aniversary was celebrated in Second Life, while Lessig was in Portugal and Ito in in Japan.
Ito made clear he is succeeding Lessing, not replacing him. Than he said:
Many people now use Creative Commons because it makes business sense. The corporate world needs to hear this in a language they understand. I speak their language.
I like it, and I’m sure he will positively contribute to Creative Commons success.
Roberto Galoppini
European Patent Conference invitation (wed 24 January, Brussels)
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a non-profit organisation dedicated to establishing a free market in information technology, invites you to European Patent Conference, on Wed 24th of January, 2007, in Brussels.
EUPACO-1 is the second in a series of events aimed at constructing a new European patent system through dialogue and collaboration based on research and data.
The topics that this event will cover are wide, including:
- the Community Patent proposal;
. - the European Patent Litigation Agreement proposals;
. - the future of the patent system;
. - new patent examination models;
. - patent litigation insurance.
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Speakers include:
- Dr Johanna Gibson, Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute;
. - Greg Perry, Director General, European Generics Medicines Association;
. - Pieter Hintjens, President, FFII;
. - Tommy Schweiger, Greenpeace;
. - Roger Burt, IBM IP Law Counsel for Europe;
. - Amedee Turner, CJA Consultants.
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Entrance is free. Breakfast and lunch will be served to registered participants. Wifi will be provided during the day.
Please register on line. Places are limited and early registration is highly recommended.
For further information please contact Benjamin Henrion bhenrion (at) ffii.org FFII Brussels – +32-484-566109 – +32-2-4148403
Roberto Galoppini
What Venture Capitalists want
Sustainable competitive advantage, that’s what Warren Buffett, one of the most famous investors in the world, said he looks for in a company. So to determine if you do know your competitive advantage Erica Olsen suggests to answer the following questions in less than 30 seconds, succinctly with clarity.
What is your company goot at?
But a list of strenghts it’s not your competitive advantage, you need to clarify which is your unique advantage. Read the full story, and if you’re really thinking to start a new company have a look at David Spitz presentation, it’s worth a click.
But.. what about the amount of VC funding invested this year in the Linux and open source-related vendors? A rough extimation says open source funding was up 131% to $404.5m in 2006, and you better take notice.
Roberto Galoppini
The Webnaut, “person” of the year
Over the weekend I was reading some news, and I sorted out that Time Magazine have chosen the person of the year, someone who “for better or worse” the editor believes had the greatest impact on the year’s events.
In 1982 spotlights were on the Computer, the first non-human abstract to be chosen.
The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
But they’re not lonely thinking like that, Gartner says blogging will reach his peak in 2007.
Whatever will happen, I believe Time is right saying that:
Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas.
Roberto Galoppini
Licensing: a GPL Quiz
Today by the Free Software Foundation Europe blog I have read a post reporting a link to test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL. I found another website reporting the same quiz, along with the author’s name and a link to the free software used to create the quiz, more interesting than the source code reported by the GNU page.
I hope you enjoy the quiz!
Andreas Mueller 1:55 pm on February 17, 2007 Permalink
You really think that Solaris will be more popular than Linux?
Well I don’t think so… and I don’t think that Unixfans should start an opinion war between them.
I’m fascinated of all Unix systems or Unix hybrids, including Linux.
I use Linux at home and I just wanted to install opensolaris. Well, after this… I think I will try it for a little time, but nothing more. Why should I leave a product intalled on my system, when the manufacturer of it sees himself as an enemy rather than a friend?
Greets,
Andreas Mueller alias Andy Miles
Roberto Galoppini 4:52 pm on February 17, 2007 Permalink
Honestly I doubt that is going to happen any soon.
I think OpenSolaris might really take over in the long run, it strictly depends on how Sun will eventually adopt a symbiotic approach.
We don’t know yet, but we shall soon see..