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  • Roberto Galoppini 5:12 pm on April 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, , Octopus   

    Open Source EU Funded Projects: FLOSSMetrics 

    Looking into EU funded open source initiatives I stepped into few projects, included EDOS,  QualOSS and few others around FLOSS metrics and quality. Over the last 7 years a number of open source software assessment methodologies have been proposed, and FLOSSMetrics definitely achieved some interesting results in this respect, and not only.

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    • Jesus M. González Barahona 10:18 pm on April 16, 2010 Permalink

      Thanks a lot for the review, Roberto. The project is now over, but we plan to improve the platform (Melquiades) and the tools. Well, in fact, we’re already at it.

      Any comments and suggestions are welcome!

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:22 pm on April 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alithelia, open source software quality,   

    Open Source EU Funded Projects: SQO-OSS 

    Among open source related projects funded under the sixth Framework Program, at least four of them – namely FLOSSMetrics, QualiPSo, QUALOSS and SQO-OSS – have been found overlapping around open source software development and quality.

    SQO-OSS – Source Quality Observatory for Open Source Software – similarly to FLOSSMetrics was aimed at massive collection of data from thousands of projects, though with different goals.

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  • Roberto Galoppini 12:23 pm on August 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: DG Information Society, European Information Society, , GForge, , MichelLacroix, open source research, , , Unysis   

    European Open Source Haystacks 

    The EU now provides a search tool to find applications among the 1751 open source development projects hosted on ten federated forges managed by Austrian, French, Italian and Spanish public administrations.

    The new search engine basically relies on an automatic translation service, translating projects’ descriptions in English.

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    • Jesus M. González Barahona 6:20 pm on August 31, 2009 Permalink

      Well, I’m not that sure about your proposal of looking for *code*. In the case of OSOR, the idea seems to be to link with other sites devoted to libre software for public administrations. Working at the package (or poroject) level, seems to me about right. When you’re looking for some piece of code, the domain of the program probably doesn’t matter that much…

      In other words, if you’re looking for some package which may be useful for public administrations, looking at OSOR and federated forges seems reasonable. But if you are looking for a specific piece of code (even if it is for a software to be used in PA), the search should be much wider: probably almost any forge could have the piece you want).

      WRT FLOSSMetrics, indeed we’re focused on GForge-like forges (including SourceForge), but we can extract data from any public repository in any forge, provided we have its url, and the kind of repository is supported by our tools. Currently that amounts to CVS, Subversion, git and (limited) Bazaar for SCM, Bugzilla and SourceForge for bug reporting systems, and mbox for mailing lists repositories. More are supposed to come.

      Yes, I fully agree that the services provided by FLOSSMetrics could be integrated with OSOR, or with any other forge, for that matter. SourceForge is starting that way (not with FLOSSMetrics, but with their own machinery), and OSOR also started it, offering graphs about the evolution of some parameters related to the activity of the projects (in this case, using a part of the FLOSSMetrics toolchain).

      Just to finish, thanks a lot for reporting on FLOSSMetrics, and for taking the time to understand it!

      [Disclamer: I’m coordinator of the FLOSSMetrics project, and also involved in the OSOR as a member of the consortium maintaining it]

    • Roberto Galoppini 7:04 pm on August 31, 2009 Permalink

      Hi Jesus,

      glad to see you joining the conversation.

      As I wrote in my blog post most of the times open source projects for public administrations are lead by SMEs thinking and acting locally. Translating projects’ descriptions can hardly help the share and reuse of knowledge in the context of IT, I am afraid.

      Krugle code search engine or similar technology might help to search pieces of code that perform more specific tasks, and eventually reuse code made available from other EU public administrations under the EUPL (apparently designed to ease the licensing burden).

      Taking advantage only of code hosted on federated forges may result in a lack of opportunity anyway, either if you look for a whole package or a library. In other words, I am assuming that we need of OSOR here, and the EUPL license may well be the reason for that.

      I wish to report more about FLOSSMetrics, let’s keep in touch for writing a specific blog post on project’s final findings.

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:26 pm on July 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , GridCoord, PaulAdams, , sirius, , zea partners   

    About Open Source EU Funded Projects Overlapping 

    As mentioned before, sometimes EU funded projects overlap. Asking around about European open source initiatives, I happened to get in touch with Paul Adams. Apparently Paul is the only person who has worked on each of the three projects to whom the EC asked to collaborate, and I asked him more about such cooperation.

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  • Carlo Daffara 2:36 pm on February 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    A survey of European OSS research projects 

    The EU has for a long time supported research on open source software, first with the creation of the European Working Group on Libre Software, by sponsoring studies and research and through various EU branches, like IDABC (the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens). Among the most interesting activities:
    IDABC OSS observatory: a long term activity, that provides news and information on OSS with a focus on Public Administrations. It provides news, a software repository, a taxonomy of software applications, a list of OSS competence centers, and several resources and papers related to legal and adoption processes for Public Administrations.
    The IST research area of the Commission has a long history of research in OSS, including past projects like SPIRIT (open source healthcare) or the FLOSS study (one of the first longitudinal study of OSS participation and development). More recently, projects like COSPA researched the real costs of migration of public administrations to OSS, and provided the data for later research like the EU study “Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU” that had a significant impact. Other significant projects were CALIBRE (open source in industrial applications) and EDOS (Environment for the development and Distribution of Open Source software).
    Several new projects focusing on OSS software quality were funded, like SQO-OSS, FLOSSMETRICS and QUALOSS, collectively grouped on a coordinated initiative called FLOSSQUALITY. While in the beginning the Commission was more interested in “stimulating” OSS production in under-represented areas (especially those that are more relevant for EU at large, like embedded systems, security, development tools like TOPCASED) now most research is devoted to other areas like economic impact and business models, along with the many projects that are using OSS licenses to disseminate the results to a wider population.
    This is just a small outline of the most recent activities, and I will provide a small summary of the results of individual projects in future posts.

     
    • Egor Grebnev 4:30 pm on February 8, 2008 Permalink

      Carlo,
      Thanks for a helpful overview. It makes a nice entry point to the European FLOSS activities.
      I am however still lacking a more critical review of what has been done. It seems that nobody has written such a review in Europe simply because all the experts are already involved and they cannot remain unbiased. Outside of Europe there are not many people who can properly understand nor evaluate what has been done since the matter has been researched in the EU deeper and more thoroughly than anywhere.

    • Carlo Daffara 9:47 am on February 9, 2008 Permalink

      It is true that it is difficult to be impartial with the project you worked in… but I can talk about those I was not involved in, and maybe Roberto can write about the others? I will prepare a post with links to most of the projects I know of, and we can start from there.

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:26 am on February 9, 2008 Permalink

      Egor,

      I will definitely start writing also about those EC=funded projects. Considering that I have never been involved with any of them I believe I could be considered an unbiased source.

      Carlo I have been writing about COSPA few times, what-s next?

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:08 pm on January 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , DougLevin, FLOSSBazaar, FLOSSology, , , , StevenGrandchamp,   

    Open Source Tools: HP launches FOSSology and FOSSBazaar 

    HP just announced the availability of FOSSology, an open source tool that can be used to track and monitor the use of Open Source software within an organization. The main functionality made available at the moment is license detection, more features will be added in the next future.

    At the Linux Meets Business conference held yesterday in Germany Christine Martino – Vice President Open Source and Linux Organization at HP – introduced also FOSSBazaar, a community platform to discuss best practices related to the governance of FOSS.

    I had the chance to learn more about HP open source plans just last week, when Martin Mychlmayr invited me to talk with him, Phil Robb – Engineering Section Manager in the Open Source and Linux Organization at HP - and Bernard Marclay, FOSS Marketing Manager at HP.

    HP wants to demonstrate its experience with FOSS Governance obtained in over 7 years for internal purposes, and it will be offering services related to FOSS Governance at large (e.g. defining open source policies, supporting the adoption process with its consulting division, etc).

    As a matter of fact they are partnering with many actors. Doug Levin – Black Duck software CEO – made some public statements welcoming FOSSology’s introduction. Steven Grandchamp - OpenLogic CEO – asked to comment the announcement told me:

    As a Strategic Sponsor of FOSSBazaar, OpenLogic is working with others to provide information and tools that help enterprises understand the issues around open source governance.  Sharing our open source expertise, along with tools like OpenLogic’s OSS Discovery (which produces an inventory of open source being used) and HP’s FOSSology (which uncovers licenses in open source), will help enterprises leverage the significant financial benefits of open source software.

    Also Stormy Peters is blogging on the matter, and others will come. While having dinner with HP people honestly I couldn’t come out with a firm’s name that they didn’t contact yet. We also spoke about the business side of the initiative, I will soon write on the matter.

    The man behind the FOSSBazar community. 

    Martin, a known Debian developer and fellow researcher, is the man behind the FOSSBazar community. He is the FOSSBazaar Community Manager, and he will be working with partners to define content, help members to conduct valuable and interesting discussions and debates, and he will be joining conferences all over the world to promote the FOSSBazaar community.

    I wish him all the best of luck!

    About Martin Michlmayr. 
    Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source software projects for well over 10 years. He acted as the leader of the Debian project for two years. In this role, he performed important organizational and coordination tasks within Debian. Martin works for HP as an Open Source Community Expert and acts as the community manager of FOSSBazaar. Martin holds Master degrees in Philosophy, Psychology and Software Engineering, and earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

     
    • Egor Grebnev 1:46 pm on January 28, 2008 Permalink

      You are doing a great job telling about the people who stand behind the projects, and not just the project themselves. Such information makes a very valuable supplement to the official websites and news articles as it makes everything much more ‘realistic’ and understandable.

      Having received your kind permission to translate some of your postings into Russian for INFO-FOSS.ru, we will be republishing this one in the international expert opinion section that we’re about to set up.

      I have a more general request, though. As you know, I am currently a member of two teams: ALT Linux, which is the largest Free Software development company in Russia and INFO-FOSS.ru, which is an information project on Free Software and Open Standards targeted primarily at government public.

      Both organisations are in need of cooperation with the international research community. As a member of ALT Linux, I would be happy to collaborate and share our experience on Free Software acquisition management in government contracts that we have gained in a series of research projects for the Ministry of Economy. As a member of INFO-FOSS.ru, I am interested in making the project part of the international research community and consequently move from borrowing information mostly from European publications to being involved in its production. There has been a number of FOSS-related developments in Russia recently, and I believe that such cooperation could become mutually beneficial.

      I will highly appreciate any help from you side as even partial implementation of these wishes will be a major step forward!

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:19 pm on January 28, 2008 Permalink

      Egor,

      I am glad and honored to be published on INFO-FOSS.ru, please link to the original for comments and suggestions.

      You might share your ALT Linux experiences with open source acquisition by public administrations with an international audience. If you wish so my blog is always open to your contributions, and you might get the attention of potential EC partners and eventually get info-foss.ru involved with FP7 and beyond.

    • Carlo Daffara 12:24 pm on January 29, 2008 Permalink

      Dear Egor,
      I share with Roberto the wish to help in strengthening the ties between Russia and Europe on FOSS technologies and approaches. I would be happy to help in bridging the work done in the past (in the COSPA, SPIRIT, OpenTTT and FLOSSMETRICS projects) if it may be helpful, and learning from you and your experiences.
      I am working on the new revision of our EU guide to OSS, and any addition and resource will be welcome.

    • Egor Grebnev 2:16 pm on January 29, 2008 Permalink

      Dear Carlo,

      Thanks for your message! Yes, sharing your experience on these projects will be very helpful. There is not a little information gathered already, and I often feel myself in need of someone to guide me through.

      I believe that it is the appropriate moment to make a summary of our achievements in an English presentation. Meanwhile, I will try to contact you via email.

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:28 pm on December 6, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Marketplace: SourceForge Marketplace goes live! 

    SourceForge last March announced a new feature to buy or sell services for Commercial Open Source on SourceForge, eventually launched in early summer in beta. Right now SourceForge released its SourceForge Marketplace, and 512 Service Providers and 251 Projects are available.
    Openbravo ERP is probably the most famous among the supported projects, nonetheless we should probably pay more attention to the (very) long tail. If we look at the estimation of the real number of active FLOSS projects done within FLOSSMETRICS, there are 18000 stable and mature projects out there.
    The SourceForge Marketplace could help to monetize open-source projects, but can also foster communities and, even more interesting, super-communities.

    Could products like SuiteTwo come to life within the SourceForge community?

    European countries like Germany, Italy, Spain, France and UK sum up about 30% of the SourceForge’s 25 million unique visitors. Here there is clearly space to positively contribute to the European open source adoption.

    Full Disclosure: I am on SourceForge.net Marketplace advisory board.

    Technorati Tags: oss, open business, open source marketplace, sourceforge

     
  • Carlo Daffara 10:41 am on November 28, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Guide: Guide for SMEs published 

    It has been a long, long, long road, but after the evaluation by the Commission, I am happy to announce that we have finally published our guide for small and medium enterprises, designed to help the adoption process of open source and free software.

    We have striven to be pragmatic (no vendor-paid research, for example) and practical; two more editions will follow, every 6 months, to allow for updates and new material.

    DirectionsOpen Source Directions by geraldinha_1/

    The guide (developed in the context of the FLOSSMETRICS and OpenTTT projects) present a set of guidelines and suggestions for the adoption of open source software within SMEs, using a ladder model that will guide companies from the initial selection and adoption of FLOSS within the IT infrastructure up to the creation of suitable business models based on open source software.

    The guide is split into an 80 pages introduction to FLOSS and a catalog of 165 applications, selected to fulfill the requests that were gathered in the interviews and audit in the OpenTTT project. The application areas are infrastructural software (ranging from network and system management to security), ERP and CRM applications, groupware, document management, content management systems (CMS), VoIP, graphics/CAD/GIS systems, desktop applications, engineering and manufacturing, vertical business applications and eLearning.

    The guide is available at the guide web page ; the two pdfs are 2Mb (“FLOSS Guide“) and 20 Mbytes (“FLOSS Catalog“), so take it into account if you are connected by narrowband or cell phone.

    I welcome any suggestion, addition or criticism; I hope that this can become the beginning of a collaborating community centered on helping the use and adoption of OSS in companies. I thank Roberto for the many suggestions and for the use of his blog as a media for future updates and interactions with any welcome contributor. To facilitate conversation on the topic touched by the guide, and in particular those related to open source business model, we are preparing a mailing-list that will be announced soon.

    Technorati Tags: FLOSSMETRICS, OpenTTT, Software Selection, Open Source Adoption, Open Source Strategy

     
    • Paolo Corti 12:14 pm on November 28, 2007 Permalink

      Carlo and Roberto
      this is an invaluable exceptional work!
      thank you very much for it, I am looking forward to have some spare time these nights to read both docs, and maybe give you some feedback based on my experience.

    • Carlo Daffara 4:55 pm on November 28, 2007 Permalink

      Dear Paolo,
      many thanks for your kind words. Our hope is to be useful to as many companies as possible, and any feedback (and of course any criticism) is welcome.

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:38 pm on November 9, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Commercial Open Source Blog: one year in review 

    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 reviewA 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:

    1. you can get to know lots of like-minded people who share your interests, passions and sometimes business customers and reach out to them in ways that would be next to impossible in the physical world:
      .

    2. among my key referrals opensource.org and openoffice.it/org have played a significant role in sending me huge number of visitors, that made me realize how important is to keep contributing whenever possible to such large and important communities;
      .
    3. Robin Good was totally right suggesting me to pay great attention to choose the tag-line. Googling for Commercial Open Source my blog is always one of the very first results. In reason of that PR agencies and CEOs from all around the world touch base with me daily to open more and more conversations.
      .
    4. I learned to stay focused and to not get distracted by off topic arguments, as soon as I did I was rightly “ripreso” for that.

    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!

    Technorati Tags: open source blog, professional blogging, SavioRodrigues, DanaBlankenhorn, MatthewAslett, RossTurk, SourceForge Marketplace, JamesMcGovern, RedMonk

     
    • Stefano Canepa 3:50 pm on November 9, 2007 Permalink

      Thanks very much. I read and read again you post. Your blog is one of the more interesting in my blogroll.

    • Antonella Beccaria 9:50 pm on November 9, 2007 Permalink

      Great work in this year, Roberto. Good luck for your future.

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:30 am on November 12, 2007 Permalink

      Thank you Stefano for your kind comments!

      Antonella you helped me a lot, thank you!

    • Paolo Corti 10:16 am on November 13, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto, congratulations! 😉

    • Savio Rodrigues 5:54 am on November 16, 2007 Permalink

      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

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:40 am on November 16, 2007 Permalink

      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.

    • Idetrorce 1:35 pm on December 15, 2007 Permalink

      very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
      Idetrorce

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:28 am on September 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source myths: Carlo Daffara asks your input on Groklaw 

    Carlo Daffara wrote an article, that is part of the project FLOSSMETRICS, answering the Tim O’Reilly‘s “Ten Myths about Open Source Software“, a keynote speech given in 1999 to an audience of Fortune 500 executives.
    Since those myths are still perceived as true at some extent, Carlo tried to provide some pragmatic answers and asks for your opinions on Groklaw, so far 318 comments are already listed!

    May I request your input? This article is part of our research in the EU project FLOSSMETRICS, where we are preparing a guide for helping small and medium-sized enterprises on the adoption of free/libre/open source software (FLOSS). As the first version of the guide will be ready soon, I would ask my fellow Groklawers for suggestions on what additional aspects you would like to see in the guide, as the results will be freely published under a CC-attribution-share-alike, allowing also for commercial use. We already have planned chapters on software selection, adoption methodologies (especially for the smaller companies), guidelines for contributing code to FLOSS projects, interaction with public administrations, and an initial selection of 50-60 interesting packages for SMEs. I welcome suggestions on additional topics, and of course criticisms and corrections.

    Technorati Tags: groklaw, open source myths, carlodaffara, flossmetrics

     
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