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  • Roberto Galoppini 11:03 am on April 28, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Free Software Foundation Europe advocacy: International conference for Public Administrations 

    The European Training Centre for Social Affairs and Public Health in collaboration with Free Software Foundation Europe is organizing in Milan on 21-22 June 2007 an International Conference entitled “Free/Libre Open Source Software: A Valuable Opportunity for Public Administrations“.

    FSFE fellowshipFSFE Fellowship initiative by Stefano Mainardi

    Project leader of the conference is Giampaolo Amadori, formerly European Manager of Large Accounts and Application Server Providers at IBM.

    The Conference is designed for Civil servants, Senior Civil Servants (Directors & Unit Heads), lawyers and politicians in EU Member States and countries surrounding the EU who are involved in the procurement of IT solutions and in strategic decisions about innovation and eGovernment, and who provide legal advice on copyright and patents. Also the IT responsibles/Specialists providing strategic and technical advice to the Public Administrations could be extremely keen of attending.

    The participation fee is 490 €. The number of participants is limited. You can also register online.

    Technorati Tags: Free Software Foundation Europe, Public Administration

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:21 pm on April 27, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Business Development: Adobe going open source 

    Adobe Systems yesterday announced that is going to release the Flex SDK under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The beta version of the next Flex release is scheduled for June, while the full release of open-source Flex will be available at the end of 2007.

    Go!Go, go, go! by S.Affandi

    This announcement expands on Adobe’s commitment to open technology initiatives, including the contribution of source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation under the Tamarin project, the use of the open source WebKit engine in the “Apollo” project, and the release of the full PDF 1.7 specification for ISO standardization.

    James Governor sounds enthusiast, as reported by Linux insider:

    The fact that it has open sourced its future rather than its past is very key.

    Lately Governor made it even more clear in his post talking about his customer’s vision:

    [..] I think the Flex SDK OSS decision says something interesting about the status of the industry in 2007. Why do we open source? To save money? No- to attract developers.

    We already saw Google doing similar things, and Adobe might really end up allowing external committers, exploring the hybrid production model at its best.

    Let’s see how people at RedMonk will drive them open!(and a memo for myself: add Mark Anders’s blog to your blog-roll)

    Technorati Tags: Adobe, Flex, RedMonk, Governor

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:40 pm on April 27, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Software Patent: US patent reform, some opinions 

    Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Patent Reform Act of 2007 and despite the contention the Congress eventually pushed the legislation through. I collected some opinions and comments from people interested in the matter.

    ChangesChanges.. by zephir_350d

    Rashmi Rangnath at the Public Knowledge, wrote in her blog:

    The Patent Reform Bill of 2007 would change the way damages due to a patent owner are calculated and require that they bear some relation to the value of the patent infringed. Under current law courts do not distinguish between the value of the patented technology and the larger goods containing it.

    She also a Christopher Rugaber’s article giving a clear example of, citing Alcatel-Lucent SA vs Microsoft case ($1.52 billion paid by Microsoft to Alcatel-Lucent SA for including infringing MP3 technology in its software).

    Last but not least she wrote a very good summary of the new Patent Reform Act of 2007.

    Anthony Peterman, patent counsel for Dell Inc. said:

    Plaintiffs are exploiting litigation rules and seeking artificially high damages, it’s litigation as a business. This patent reform legislation is needed, and needed now, to help sustain America’s growth and vitality. The problem hurts American competitiveness and the U.S. economy.

    Dennis Crouch at PatentlyO wrote an insightful post, that I suggest you to read (there is also a part 1 of it).

    Steven Landsburg explains why in his opinion the Kremer proposal does something to alleviate some problems of the patent system. Mark Webbink, general counsel for open source software vendor Red Hat, is told to have expressed hope that the effort would prove effective in changing patent rules, while Richard Fontana, counsel with the Software Freedom Law Center told vnunet.com that:

    We are sceptical about whether this [reform] represents any substantial change. To our clients, the open source developers, this reform does not really go to the root of the problem. It is still too easy to get a patent on software out of the US Patent Office that is too broad.

    Technorati Tags: software patent, dell, red hat

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:27 am on April 26, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    File Format War: more on China’s position on open standards 

    William New at the Intellectual Property Watch wrote an article entitled “Open Source, Standards Get a boost In China” reporting that China, among others, says that sometimes companies owning (hidden) patents when their standards get momentum they start charging high prices for licenses. The issue was discussed, as mentioned earlier, at a 17-18 April event in Beijing, below some excerpts of the original post.

    The name of the conference was said by organisers to change overnight to “WTO: IPRs Issues in Standardization,” similar to the title of a 2005 paper China submitted at the WTO to push for changes to the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade.[..]

    Speaking at the event, Hu Caiyong, CEO of Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Technology, an open-source software company, said international standards have not been fair to China and should be ignored, at least for now. “There’s no level playground,” he said. Countries present in international organisations like the World Trade Organization are there “to profit their own interests.”

    “To establish an intellectual property protection system conforming to Chinese characteristics, protecting independent innovation: Avoid resorting to international usual practice blindly,” one of his slides read. He said Microsoft uses a less-precise western-based system.

    Hu’s company’s Linux-based open source software, RedOffice, has been adopted by more than 200 local governments in China. “We are now in a position to compete with Microsoft,” he said, adding that his company has received regular legal threats from foreign technology and telecommunications firms. But he said he has support from the Chinese government as open-source software is essential for China’s development of competing and independent tools. (More …)

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:06 pm on April 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Billionaries: are there any out of there? 

    Hugh MacLeod wrote a post entitled “how well does open source currently meet the needs of shareholders and ceo’s” wondering why there are no open source billionaires around, considering how good is open source.

    Many others joined the conversation, I would reccomend reading Seth Godin, JP Rangaswami and Rick Segal.

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, seth godin, gapinvoid, rangaswami, billionaries

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:39 am on April 24, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Software Patent: the truth unveiled, Simon Phipps’s and Florian Mueller’s opinions 

    Talking about open source having a need for lobbyists I mentioned the David vs Patent Goliath fight, a ground where previously unknown lobbyists – people coming from the Economic Majority of European SMEs against software patents or no profit organizations like FFII – made their name.

    TruthTruth or Consequences by kxlly

    Simon Phipps joined the conversation, saying:

    Something this overlooks – and that was present in the CII Directive debate – is that as more and more companies depend on open source as the bedrock of their business, they will direct their lobbyists to act on behalf of the open source communities.

    I spent a great deal of time in support of lobbyists (as did my colleague Mark Webbink from Red Hat) patiently explaining to politicians and their staffs the problems with software patents as envisaged by Microsoft and the other pro-lobby members. In fact, I might even want to claim that our little informal alliance – Sun, Red Hat, Oracle, IBM and one other that prefers to remain anonymous – actually swung the interoperability argument that killed the Directive.

    This is not to say we don’t need lobbyists acting on behalf of FOSS projects directly. But don’t forget that corporations that grok FOSS lend can their weight to the cause.

    I took the chance to privately ask Florian Mueller – “No lobbyists as such” author and founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign – his opinion, that I fully quote.

    Anyway, interoperability was a secondary theater of war for us. The simplest way to explain it is that if you have no software patents, you don’t need an interoperability privilege. There was an email exchange in the week before the final vote between a lawyer working for some or all of the companies Simon refers to, the FFII’s then-president Hartmut Pilch, and myself. Both Hartmut and I pointed out that we looked at interoperability as a minor bargaining chip, far from a priority subject.

    It is true, however, that some interoperability proposals that were proposed back then as amendments caused a certain degree of discord within the pro-swpat camp, especially between IBM and Microsoft.

    I have previously explained and documented in my blog certain facts about Red Hat’s role.

    In a situation of political instability (back in those days, the Parliament was a “zoo” with dozens of lobbyists from both camps running around, numerous citizens emailing, faxing and phoning MEPs, etc.), anything can contribute to people’s nervousness, including some discord over a secondary issue like interoperability. But the important thing was to have that zoo, that overall instability, a large part of which was due to the political situation that had arisen from the FFII’s and my fight against the Council’s common position, including the restart initiative in the EP.
    The important second-reading amendments were the 21 amendments filed by various political groups and lists of MEPs at the FFII’s initiative, and certainly not the one proposed by the companies Simon refers to and which proposal was in fact not liked by the FFII and myself at all. Claiming that a small-scale interoperability initiative made all the difference for getting the proposed directive killed is like eating a peanut after a five-course meal and believing that it was that peanut which took your hunger away because after eating the peanut you no longer felt hungry.

    I never claimed all of the credit for myself and shared it with the FFII in a variety of public declarations. However, I would prefer for companies with an obvious, vested interest in currying favor with the community to take reasonable positions as well.

    I guess my most recent success in a policy area unrelated to patents (i.e., football broadcasting rights) gives me more credibility than I could gain from further debates on who made what contribution to the rejection of the swpat directive.

    Technorati Tags: software patent, simon phipps, FFII, florian mueller

     

    • Simon Phipps 12:53 pm on April 24, 2007 Permalink

      It’s exactly the fact that Florian thought interoperability irrelevant that made it important for others to champion it! His was an all-or-nothing strategy, and in the end it was that “peanut” that saved the day according to my independent sources. I know Florian disagreed and it seems we still differ. Oh well. At least CIID was defeated (or postponed)

      I’m afraid I find his response disappointing though, there was more than him and FFII in the fight. And my point (that corporations truly working with FOSS can be expected to defend it) stands, even if Florian want’s to try to dismiss it.

    • Roberto Galoppini 3:29 pm on April 24, 2007 Permalink

      Dear Simon,

      I might not refer to interoperability as irrelevant, neither I think Florian does, as results from his own words:

      It is true, however, that some interoperability proposals that were proposed back then as amendments caused a certain degree of discord within the pro-swpat camp, especially between IBM and Microsoft.

      Being an involved activist from the very beginning I can’t share your idea that, in your own words

      the interoperability argument killed the directive.

      By the way, considering that IBM, Sun, Oracle and other important players are still working on interoperability and open standards issues, I would be glad you all to take into consideration the hidden traps in Open Document (or any other open standard).

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:16 pm on April 23, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source GIS: Autodesk’s MapGuide gains “seal of approval” 

    MapGuide, a web-based platform aimed at deploying web mapping applications and geospatial web services, now is a fully endorsed project within the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, as reported by PRNewswire. MapGuide, originally developed by Autodesk, has been released to the open source community about one year ago, and is already considered a leading project within the GIS arena, as results from the “The State of the Open Source GIS” (PDF).

    Save the forestSave the forest by photokitten

    As a more recent project, MapGuide has a more modern architecture than the original MapServer. It also includes some default web interface components as well, so it is possible to create an out-of-the-box web mapping site with MapGuide more easily than with Mapserver. Mapserver has its own advantages, in terms of simplicity and number of supported formats, so examining both carefully before making a decision is a good idea. Because the originating organization is Autodesk, some users might be concerned that MapGuide OS is not “real” open source. However, it certainly is “real”, judging from a number of facts.

    First, the license used is not some customized corporate license, but the familiar LGPL, used by many other open source projects.

    Second [..] the code base includes dependencies on other open source library projects, such as Proj4 and GEOS – enlightened re-use is a sign of a good open source methodology.

    Finally, Autodesk has opened up the development process, using a public source code repository for active development, having a public mailing list for users and developers to directly interact, and transferring all intellectual property rights for the code to a neutral organization (the Open Source Geospatial Foundation)

    About the MapGuide’s “open source nature” I noticed that the definition of the Project Steering Committee, the governing body of the project, has been derived from the guidelines of other committees with the Open Source GIS arena – like the MapServer Technical Steering Committee, the GeoServer PSC, and the MapBuilder PSC.

    Participation to the MapGuide’s project is extraordinary, as reported by Ohloh that considers MapGuide one of the largest open-source teams in the world, reporting that over the last year 26 developers contributed new code.

    The San Francisco Urban Forest Mapping System was developed using MapGuide Open Source as the central element, read the related press release.

    About MapGuide.

    MapGuide Open Source is a web-based platform that enables users to quickly develop and deploy web mapping applications and geospatial web services.

    MapGuide features an interactive viewer that includes support for feature selection, property inspection, map tips, and operations such as buffer, select within, and measure.

    MapGuide includes an XML database for managing content, and supports most popular geospatial file formats, databases, and standards.

    MapGuide can be deployed on Linux or Windows, supports Apache and IIS web servers, and offers extensive PHP, .NET, Java, and JavaScript APIs for application development. MapGuide Open Source is licensed under the LGPL.

    About MapGuide Open Source.

    Despite sharing a name with the previous closed source MapGuide product from Autodesk, MapGuide Open Source (OS) is in fact a completely new product, with a new code base and a new licensing philosophy. Autodesk will sell the new MapGuide as commercial product, with some bonus features (extra format support, formal product support, better backward compatibility) but the main development of the MapGuide OS product is now done as open source.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source GIS, Commercial Open Source, MapGuide, Ohloh

     

    • Savio Rodrigues 3:55 pm on April 26, 2007 Permalink

      Very cool – I haven’t used a GIS program since my thesis project in university and didn’t even know Autodesk was in the market (but it makes a lot of sense).

      Interesting that Autodesk, with is huge revenue from AutoCAD is strategically endorsing OSS.

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:38 am on April 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Advocacy: from hecklers to lobbyists 

    Dana Blankenhorn says “open source need lobbyists” (actually he didn’t mention free software hecklers). He observes that we need money to hire them because otherwise the law will always be in favor of the proprietary folks.

    In Europe we faced (and we keep facing) very talented lobbyists working hard on a controversial political issue regarding software patents. As you might know patentability of computer-implemented inventions is not legal here yet, the reason for this is simple resumed by Florian Mueller in his “no lobbyist as such” (a must read):

    After spending million of dollars,euros and pounds, company like IBM, Microsoft, Siemens and Nokia did not get their way. They were beaten over at their own game – a game called lobbying – by our group of mostly young people, sparsely funded, and formally untrained “freedom fighters” who staged a spirited resistance. Many of us seemed utterly unlike traditional lobbyists and yet we proved effective in the political arena.

    Florian MuellerFlorian Mueller by duncandavidson

    James McGovern answered back saying that Dana, and not only him, is part of the problem:

    Maybe what he is asking for is to get some other body to spend lots of advertising dollars while not acknowledging that open source doesn’t really need traditional media to be successful.

    Throughout his column he always talks about open source but never seems to segment thoughts on commercial open source such as Alfresco, Intalio, MySQL, etc from non-commercial open source such as Apache. Why not ask the question of media and its ability to simply be charitable in terms of advertising space?

    I am not sure we need any charity, not even for open source projects that are not driven by a corporate actor or are under a big enough “umbrella”. Appropriating returns from Commons is critical indeed, that’s why we see many good open source projects with no advertising coverage, but people like Matt Asay, Matthew Aslett, Alex Fletcher, James Governor, Savio Rodrigues, Raven Zachary and of course James McGovern himself are already making the difference.

    What about federating? Here I am dreaming about a sort of Gawker for Open Source..

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, Commercial Open Source, software patent, gawker

     

    • Simon Phipps 4:04 am on April 23, 2007 Permalink

      Something this overlooks – and that was present in the CII Directive debate – is that as more and more companies depend on open source as the bedrock of their business, they will direct their lobbyists to act on behalf of the open source communities.

      I spent a great deal of time in support of lobbyists (as did my colleague Mark Webbink from Red Hat) patiently explaining to politicians and their staffs the problems with software patents as envisaged by Microsoft and the other pro-lobby members. In fact, I might even want to claim that our little informal alliance – Sun, Red Hat, Oracle, IBM and one other that prefers to remain anonymous – actually swung the interoperability argument that killed the Directive.

      This is not to say we don’t need lobbyists acting on behalf of FOSS projects directly. But don’t forget that corporations that grok FOSS lend can their weight to the cause.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:58 am on April 24, 2007 Permalink

      Dear Simon, thanks for your comment, I wrote a post about it, asking Florian his opinion too. Have a look and keep joining the conversation, you are always welcome.

    • burun 2:56 pm on January 24, 2008 Permalink

      The questions Roberto poses to lobbyist Florian Mueller gave me to think about the current file format war and the role of medium/large European companies. It impresses me how many of them still have no idea of what mess the specification of OOXML are, how bad it will be for them on the market to have it approved by ISO. I also think that a stable lobbying group can be more effective at preventing damaging legislations.

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:13 pm on January 25, 2008 Permalink

      In my opinion what I call the file format war it is a very complicated issue. I would recommend Europe to adopt formal procedures to adopt IT products pretending to be compliant with this or that standard. Would you believe me that there is no product fully compliant with those specifications?

      Everyone talks about standards, but compliance it is a different thing!

    • ameliyat 10:59 am on February 1, 2008 Permalink

      Microsoft will be involved in the patent pool for HD DVD as will every other company who has technology in it. The same is true of Sun Microsystems which developed Java for Blu-ray. Since patent pools have non-discriminatory provisions, no tie-in can exist with any operating system or who is licensing the technology. Every claim in the above paragraph is simply wrong.HDi is based on open web standards (XML) which makes it very easy for web developers to become familiar with it. This is the reason that there are hundreds of HD DVD discs (nearly every title) with HDi interactivity whereas there are less than 30 Blu-ray discs released that are using BD-J. BD-J requires a greater degree of programming experience, which is why the even the Blu-ray technical committee investigating HDi recommended it in place of BD-J, which had previously been selected.

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:48 pm on February 1, 2008 Permalink

      How is that related to the original topic?

    • Ramir.Info 8:09 pm on February 1, 2008 Permalink

      Hello Everyone,

      I just learned that Microsoft Offer to Buy Yahoo for $44 Billion Dollars and Yahoo turn it down. Does anyone knows why Yahoo turn this kind of offer?

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:56 pm on April 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government Policies: the French case 

    APRIL, the French advocacy group whose acronym stands for Association for Promotion and Research in Libre Computing, on the 2th of February launched a survey containing 14 questions to the presidential candidates, asking them for their positions on issues related to the future of the free software (patentability, royalty, data processing of control, interoperability, etc).

    Eiffel towerEiffel tower by Grufnik

    Eight out of 12 candidates have responded, as reported by the article of Bruce Byfield.

    Among respondees the major candidates, Ségolène Royal of the Socialist Party and François Bayrou of the Union for French Democracy, along with Nicolas Sarkozy of the Union for a Popular Movement, who also responded but not fully addressing APRIL’s questions.

    Kudos to APRIL for its great work, read here some excerpts of the original article, orif you can manage French have a look at the APRIL’s press release in French.

    (More …)

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:08 pm on April 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Hackers: Brian Behlendorf’s speech at the Digital Freedom expo 

    Brian Behlendorf, Apache founder and now CTO at Collabnet, on Thursday at the Digital Freedom Expo gave a speech entitled “Ten things you may not know about open source“.

    open standard campaignOpen Standard campaign by 4_eveR_Young

    Some excerpts out of his list:

    2. Apache kept the Web flat and free

    Apache was launched in 1995, at the time Netscape was the dominant Web browser and there was a fear that if the same company could own the browser market and the server market they would have too much control and could charge companies a tax of sorts for web hosting. Apache’s launch was done with a dual purpose. There was the pragmatic aspect of combining efforts for better development and there was the idealistic aspect of keeping HTTP (Hypertext transfer protocol) as an open standard.

    That is really interesting. Enforcing an Open Standards through an open source reference implementation. Someonelse is also suggesting the need for a reference implementation to augment – if not, perhaps, replace – the formal specification of the standard.

    4. Open Source helped free the human genome

    Before the mapping of the human genome had been completed, a commercial consortium, Celera, was sequencing the genome with the intention of patenting it. This preposterous idea of patenting a discovery rather than an invention began to get many geneticists concerned. In about 2002 a doctoral student, Jim Kent, wrote 10 000 lines of Perl code to make a program that could perform the number crunching of raw data that was necessary in sequencing the genome. This program [Human Genome Project] was then run over 100 Linux servers and the entire genome was successfully sequenced a few months before Celera finished.

    While more related to Open Knowledge this story is really interesting, in 2002 Tim O’Reilly described Kent’s work as “the most significant work of open source development in the past year”.

    5. Microsoft loves open source

    As odd as it sounds, Behlendorf explained that Microsoft has benefitted from open source development and also included software, which although not labeled “open source”, had the source code openly provided. The first use of TCP/IP in Windows was a port of Berkley’s code. He sited the work that Microsoft was doing with open source programs such as MySQL, SugarCRM and JBoss. Codeshare, Channel 9 and other websites were also cited as positive signs that the proprietary giant is openeing further, as Behlendorf put it, “dragged kicking and screaming into the future”.

    So I am alone thinking things like that. Ten days ago I happened to see a meeting of developers belonging to a Microsoft’s community and I was quite impressed.

    6. Altruism is not the only reason why people contribute to open source software

    Many contributors use the software professionally and find that doing things such as fixing bugs and adding features is much easier when collaborating within a group. According to a survey done in 2006, the existing base of FLOSS represents 131 000 real person years of developmental effort. The costs of sharing code are low while the benefits are high.

    Many thanks Brian, I am really tired to listen to professors talking about gifts and fun, I am happy that people hacking for real can tell them the truth.

    9. Open source can still change the world

    Behlendorf strongly believes in the power of open source to make the world a better place, citing many examples. Within government, he believes that open source software can help immensely in counting election votes in a trustworthy way and also with transparency of government’s actions and policy. For countries such as China where there is restricted acces on the internet, open source has already been successful on helping people within these countries get greater access by overcoming the censorship exerted on them. Third world development can benefite greatly through initiatives such as the One Laptop Per Child project which runs on entirely open source software for the dual purpose of making it cheaper to produce and so that it can be modified to suite each country’s specific needs. Fighting digital rights management was another example given.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, open standard, hacker, behlendorf

     

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