Recent Updates Page 113 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:02 pm on February 26, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org Italian Association meets its first goal: Press release 

    “OpenOffice.org Italian Association meets its first goal”

    PLIO, 26th of February 2007 – The Association PLIO, the Italian community of volunteers who develop, support and promote the open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org, has met the first goal of the yearly program: the inclusion of the Italian dictionary and thesaurus – released by Italian volunteers – in one of the next official versions of OpenOffice.org.

    In the very next future the full release (dictionary and thesaurus included) of OpenOffice.org Italian version, today available for download only by PLIO servers, will be available also by the official site.

    Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org primary sponsor and contributor, through the authoritative voice of Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer of Sun, announced the decision on Roberto Galoppini’s blog. Galoppini had previously written an open letter to Simon Phipps on behalf of the Association asking help with Sun’s legal team to get a public comment about the implications of distributing the dictionary and the thesaurus with OpenOffice.org.

    Roberto Galoppini, one of PLIO’s historical members and recently appointed PLIO Institutional Relationship Manager, commented:

    Simon Phipps’s comment, nowadays the most visited page of my blog, returns a positive feedbacks from Sun’s lawyers and announces that the inclusion of our great facilities will proceed forthwith – and I guess before this summer we’ll get them included in the official version.

    The problem was due to a suspected licenses mismatch between the linguistic tools’ license and the openoffice.org one. I am convinced that the PLIO Association for Sun might be an important interlocutor within the OpenOffice.org community, and this is just the first goal in the direction to build a more collaborative dialogue.

    PLIO Association can be found at the following address: http://www.plio.it. PLIO is on duty for the Italian Native-Lang Project, that can be found at the following address: http://it.openoffice.org, where is available for download the last version of the suite, namely OpenOffice.org 2.1.

    Roberto Galoppini, commercial open source software and open source business models expert, founder of the first Italian open source consortium. His blog can be found at the following address: http://robertogaloppini.net.

    PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project, is the Italian community of volunteers who develop, support and promote the open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office applications (standard ISO/IEC 26300) and is available on major computing platforms in over 90 languages, available to 90% of the world-wide population in their own mother tongue.
    OpenOffice.org is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL), can be legally used in any context.

    PLIO, Progetto Linguistico Italiano OpenOffice.org:
    http://it.openoffice.org
    “Vola e fai volare con i gabbiani di OpenOffice.org: usalo, copialo e regalalo, è legale!”
    For further information: Italo Vignoli (+39.348.5653829), stampa@openoffice.org

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:29 pm on February 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Debian and business: HP making big money out of free Debian GNU/Linux 

    HP few months ago announced its support services for Debian, because as Jeffrey Wade, worldwide marketing manager at HP’s Open Source and Linux Organization, explained:

    We’ve had a number of customers continuing to ask us to have broader support for Debian. [Linux customers requested the Debian support, after wondering if they could get] a better value with a distribution that doesn’t require a subscription fee and subsequent renewals for that subscription.

    money andy warhol

    As recently reported by InternetNews HP in fiscal year 2006 $25 million in hardware sales in the EMEA area were directly related to HP’s Debian support.

    Hewlett-Packard is known to be a Linux Foundation supporter, as said Christine Martino, vice president, Open Source and Linux Organization of HP:

    HP has been a long-time member of both OSDL and FSG, and is proud to continue supporting the advancement of Linux and open source as a founding Board member of the Linux Foundation.

    HP is also an important Debian’s developer partner, and sponsors many other open source projects, but despite of all this HP is not even listed in the top ten business contributors in the now famous final report on the economic impact of FLOSS.

    HP was already supporting both Novell and Red Hat distros, and Wade commenting the somehow unexpected extremely good results due to Debian support said:

    Every additional distribution that we pick up is a big investment in testing and support which is a challenge from the service side. When we decided to do Debian, we had to figure out what the opportunity was and what sales we would generate.
    This information exceeds what we were expecting to see.

    As reported by Sean Wilson, IBM has also come on board the Debian support services bandwagon with their French partner Alcôve in order to to provide Debian support for their IBM Global Linux Support Line.

    Technorati Tags: Debian, HP, IBM, FLOSS

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:08 pm on February 24, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Licensing: more on Alfresco going GPL 

    Yesterday many commented Alfresco’s decision, among them Matthew Asslet’s article talks about the mentioned exception approach and the attribution thing.

    Commenting the FLOSS exception, Matthew wrote:

    It is an interesting approach that solves some of the problems Alfresco faced as an emerging commercial open source vendor, and do so better than the company’s previous Mozilla + Attribution approach.

    Matthew spoke to Matt Asay, Alfresco’s VP of business development, recently, about Alfresco’s decision to abandon MPL+attribution in favor of the GPL.

    While that is a good reason for the company to have turned to the GPL, Asay also maintained that it is his belief that the GPL does a better job of encouraging attribution and contribution, either in the form of support revenues or code development.

    “The problem with application companies is there’s no protection for you,” he said, noting that there is more opportunity at the application level than the operating system level for developers to pick up code and turn it into something else.

    While the GPL does not prevent developers from doing that, it does mean that they are required to publish any code they distribute under the GPL, ensuring any modifications remain open.

    According to Asay, this is a more elegant method of retaining attribution than dictating to developers how they use and display a trademarked logo in any modified code. He explained that it was understandable why several open source start-ups took up the MPL+ Attribution approach, however.

    “As a company we didn’t feel comfortable that we had the brand that would push people to buy support from us,” he said. “It’s really, really hard to take that leap of faith that you’re providing the value that people will buy from you.”

    It will be interesting, as Matthew wrote, to see how Alfresco’s move will affect integration with other open source projects and, moreover, to see how Alfresco will eventually find its way to a symbiotic approach.

    Post Scrittum: read also the Internews article, it reports interesting spots of Matt’s thoughts:

    We would be ecstatic if someone forked the GPL version of Alfresco because then they get to go off on their fork and develop their own system but we would also benefit from the work that they do. If we can’t compete based on the work that we’re doing on our own code as well as benefiting form the work that a fork would do on theirs, then we don’t deserve to be in business.

    We want the conversation around Alfresco to be much broader than Alfresco the company, we want it to be about the code and the value of the project first and the company secondarily.

    Let’s see how Alfresco will cope with the upcoming community, I’m sure they’re working on it..

    Technorati Tags: Open Source,  GPL,  MPL,  Alfresco
     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:36 am on February 23, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Licensing: Alfresco goes GPL! 

    Reading Maffulli’s comment on my last post I learn that Alfresco, previously using the Mozilla Public License with the discussed attribution provision, yesterday moved to GPL. As reported by Stephen Shankland Matt Asay, Alfresco’s Vice President of Marketing, said:

    We wanted the code to be bigger than the company. People basically know what (the GPL) means, so there’s no time wasted wondering (about) MPL.

    Talking about why makes sense use GPL-compatible licenses I mentioned that you can take advantage of lots of programs and libraries licensed under GPL, and it looks like if Matt confirmed this the case:

    In addition, Alfresco will be able to easily integrate with other GPL projects, such as the Drupal content management software.

    I believe that Matt played a very important role in Alfresco’s decision, he recently wrote “Why you need the GPL” explaining clearly that in his poinion the GPL is the best way:

    It’s not about evil. It’s about what works. It’s about making money with free/open source as your ally, and not a weak alibi.

    But it’s not the first time as you can see here (07/04/05):

    The GPL is one of the most exciting, innovative capitalist tools ever created.

    and here (31/05/04):

    Absolutely. People tend to describe the GPL as highly restrictive. It is, in a sense, but it’s also liberating, and a great competitive tool.

    About the GPLv3 debate he said:

    We’d really like to go version 3 when it comes out, if it remains as planned. Until then, though, the software remains only under GPL 2.

    Good news for my FSF friends, indeed.

    Alfresco added to the GPL license a “FLOSS exception” to allow the software to be embedded in other open source software licensed with other licenses, as Matt explained:

    With the exception, those other projects don’t have to worry about a potential requirement to release their own software under the GPL.

    So let’s now how fast Alfresco will eventually move from the Corporate production model to an hybrid one, that I wish them to be as symbiotic as possible!

    Technorati Tags: Open Source,  GPL,  MPL,  Alfresco
     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:01 pm on February 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Licensing: choose Open Source licenses GPL-compatible 

    David Wheeler, who I frequently mention talking about Commercial open source, just released a revised version of his “Make Your Open Source Software GPL-compatible. Or else”, a paper arguing that FLOSS developers should use existing widely-used license GPL compatible.cliff fall - mind your step!

    I asked him what was new, and as he suggested me to check the latest version against the last known to the WaybackMachine, then the diff utility did the rest. The result confirms just what he anticipated me by email:

    I know I added info about Wine. I’m sorry I didn’t mention them earlier, because they’re a really interesting case. They switched from non-GPL to X license, which helped. They later switched to LGPL, which increased their number of contributions. Both REALLY interesting.

    In the list of important FLOSS projects gone under (painful) changes to make themselves GPL-compatible he just added:

    As noted in Wine history, Wine’s, “history of licensing has sparked many debates.” The WINE project originally had the BSD-old license, a GPL-incompatible license; this incompatibility with the GPL drove the developers to switch to the GPL-compatible X11 license in January 2000. Many developers expressed concern about appropriation of the code by commercial entities, so in March 2002 the developers agreed to switch Wine to the LGPL license. The “ReWind” project was created for those who wanted an X11-licensed codebase, but most developers decided to focus their efforts on synchronizing with the LGPL’ed Wine, and the vast majority of development and new features appear there first. The Wine project reports that shortly after changing the license to the LGPL, development began to pick up at a greater pace (more patches began to appear, the leader Alexandre made more CVS commits, and more applications were reported to work).

    I didn’t know that the Wine project experienced such a positive trend because of license change. Knowing that Alexandre Julliard contributed most of his code back to the Wine project as CodeWeavers’s CTO, I’m wondering if others were contributing while employed by other proprietary software firms.
    Getting back to the original topic, I agree with David’s hint, choosing GPL-compatible license allow you to take advantage of lots of programs and libraries licensed under GPL.

    If you want to be sure your license is GPL-compatible just use the GPL, or choose from the FSF’s list of licenses compatible with the GPL: determining GPL compatibility can be a difficult task.

    Take the European Union’s license, time and effort has been spent to create such draft, and to let people use it make me wonder about the propaeudetic value of Esperanto.

    Even when talking about Linux Kernel, despite as clearly wrote Linus Torvalds:

    In short, apart from the very early code in 1991 and early -92 (versions 0.01 through 0.12), Linux has been licensed with _only_ the GPLv2 license file, and normally no mention of “v2 or later” in the actual sources.

    A recent and clear analysis showed as it is inaccurate:

    License # Bytes % Bytes
    GPL 2 or above 60,637,907 39%
    GPL 2 only 32,215,150 21%
    GPL, Ver unspecified 19,773,264 13%
    Other 43,762,840 28%
    All Combined 156,389,161 100%

    When choosing your next license, mind your step!

    Technorati Tags: Open Source,  GPL
     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:30 pm on February 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Sun’s ODF plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 now available 

    Simon Phipps announced that now Sun’s plugin for MS Word 2003 is available for download (registration required), and as stated by Sun’s website:

    Microsoft Word users now can easily import and export to the OpenDocument Format.

    As Simon honestly reported the download is a little cumbersome, but it eventually works.

    This (initial) plug-in supports only text documents’ conversions, support of spreadsheet and presentation documents is expected with the final version, in April.

    I already mentioned Microsoft’s plug-in, by now Microsoft Word users have a second option, and I’m looking forward to see the da Vinci class of ODF plugins for Microsoft Office, that sounds promising in Sam Hiser’s words.

    Technorati Tags: OpenOffice,  ODF,  Sun,  Microsoft,  OpenXML
     

    • muhibbuddin 5:36 pm on July 10, 2008 Permalink

      Even though i haven’t try this i think this is a cool plugin

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:27 am on February 20, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Software Patent: Sakai Foundation recognizes Blackboard’s patent pledge 

    The patent pledge announced by Blackboard was recognized by the Boards of Directors of the Sakai Foundation and of EDUCAUSE as:

    a step in a more positive direction for the community, to the extent that it offers some comfort to a portion of the academic community that uses open source or homegrown systems.

    Blackboard press release report the following statement from the EDUCAUSE and Sakai Boards of Directors:

    We particularly welcome the inclusion of pending patents, the clarification on the commercial support, customization, hosting or maintenance of open source systems and the worldwide nature of Blackboard’s pledge. We also appreciate the willingness of Blackboard to continue with frank and direct dialogue with our two organizations and with other higher education representatives and groups to work toward addressing these problems of community concern.

    Blackboard missed to report other interesting statements from the Sakai’s press release:

    Although Blackboard has included in the pledge many named open source initiatives, regardless of whether they incorporate proprietary elements in their applications, Blackboard has also reserved rights to assert its patents against other providers of such systems that are “bundled” with proprietary code. We remain concerned that this bundling language introduces legal and technical complexity and uncertainty which will be inhibitive in this arena of development.

    Sakai’s concerns about uncertainty are better clarified by the following excerpt:

    As a result, the Sakai Foundation and EDUCAUSE find it difficult to give the wholehearted endorsement we had hoped might be possible. Some of Sakai’s commercial partners and valued members of the open source community will not be protected under this pledge. Furthermore, EDUCAUSE and Sakai worked to gain a pledge that Blackboard would never take legal action for infringement against a college or university using another competing product. While Blackboard ultimately agrees that such actions are not in its best interest from a customer relations viewpoint, it could not agree for reasons related to its existing legal case. Our organizations will remain vigilant on this point as protecting our member institutions is of top priority.

    Partial pledges are dreadful, Commercial Open Source really do not need them. Some of the commercial affiliates partecipating to the Sakai technological club might have serious problems to enjoy Blackboard’s patent pledge, where universities are much less exposed to IP claims.

    I’m afraid there is space for a dividi et impera (divide and conquer) technique, do you agree?

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:02 pm on February 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Business Development: Doc Searls on relationship economics 

    Doc Searls talking about the values that open source development methods can bring to the economy came up with an interesting old story from the developing world. Few years ago he met a Nigerian pastor named Sayo, sitting next to him on an airplane trip, and he was on his way to give a talk about The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book I would recommend to everyone in this market.
    Since Doc Searls was going to give a speech about the “Markets are conversations” chapter he spoke with Sayo about that, and he asked him what he meant by that.

    After his answer, Sayo said that Searls’ observations were incomplete, in his opinion something more was going on in markets, and he asked him what was it:

    I said I didn’t know. Here is the dialogue that followed, as close to verbatim as I can recall it…

    “Pretend this is a garment”, Sayo said, picking up one of those blue airplane pillows. “Let’s say you see it for sale in a public market in my country, and you are interested in buying it. What is your first question to the seller?”

    “What does it cost?” I said.

    “Yes”, he answered. “You would ask that. Let’s say he says, ‘Fifty dollars’. What happens next?”

    “If I want the garment, I bargain with him until we reach an agreeable price.”

    “Good. Now let’s say you know something about textiles. And the two of you get into a long conversation where both of you learn much from each other. You learn about the origin of the garment, the yarn used, the dyes, the name of the artist, and so on. He learns about how fabric is made in your country, how distribution works, and so on. In the course of this you get to know each other. What happens to the price?”

    “Maybe I want to pay him more and he wants to charge me less”.

    “Yes. And why is that?”

    “I’m not sure.”

    “You now have a relationship”.

    Doc Searls than shared that conversation with Eric S. Raymond, who told him that:

    All markets work at three levels. Transactions, conversations and relationships.

    Doc began to catch that there is something more to the relationship business:

    Development communities are notoriously long on conversation (check out the LKML for starters), and on relationship as well. Not a whole lot of transaction there, either, since the code is free. Next question: Are there economies involved?

    I think the answer is yes, and they are concentrated on the manufacturing end. We make useful code for its “because effects”. Thanks to Linux, much money will be made; but because of it, far more than with it.

    Read the full article, I found it inspirational if not informational.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:44 pm on February 18, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Novell says OpenOffice is key 

    Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO, talking about OpenOffice.org said:

    The financial holy grail is actually the office productivity suite … when you look at structures of companies there is a lot of profitability in those product sets from the competition.

    Novell CEO talked about the Hula project, a real-time collaboration productin alpha development stage:

    Real-time collaboration between organisations is going to become more important and that is going to be more difficult with all of the older products in the market — Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes etc.

    In Hula there is so much more real-time stuff coming. This is a young, evolving market at this point and a lot of the pieces are going to move around for the next couple of years before we see it shake out.

    Hovsepian defined also Novell as a “custodian to the community and to the commercial customers”.

    Read the full article, a four part video is included.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:41 pm on February 17, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    More on Open Solutions Alliance 

    The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) eventually debuted at LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit, as previously mentioned. Ten leading companies announced to join the OSA consortium dedicated to driving adoption of comprehensive open source business solutions.

    Founding members include Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net®, SpikeSource and Talend.

    Barry Klawans, OSA spokesperson and CTO at JasperSoft, stated:

    We’re inviting all companies developing and using open source software to work together and ensure the availability of turnkey, enterprise-ready solution suites faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional proprietary alternatives.

    While we don’t know yet if this last technological club will eventually work, Stephen Walli expressed some concerns:

    I had a little experience with CentricCRM pretending to be an open source company a year ago while I was still at Optaros. I read their license then, and it hasn’t changed. Here’s how it starts:

    You may use, copy, modify, and make derivative works from the code for internal use only.

    You may not redistribute the code, and you may not sublicense copies or derivatives of the code, either as software or as a service.

    This is of course the community version of their “open source” solution.

    False positive are dangerous, and I hope OSA will soon push its members to adopt a clear strategy, calling themselves open source companies only if appropriate.

    Technorati Tags: Open Solutions Alliance, OSA, Centric CRM

     

    • Savio Rodrigues 3:34 pm on February 20, 2007 Permalink

      Definitely agree about false positives in the open source arena.

      I’m 100% sure that the # of incidents of inaccurately claiming “we’re open source” is going to increase as fast as interest in open source does.

      But that is something everyone in the “community” will have to watch for and call bullsh*t on as needed.

← Older posts

Newer posts →

c
Compose new post
j
Next post/Next comment
k
Previous post/Previous comment
r
Reply
e
Edit
o
Show/Hide comments
t
Go to top
l
Go to login
h
Show/Hide help
shift + esc
Cancel