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  • Roberto Galoppini 8:23 am on December 11, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Licensing: FSF and OSI approval processes 

    Definitions of free software and open source are both vague, and license approval processes of both organizations are the ultimate resource to know if a license is free software or open source.
    Free Software Foundation criteria to decide if a license qualifies as free software are mutable:

    To decide whether a specific software license qualifies as a free software license, we judge it based on these criteria to determine whether it fits their spirit as well as the precise words. If a license includes unconscionable restrictions, we reject it, even if we did not anticipate the issue in these criteria. Sometimes a license requirement raises an issue that calls for extensive thought, including discussions with a lawyer, before we can decide if the requirement is acceptable. When we reach a conclusion about a new issue, we often update these criteria to make it easier to see why certain licenses do or don’t qualify.

    Where the mechanism used by OSI for license approval/rejection is partially opaque:

    1. Create a legal analysis of the license as it complies with the terms of the Open Source Definition. Each paragraph of the license should be followed by an explanation of how the paragraph interacts with each numbered term of the Open Source Definition. The analysis should come from a licensed practitioner of the law in your country. Email this analysis to license-approval at our domain name, opensource.org. This document will remain confidential to the Open Source Initiative.
    6. If license-discuss mailing list members find that the license does not conform to the Open Source Definition, they will work with you to resolve the problems. Similarly, if we see a problem, we will work with you to resolve any problems uncovered in public comment.

    Beyond definitions, both organizations decide unilaterally if a license qualifies or not.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:48 pm on December 10, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Copyright: the Show Must Go on 

    My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
    Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
    I can fly – my friends
    The show must go on
    The show must go on
    (Freddie Mercury, 1991)

    No doubt, the show must go on. But what about copyright?
    In december 2005 the Chancellor of the Exchequer commissioned an independent study about UK Intellectual Property Framework. The review concludes that copyright term of existing works should never be extended.

    Read the full story by Lawrence Lessig‘s blog, even dead musicians signed a petition for a retrospective term extension!

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:43 pm on December 9, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Business development: more about Alfresco 

    I wrote a post about Alfresco two days ago, and today I read a Matt Asay‘s post with some data from Alfresco, and I wouldn’t have been able to pose better questions!

    Lead Generation. Alfresco’s website (Downloads/product trials) drives 72% of our leads, and documentation drives another 21%.
    [..]PR, which leads to visits to our website and subsequent downloads, is the biggest driver for our business. Lesson? Invest in great PR and ensure your web presence is well-designed to receive the visitors.

    So it’s true, Enterprise Content Management System is a promising application area for commercial open source. And yes, PR is vital. After all, didn’t Alfresco hire Matt on purpose?

    “Free” is good business. We only recently started measuring unpaid implementations of Alfresco, and have over 6,000 “Community” implementations.

    May be Alfresco has a 1/1000 ratio of customers/users, just like Mysql? I bet the ratio would be better in the very next future.

    Btw, because our business is essentially support (as this is the primary ongoing value we provide to a customer, just like any software company), we’ve found it imperative to have support inextricably connected with engineering.

    Well, support is essential, we know, but when it’s your core business it’s the most important critical success factor. Thanks Matt for such information!

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:06 pm on December 8, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Microsoft-Novell: adaption to customers’ need or nefarious deal? 

    The debate didn’t come to an end yet.

    We all know from the Microsoft statement that

    Microsoft and Novell have agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents.

    As from Novell’s Open letter to the community we learn that

    Our interest in signing this agreement was to secure interoperability and joint sales agreements, but Microsoft asked that we cooperate on patents as well [..]. In this agreement, Novell and Microsoft each promise not to sue the other’s customers for patent infringement. The intended effect of this agreement was to give our joint customers peace of mind [..].
    Since our announcement, some parties have spoken about this patent agreement in a damaging way, and with a perspective that we do not share.
    We disagree with the recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents.

    On the 2nd of November, just few minutes later of the public announcement, I had a chance to comment the agreement with Microsoft’s people. From the very beginning I said that the patent thing would have been considered dangerous from the OS community.

    Microsoft and Novell lawyers did a very good job, as stated by Richard Stallman feedbacks, since thet respected the GPLv2 and, likely, the GPLv3 as well (see also my previous post GPLv3 ad personam). But they lacked of good communication, as shown clearly by their disagreements on agreement,and they had bad ideas, like offering a covenant for non commercial OS developers.
    I believe that the Intellectual Property frame was a must for Microsoft, but I’m interested in knowing the answers to the following questions (excerpt from a post of Novell’s Chief Marketing Officer):

    • What if we collaborated on innovation that made our customer’s more productive?
      .
    • What if we made Linux and Windows easier to deploy and manage?
      .
    • What if we collaborated on solutions that allowed our customer the choice and flexibility to deploy the technologies most appropriate for their task?
      .
    • What if we made interoperability between the worlds of open source and Microsoft more meaningful?
      .
    • What if we reduced the concern about our respective patents on the use of our solutions?
      .
    • What if we took the customer perspective?
      .
    • What if we used the basis of our competition to cooperate?
      .

    While waiting today I did read an interesting comment posted on Groklaw on the 5th of December, and I hope you will enjoy it.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:33 am on December 7, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Business development: the Alfresco approach 

    Two weeks ago I attended John Powell’s speech, you might have a look at his presentation by the Italian SourceSense website. Alfresco is a company founded by by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, formerly from Business Objects and its investors include leading investment firms as Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund. Alfresco tagline “the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management” summarize Alfresco’s strategy: forging inside and delivering VAS services and maintenance.

    Alfresco reduced drammatically marketing costs because there is no need for evangelic sale since potential users are already users.

    It’s true, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) open source software is found by users, but as seen with MySql is not trivial to turn them into customers. Luckily Enterprise Content Management is more complex than DBMS, and customers need subscription based support and value added services, therefore VC are happy to invest.

    About marketing Powell reported proprietary vendors expenditure for marketing and sales about 76% of new license revenues, and he added that

    buying proprietary software you’re paying for a sales guy.

    But cutting cost of sales of two or four times sounds a bit difficult, and I’m looking forward to read Alfresco’s 2006 annual report to figure it out.

    About production costs Powell said Alfresco benefits from community involvment, and I think it would be interesting to know more about it, may be getting analyzed by FLOSSMETRICS, a European funded project analysing OS software projects to collect complete information about the development process, its productivity and the quality of its results.
    Alfresco’s story it’s really interesting, here some reasons:

    • they did choose a promising market (estimated 3.9b$ where RDMBS is about 10b$);
      .
    • they have choosen mature OSS infrastructure components;
      .
    • they hired developers from Documentum and Interwoven teams;
      .
    • they are running a very strong and wide partnership program;
      .
    • they understood the importance of benchmarking and stack-assurance;
      .
    • they pay attention to standards, ODF included;
      .
    • they do agree that user interface matters.
      .

    Matt Asay, Alfresco VP Business Development, has an interesting blog, and I keep it in my blogroll.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:29 pm on December 6, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Robin Good: to boldly go to where no other indipendent publisher has gone before.. 

    The first time I met Robin, we were having dinner with Richard Stallman. When I asked him about his job he told me he was an independent online publisher. What I understood was that he was making a business out of brokering information, I had a look at his information portal masternewmedia and than asked him to meet.

    Recently I stepped by his office and I spent a couple of hours watching him collecting news from the net using RSS-aggregators like MySyndacaat, republishing and commenting posts, studying Google analytics and keeping in touch with his co-editors. He is an information broker, running his info-entepreneur business on his own, without charging directly his customers. He is a proof of what Larry Wall said by the First O’Reilly Perl conference

    Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to be valuable

    Yes, his business basically is based on online-advertising. It works because he spent years looking for interesting sources of information, cooperating with software vendors to get useful tools to speed up his daily work, keeping users interested, working hard..

    Yes, it’s a web 2.0 business model, and he has been clever enough to build up a team, his business goes beyond the one-man band limit.

    Robin Good worked for years as design director, information designer and multimedia production specialist, spending some time collecting interesting resources from the Internet for his own sake.
    Then he started publishing news on his blog, and as soon as he got ranked by Technorati and other sources he understood he might turn it into a business. After a couple of years he gave up with his previous jobs and dedicated himself to his mission:

    helping both individuals and large organizations leverage the infinite potential for positive co-operation that the intelligent use of new media technologies offer us.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:51 pm on December 5, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Format: Free Format Definition, a proposal 

    Almost a couple of years ago I wrote a proposal of definition for “free formats” in an Italian mailing-list about digital formats. The idea was quite simple: rewriting the free software definition substituting “program” with “format specification”.

    • The freedom to use the format specification, for any purpose (freedom 0).
      .
    • The freedom to study how the format specification, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).
      .
    • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
      .
    • The freedom to improve the format specification, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3)..

    .

    Freedom 0
    Allow you to write programs based upon such specifications, therefore to license such software with any kind of license, free software ones or open source ones included.Format specification based on patent or patent applications containing claims that would necessarily be infringed by an implementation of that standard are critical. Such patents or patent applications must be released under a scheme that is perpetual, irrevocable and royalty-free.
    As an example a format specification based on a patent released as Reasonable and Not Discriminatory (RAND) doesn’t comply with the freedom 0.
    On the other hand, the W3C Royalty-Free policy is compliant with such definition. As a matter of fact W3C Royalty-Free policy allow format implementation, even if the FSF considers it harmful because of restrictions that might be posed by the patent holder on the “field of use”.
    .

    Freedom 1
    Contained somehow in Freedom 0, and we might keep it for “historical” reasons.
    .

    Freedom 2
    It requires the format specifications to be freely distribuitable, that is necessary if we want to allow anyone receiving data in a free format able to interpret them. As an example if to obtain format specification you need to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) freedom 2 is not respected. Still there is space for Standardization organizations to make money of the certification programs and selling official version of such standards.
    .

    Freedom 3
    It should require a copyleft policy, otherwise someone might embrace and extend the standard to create a proprietary version..

    Does it make any sense to you?

     

    • Simo 5:18 pm on December 5, 2006 Permalink

      It definitely make sense.
      I’d chop away Freedom n.1 as it is completely covered by 0/3.

      The only problem I see is: how do you enforce compliance with the definition?

      The specification itslef can be copyrighted, the trademark can be used to avoid abuse of the name and certification purposes.
      But the only way to have a sort of “copyleft” license on a specification I am afraid is through a patent covenant on an unavoidable patent that covers all the specification uses.

      Simo.

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:11 pm on December 6, 2006 Permalink

      I believe standardization organizations’ policies about Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) must ensure this.
      They might do it through patent covenant or releasing free software in order to create prior art and, if needed, be able to cope with patent litigations. Standardization organizations need resources, therefore certifications should be mandatory by law.

    • Stefano Maffulli 10:55 am on December 11, 2006 Permalink

      I think you should join the discussion list for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Dynamic Coalition on Open Technical Standards. http://mailman.ctyme.com/listinfo/openstds See you there 🙂

    • Roberto Galoppini 9:16 am on December 12, 2006 Permalink

      Many thanks Stefano, I just subscribed to that mailing-list.

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:02 pm on December 4, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Business model: appropriating returns from Commons 

    Boundaries between public goods and private investments are blurred in the Open Source Software industry. A number of studies published over the last years tried to address the issue from a theoretical and an analytical point of view, nevertheless none of them return the key to bypass the storm of problems caused by a tactical approach.

    An Italian research based upon 146 firms shown that where OS firms preach participation, in general such positive attitude to cooperation is seldom put into practice.
    A study conducted on the linux-embedded vertical market, shows how averagely 53% of code is revealed, showing how participation to a technological club done by virtual and informal R&D networks can have beneficial effects on their business.

    Nowadays quite few OS firms are doing very well Red Hat who recently acquired Jboss moving a step forward on the application level, is the first pure open-source success story to point to, being the only vendor publicly traded. The Swedish firm MySql makes open-source database software and is said to be closing in on $40 million in revenues this year, but it has a 1/1000 ratio of customers/users, showing how being the first mover is a must to get success.

    Meanwhile, meta-organizations like Object Web are federating vendors around enabling technology and its compliance with open standards, renewing middleware market who appears doomed to fail even more dramatically than other software markets. In the middleware development area a new rationale is emerging, targeting sustainable development of a “business ecosystem” where stakeholders could share beneficial middleware strategies, just like in the Linux-embedded example.

    Others choose to take advantage of the absence of a Corporate actor to develop new services, not based on code production but focused on well known open issues like:

    All those business models are possible because only few projects are held by a specific corporate actor who market its products, tracking the production process, developing partnership in order to let hardware or software vendors do benchmarking, delivering form of indemnification and/or warranty to customers, and last but not least working with under contract developers.

    Winner takes most, as usual, and such opportunities are bound to small oligarchies. Investments might be high to start form scratch such businesses, as seen with Canonical, struggling to be noticed in the distro arena. As a matter of fact, barriers are higher when everybody sells the “same” product, and it’s definitely not a sure bet.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:49 pm on December 2, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Format: what do you mean by that? 

    There are many proposal definitions of Open Format, reported by wikipedia (see previous post) to the IDA migration guidelines one, that says:

    Open Standard protocols are defined as those which are free from patents and with an OSS implementation

    Open Formats, a site managed by volunteers like Dario Taraborelli, has its own too.

    So, what about a “Free Format” definition?

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:00 pm on November 30, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Format: permanent interoperability matters! 

    Few weeks ago I got invited to a dinner by Rufo Guerreschi, along with Richard Stallman and Robin Good. Than Robin filmed an interview to Richard.
    Some days later we all started to discuss by email about the video format to be used to deliver such recordings. Richard asked Robin to publish those video clips using formats supported by free software applications, and Ogg Theora was the format of choice.

    But Ogg Theora is an open format and is supported by an application released under a BSD-style license. So far there is no format’s specification other than the source code of the program. No wonder the format has not been approved by any standardization body yet.

    As we know Open standards may impose “reasonable and non-discriminatory” royalty fees and/or other licensing terms on implementers of the standard and are potentially harmful for OSS implementations (see for example FSF position on W3C policies). Besides licensing issues there are other important issues within standardization bodies policies, like the ten rights reported in Krechmer’s paper “The meaning of Open Standard”. And, last but not least, we might need standardization bodies able to decline to certify subset implementations, or to place requirements upon extensions, as suggested by Perens in his Open Standards and practice, in order to avoid predatory practices.

    Freedom is about knowledge, and data format is much more important than tools’ licenses.

     

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:10 am on December 1, 2006 Permalink

      OGG/Theora might become a standard, I mean a published standard.
      Unfortunately Xiph.org has not even specified such format, but I believe it might get done. But defining new formats outside of standardization bodies is a risky bet, think about the patent issue.
      In my opinion Richard’s position it’s a pure tacticism, a mean toward a goal: promoting free software.
      My concerns are about data accessibility, and I think we need a strategy to guarantee access to our data, for ever.

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