The MySQL Librarian Initiative
The MySQL Librarian is an initiative aimed to collect links to the best MySQL-related material on the web. I asked Giuseppe Maxia, MySQL Community Team Lead, more about the initiative.
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Roberto Galoppini
Open Source EC Funded Projects: QualOSS
The European Commission when assigning funds sometimes paid little attention to projects’ overlapping, that it comes with no surprise considering that they don’t keep updated the European F/OSS-related research activities page.
Jean-Christophe Deprez – QualOSS project coordinator – in a email conversation told me that the EC eventually realized it, and asked few EC-funded projects to collaborate, as results from the Flossquality initiative.
Collection, aggregation and correlation of data fetched by open source public repositories is of great help when you need to assess open source product quality. Let’s see how things are going at QualOSS and what should we expect from them in the next future.
Roberto Galoppini
Let’s Discover more about Open Source EU Funded Initiatives
Having been both critical and supportive of some EU funded open source projects in the 6th framework program, I wish to have a look at promising or creditworthy open source related projects backed by the EU.
The Association for Competitive Technology criticized what they consider a bias in favour of open-source software in the European Commission’s plans. I wish to help to give public evidence revealing how our money has been spent on open source initiatives so far, possibly accelerating the dissemination process of results and findings.
Just raise your hand and let your voice be heard!
Roberto Galoppini, 
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Glyn Moody
How should we do that, Roberto?
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Roberto Galoppini
Hi Glyn, I think just contacting people involved and analyzing deliverables.
Any other idea?
Update: On second thought, maybe asking projects’ owners to share projects’ Description of Work would be a first step in the right direction. Correspondences between the “expected†and the “actual†deliverables should come as the next step.
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Juergen Geck
i don’t think we stand a chance to be comprehensive against the eu. just to entertain our worldwide audience (beware, slightly off topic), and to provide a measure of how broken this system is: http://tinyurl.com/nhut7v
maybe in an open source world of blogs we could catch up, but not for long … 🙂
and then there is the issue why this preference would be an issue. if open source is prefered, at least people get what they payed for, no?
a year ago in berlin i sat in the audience of a government sponsored meeting with lots of talk about open source and plenty of people from universities in the audience. i asked them “shouldnt the stuff you produce be available to those who pay for it?” the answer was a definite “yes, of course, but …”.
I for one like this imbalance towards open access to what i payed for!
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Roberto Galoppini
Hi Jurgen, good to see you again.
My intention is definitely not to be against the EU. I rather want to put under the spot light projects that deserve attention, and I hope that many of them are worthy to look at. Nevertheless some of them could be promising on paper and pathetic in practice, but we aim to the truth, only the (open source) truth!
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Stefane Fermigier
Hi Roberto,
you should ask Roberto Di Cosmo about the EDOS and MANCOOSI projects.
http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Cheers,
S. Fermigier
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Roberto Di Cosmo
Hi Roberto,
being the coordinator of Mancoosi, one of the EU funded Open Source related projects, I have no problem in disclosing the precise scope of the project; actually, the description of work for Mancoosi has been online for almost a year now at http://www.mancoosi.org/deliverables/d1.1.pdf and the wonderful people I have the honor to coordinate in this project have been doing some impressive work, that everybody is very welcome to look at (see also http://blog.mancoosi.org).But let me offer another suggestion: spending time scrutinizing the Open Source related EU projects to see if they have been conducted efficiently is surely interesting;
but it would be much more interesting to scrutinize EU-funded projects that produce *non-open source technolgy*: indeed, while badly managed open-source related projects may still give back EU citizens something for their money (the code), we can be sure that badly managed EU-funded projects producing closed source artefacts are just money thrown out of the window.And while funding open-source related projects on public money can be justified simply on the basis of increasing the scientific commons, funding closed-source projects on public money can be justified only if some significant, tangible positive impact on the society can be achieved as a result; said in another way, the standards for scrutinizing publicly funded closed-source projects should be much higher.
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Roberto Galoppini
@Stefane great to hear back from you, and I agree that both mancoosi and its predecessor EDOS are both great projects to look at.
@Roberto My main purpose is to help the dissemination process of both promising and interesting EU funded open source projects.
Take QualOSS, the first I covered
Rover this scrutiny phase: the project’s page had no page-rank until the day I blogged about it. Now it has been calculated and people googling around will get a chance to find it.Commercial exploitation of open source research results is definitely a better target for my blog than anything else, maybe someone else might look into the closed-source stuff.
Roberto Galoppini
Net Freedom: Italian Blog Strike
Today Italian bloggers protest against an Italian government bill introducing rules which will put at risk the internet freedom of speech in Italy.
See the English version of the press release to know more.
Roberto Galoppini
OpenOffice.org Security Project, Quick Start Guide, Lorem Ipsum Generator
OpenOffice.org Security Project -  the Security project’s Wiki currently covers all about digital signatures, encryption and document integrity, feel free to join and help with more items.
Magenta Lorem ipsum generator – an extension generating the dummy text Lorem ipsum.
OpenOffice.org New User Orientation - new-user orientation quick start guide by OpenOffice.org Ninja.
Roberto Galoppini
European Open Source Observatory keeps launching new Features
The European open source observatory opened up about one year ago, last February went into the wild 2.0 and now offers a free Virtual Forge service, aimed at giving a better understanding of hosted projects.
Europe keeps investing money to fund OSOR development, now trying to mimic Ohloh metrics and data, instead of spending energies to create synergies with others.
In the OSOR news  Marco Battistoni, Unisys OSOR Technical Manager, says (emphasis is mine):
However setting up and operating such a repository can be very costly and time consuming (believe us, we know!):Â one has to buy servers, internet connection, install the necessary applications, hire experts to operate the site 24/7… This needs a lot of commitment both in human and in financial resources.
I’d prefer to see our money spent to create something new, or simply to share knowledge about interesting open source projects and tools. There are definitely more forges than necessary.
Stefano Canepa
I agree with you, there are so many places where a free software developer can host his/her project that it’s difficult to decide but no one help in sharing ideas, this could be of some help in cutting down the number of project doing the same thing and help developer to team up.
Roberto Galoppini
Stefano don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Europe is wrong having its own repository/forge. European public adminstrations have to deploy a long term sustainability plan when it comes to hosting projects. Today moving projects from a forge to another is not trivial, since data federation is still to come (and maybe Europe might well help towards this goal).
OSOR EC-funded project is spending big money, and I’d like to see most of these resources spent to better disseminate projects information.
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source BI: Jaspersoft Special Offer and the Real Value of Open Source BI
Yesterday Jaspersoft announced the availability of Jaspersoft Unlimited, a special offer at a lower price. Jaspersoft offered a similar package back in 2007, but this time training has been added to the bundle.
Brian Gentile, Jaspersoft CEO and open source core advocate, commenting the news told me:
Roberto Galoppini
Microsoft Open Source Strategy: CodePlex keeps Growing
Yesterday Microsoft announced that the number of projects hosted on CodePlex breached the 10,000 mark, just after CodePlex celebrated its third anniversary.
Even if numbers are not impressive compared with Google code – becoming home to over 80.000 projects in half the time – it is definitely a measure of how seriously Microsoft is taking its open source strategy.
Roberto Galoppini
Software Patents are Back: Software AG
Software AG released a survey carried out by the Technical University of Darmstadt, stating that, among other practical recommendations, software patents are needed to protect innovation.
Dale Halling
The arguments against software patents have a fundamental flaw. As any electrical engineer knows, solutions to problems implemented in software can also be realized in hardware, i.e., electronic circuits. The main reason for choosing a software solution is the ease in implementing changes, the main reason for choosing a hardware solution is speed of processing. Therefore, a time critical solution is more likely to be implemented in hardware. While a solution that requires the ability to add features easily will be implemented in software. As a result, to be intellectually consistent those people against software patents also have to be against patents for electronic circuits. For more information on patents and innovation see http://www.hallingblog.com.
Roberto Galoppini
Hi Dale, thank you to join the conversation. I see you’re a patent attorney and an electrical engineer, I got a computer science degree and my background doesn’t help me much when it comes to talk about electronic circuits.
So said, I live in Europe and software patents are not (yet) legal on this side of the pond. Most of us are happy with that, given how little software patents are welcome by US IT entrepreneurs (see this book on intellectual property and open source for more information). I understand that lawyers, or some of them, are in favour of software patents, but there is no evidence of how they helped innovation so far. Many IT companies, included the big ones, publicly stated how software patents mostly are causing damages, only few players take (real?) advantage of them in ritualized warfares, but this is definitely not about innovation.
Roberto Galoppini
Playing more around with WordPress
I keep updating my blog to organize information in a clearer way, and I made some changes just yesterday, while WordPress was stating that WordPress themes are GPL too.
Matteo Ionescu, who originally brought my blog to 2.0 life, helped me to make more cosmetics changes, especially about new and old widgets, and my K2 template today comes with a slightly new look (new ‘top posts’ box, smaller ‘categories’ box, etc).
Comments and feedback are welcome, more is to come soon!
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