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  • Roberto Galoppini 5:21 pm on July 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Ecosystems: How Eclipse works, the Sonatype case 

    Sonatype, founded by the creator of Maven, Jason van Zyl, after committing their m2eclipse plugin to the Eclipse Foundation, recently joined the Eclipse Foundation as a strategic developer, gaining also a seat on the Eclipse board.

    m2eclipse, accepted as an Eclipse Technology Project, sets the standard for integrating Maven and Eclipse, and aims to make easier to use Eclipse IDE.

    I posed Jason few questions to learn more about how the Eclipse ecosystem works.

    How was the m2eclipse project accepted as an Eclipse Technology Project?

    There is standard process at Eclipse for the acceptance of new projects. As a project you voice your intent, and propose the project to the Eclipse Foundation as we did with m2eclipse. A public announcement is then made about the project to the Eclipse community and a newsgroup for the project is setup to field questions and concerns by the community. For us, after a few months everything was going smoothly so the Sonatype developers working on m2eclipse submitted a project proposal to the standard “creation review process” where our project was approved and then provisioned. We are now in the process of working through the Eclipse IP process, and in parallel moving our project’s code and documentation over to the Eclipse Foundation’s infrastructure. It’s been great working with the Eclipse folks, they have a very professional, and thoughtful setup.

    Is the project economically sustainable?

    All of of the projects being developed by Sonatype are economically sustainable. We have a number of very large clients, whose names everyone would recognize, who are using Eclipse with Maven and require high quality integration and support. We are experts on integrating Eclipse with Maven, and moving our project to the Eclipse Foundation is a display of our commitment to the project. We have joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Development Partner, which entails providing 8 full-time employees to work on the m2eclipse project. This commitment meant that we needed to be economically viable before we brought m2eclipse to the Eclipse Foundation.

    How does the Eclipse Foundation see community building?

    As part of the standard process toward having a project accepted the Eclipse Foundation likes to see an active community, because for many projects, community involvement is an integral part of their success and viability. Our m2eclipse project has been steadily growing over the course of three years, we’ve worked hard to improve the quality in order to attract a larger community and have currently seen over 50,000 downloads. The community is definitely a key aspect in the decision making process to accept a project at Eclipse.

    Did considerations about community building influence the decision to commit the project?

    The reach and influence of the Eclipse Foundation is very powerful and is a great way to increase exposure to new users. Any project that is part of the Eclipse Foundation is known to be of high quality because the Foundation demands a great deal of rigor. Moving our project to Eclipse is a sign of our commitment to them, but we appreciate the visibility and chance of attracting new users and developers, as this is a critical factor in the success of any open source project.

    Thank you Jason, and happy hacking!

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, open ecosystems, eclipse, sonatype, maven,   m2eclipse, JasonVanZyl

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:03 pm on July 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Communities: How Design Choice with regards to Transparency and Accessibility affects External Participation 

    Joel West joined the conversation on community-led and sponsored open source projects. His newer paper on the role of participation architecture in growing sponsored open source communities explores governance issues at a deeper scale.

    TransparencyTransparency and Accessibility matter by Josh Sommers

    Joel and Siobhán O’Mahony compared corporate and voluntary production models, or sponsored and community managed projects, as they called them. Their study had two research questions:

    how did sponsors design open source software communities in the hopes of attracting external participation, and how did this differ from the design of autonomous based communities?

    Interesting questions indeed, coming from real experts of open source community governance. Joel and Siobhán didn’t focus on boundary between work and hobby in an individual’s participation, or other individual motivations for open source contributions, as Joel explained. They focused on investigating how sponsored communities differ from their autonomous counterparts identified three key design choices: the organization of production, community governance and intellectual property. I tend to agree with Joel saying that the “meat” of the paper is in Table 3, reporting the specific trade-offs made across the various independent and sponsored projects, but I warmly suggest you to read the whole paper.

    Talking about the organization of the production of code, they say (bold emphasis is mine):

    Overall, the degree of modularity, associated dependencies, and the quality of code documentation affected the ability of outside members to understand the code well enough to contribute. [..] In addition to the technical architecture of the code, the organization of production includes control of the processes by which individuals participate in the community’s production process. These social measures are not necessarily correlated to a project’s technical design: for example, highly modular code can still be tightly controlled by a single firm. Thus, a project’s technical architecture is one subset of a community’s participation architecture. [..] We identified three design parameters that provided contributors with transparency and accessibility to production processes:
    1. Live code access provides transparency by offering the community the chance to review the most recent “live” version of source code on the community website [..] . 2. Public commit process refers to the opportunity for community members to become directly involved in the production process by earning (through demonstrated technical proficiency) the right to directly commit software changes to the community repository.[..] 3. Subproject creation is a mechanism by which a community based on the sponsor’s original code can grow to assume new functionality or new directions.

    The production of code is key to a sustainable open source business model, that’s why some open source firms are shifting towards an hybrid production model and also why retaining an existing one is vital.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, community-driven, peer production, external participation, open source communities, JoelWest, SiobhánOMahony

     

    • Joel West 10:07 pm on July 17, 2008 Permalink

      I think over time this hybrid model will be recognized for what it is. Most OSS users and industry types know that MySQL uses OSS as a marketing vehicle (and a way to get adoption by students and small ISVs), and that’s not sharing participation or authority the way that an Apache or Eclipse does.

      Don’t get me wrong: being open on 1 dimension is better than being open on 0 dimensions; let’s just not confuse it with being open on all 3 dimensions.

    • Giuseppe Maxia 11:54 am on July 18, 2008 Permalink

      Joel,
      what you say is true. MySQL, as a company, uses open source as a marketing vehicle. It means that the company seeks to enlarge the user base as much as it can be done, and then looks for potential customers within the extended user community.
      This is a good model, and one of the reasons why Sun acquired MySQL, i.e. for its ability of cashing on open source.
      MySQL, as a project, is sadly less open than others. While it can rightfully claim a user base far superior to any other open source database, it has a very limited number of external contributors. The company has structured its development practice around a closed source model, exacerbated by the RCS tool of choice (BitKeeper) which made openness even more difficult. We have been changing, though. Slowly, because development habits are hard to change, but the direction is towards openness. We now have many developers openly talking about the project in public IRC (instead of the internal one, the only one we used until one year ago), we have moved our code base to the more community friendly Bazaar, and this will make contribution easier. We have promoted 14 projects within Google Summer of Code, and the outcome of these projects can be added to our code (depending on quality review, of course).
      In short, we are on the right path. We acknowledge that, while we have been a good example in matter of cashing on open source, we have a long way to go in matter of public participation. But we are learning.

      Giuseppe Maxia
      MySQL Community Team Lead
      Sun Microsystems – Database Group
      http://datacharmer.blogspot.com

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:42 pm on July 18, 2008 Permalink

      Thank you Giuseppe to join the conversation, I think you are really honest about where MySQL stands today. As OpenOffice.org community member I do know how difficult is to cope with corporate production models. Hybridization is a pretty new thing, but I think that it is a process, and I welcome MySQL’s first steps.

      As I observed in another comment to Joel’s ones, I am also looking forward to see what can do communities involving (also) consumers, like SAKAI, or “not organic” ones like those managed by the Collaborative Software Initiative.

    • Joel West 12:52 am on July 21, 2008 Permalink

      Giuseppe,

      Thank you for your frank comments. I am perhaps one of the few open source researchers that’s not a true believer, maybe because I spent too much time in the software industry. But frankly I think it’s cool if companies can find success using OSS as demoware, or as a way to get PR, or by providing full IP but not sharing control or development. Parceling out different rights to see what buyers will value is just another form of business model innovation, like Southwest or Wal-Mart or (frankly) MySQL. And such innovation deserves to be rewarded.

      My only concern is false advertising, e.g. people who claim they’re promoting some noble cause but really are just out to make a buck. IT buyers are not stupid, and by now the industry has a fairly sophisticated understanding of OSS. So unlike in the consumer space, I think vendors will be punished for exaggerated claims and are better off just leveling with people. If nothing else, the dot-bomb era taught us that a free lunch doesn’t last forever and IT buyers certainly want their vendors to be around to provide support and upgrades down the road.

      Joel West
      http://www.joelwest.org

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:17 pm on July 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Jobs: SourceForge looks for Systems Programmers Analysts 

    Jacob Moorman, the Director of Operations for SourceForge.net has two open positions on his team for Systems Programmer/Analyst II’s. These positions are open to candidates located in the United States, and the salary range for this position starts at $65K plus benefits.

    Job Description:
    This role will support the ongoing maintenance and improvement of the SourceForge site backend and developer services.

    Fill on line form if you are interested.

    is looking for Systems Programmers Analysts individuals to play pivotal roles in defining he next generation of SourceForge.net, the world’s largest Open Source software development Web site.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:16 pm on July 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Communities: About the Importance of Retaining an Open Source Community 

    Beyond the differences between community and sponsored projects, if it is true that buy an existing open source community is not easy (yet possible), retaining a sponsored one seems difficult looking at the Citrix versus the Xen Community case.

    Wet groundWet open source ground by rupertsanfordscutt

    Daniel Kusneztky reports that XenSource, struggling to find ways to appropriate returns from the commons, is embarking in a new direction, potentially harmful to other members of the XenSource community.

    Tony Asaro, who recently joined Virtual Iron as Chief Strategy Officer, pointed out that the Xen technology is also the result of the efforts of others, therefore the results are not owned by Citrix.

    Acquiring a virtualization company is easy, especially if you can pay an high price for it, retaining its community maybe a more difficult task, though.

    Sun Tzu said there are six kinds of terrain, open source communities are an entangling ground: ground which can be abandoned but is hard to re-occupy. Traditional IT vendors buying small open source companies have to mind their steps, open source is a different ground, definitely.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, XenSource, Citrix, DanielKusneztky, open source communities

     

    • Stephen Spector 2:22 pm on July 17, 2008 Permalink

      I am the Xen.org program manager from Citrix/XenSource and wanted to reply to the ZDNet posting. You can read my response at http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12695-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=49804&messageID=932957. My personal opinion is that Simon’s discussion about Virtual Iron was taken incorrectly by Virtual Iron as they saw a great PR opportunity to take people’s attention away from his technical comments.

      One interesting issue that this whole blog conflict shows is the difficult task of people speaking out about both the open source project (Xen) and the companies for sale product (XenServer). I think that Simon may have incorrectly mixed the two concepts in his response thus causing the whole blog conflict; however, it seems as though the ZDNet authors went quite far in their “forecast” of what was really going on.

      Please stop by the Xen.org community site to see how Citrix along with the Xen Advisory Board who manage the project are working together to make Xen a great open source solution for customers.

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:08 pm on July 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Conference: OSCON 2008 is coming! 

    OSCON 2008 – the biggest open source convention in the world run by O’Reilly, celebrating this year its 10th anniversary, – will take place in Portland next week, bringing together more than 2500 professionals from all over the world.

    The convention includes 40 technology tutorials and over 400 sessions focusing on many different topics, ranging from business to security and Web Applications, along with a new event dedicated to open source mobile (Open Mobile Exchange).

    OSCON 2008

    Only few people from Europe will join OSCON 2008, among them Cedric Thomas (OW2 consortium), Stefano Maffulli (Funambol Community), Pierre Baudracco (Linagora) and Francesco Cesarini (Erlang Training and Consulting).

    I am looking forward to follow the Participate 08 session, aimed at exploring the issues and opportunities presented by community development, in particular the themes of hybrid models. On Tuesday I won’t miss Mark Shuttleworth‘s keynote, and I am definitely sorry that I’ll fly away before Chris DiBona‘s google open source update talk, on Wednesday.

    If you are planning to stay at OSCON on Wednesday don’t miss Open Source Software Economics, Standards, and IP in One Lesson by Stephen Walli, and Open Source / Open World on Thursday, moderated by Danese Cooper. Last but not least I suggest you to follow Does Open Source Need to Be “Organic”?, a session following the now famous Theodore’s post on the subject.

    I will be covering the event writing articles for Italian ICT magazines, see you there!

    Technorati Tags: OSCON 2008, OSCON, Portland, open source conferece, DaneseCooper, StephenWalli, TheodoreTs’o, ChrisDiBona, MarkShuttleworth, FrancescoCesarini, ERLANG, PierreBaudracco, Linagora, StefanoMaffulli, Funambol, CedricThomas, OW2

     

    • Theodore Ts'o 4:28 pm on July 18, 2008 Permalink

      By the way, since you seem to have misspelled my name not only in this posting, as well as the previous one, I thought maybe I’d send a correction. My name is “Theodore Ts’o”. That’s with a trailing ‘e’ in my last name, just like the former U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt.

      Regards,

      — Ted

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:30 pm on July 18, 2008 Permalink

      Sorry about that, I corrected it. I hope to meet you at OSCON then!

    • Debbie Morgan 10:58 pm on July 18, 2008 Permalink

      I’d love to attend but absolutely cannot.

      If possible, please post a review when it’s over.

      Thanks a bunch!

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:07 pm on July 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Systems Management: some pieces that caught my eye at Hyperic 

    Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, announced the availability of the beta of CloudStatus, a tool providing an independent view of how works the Amazon Web Services cloud.

    Stacey Schneider, senior director of marketing, after being interviewed introduced me to Jeremy Hogan, who just joined Hyperic as Director of Community Management. Since recently I started speculating on community and sponsored projects, I asked him to talk a little bit about Hyperic’s approach to open source communities.

    Hyperic at this point falls into the bee keeper model, where the majority of the code comes form the company, but I also have a few years of experience at Red Hat, where the bulk of the code comes from the upstream so I can talk about that model as well.

    Really, the community is still a community whether you have corporate interests or commerce driving innovation. Just like the wild west was eventually tamed and settled. Saloons became four star hotels and a rocky chunk of desert became LA.

    I am likely to meet Jeremy at OSCON, so I’ll keep all my questions about how lucrative coopetition can boost Hyperic’s business and his opinion about GroundWork’s attitude to be involved in the coordination of some inter-projects collaborations.

    Technorati Tags: Hyperic, Open Source Management, sponsored project, Jeremy Hogan

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:59 am on July 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: European Interoperability Framework and IPR 

    On the 25th of June IDABC organized an Information Day on the novelties of the new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and now the dispute is open: BSA representatives call for “own goal”, while open source evangelists explain why standards on a RAND basis are discriminatory towards open source software.

    Dispute about Europe-wide definition of open standards

    A dispute has been sparked in Brussels about the definition of open standards to promote the interoperability between eGovernment services. According to drafts for a revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which were recently presented by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Informatics, the specifications of open standards have to be made available either free of charge, or for a specified nominal fee. If a standard, or parts of it, are protected by patents, the revision stipulates that these parts have to be “made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis” for third party use. This has caused protests by IT business associations like the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which counts Microsoft and Intel among its members. [..]

    Jan Wildeboer is an open source evangelist at Red Hat in Europe who supports the plans for the revised EIF version. He explained, in an interview with heise online, “Particularly the stipulation that presumed intellectual property has to be made available without the payment of license fees in open standards complies with a fundamental requirement for open source developers and providers of open source solutions.” He said open standards are generally a “vital component of modern IT infrastructures”, and was surprised that the BSA renewed its call for license fees to be paid for HTTP and DHCP. Wildeboer said this argument has already proved redundant in the debate about software patents.

    Read the full article.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:03 pm on July 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Spain wants to ensure that Open Source users have equal access to eGovernment 

    Spain booked its place in the semifinals in Matthew Aslett’s European Open Source tour, but its political structure swung the decision in France’s favor, the European country who eventually won of the tour, also with my big respect and consideration.

    Today reading epractice.eu, the portal created by the European Commission, I happened to know about Cenatic‘s (Centre for the Application of Open Source Information and Communication Technologies) initiative.

    The new action plan gives top priority to ensuring that Open Source users have equal access to eGovernment. Part of that drive will be a series of studies and reports on electronic filing, process improvement, transparency and electronic billing. These will be linked to Spain’s Law on Citizens’ Electronic Access to Public Services. [..]

    Currently, CENATIC is working on Open Source applications for XBRL, a language for document exchange between administrations. Its interim conclusion is that there are viable Open Source solutions for financial document exchange between public administrations, small and medium-sized enterprises and the tax and regulatory authorities.

    Read the full news.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:26 am on July 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Network Neutrality: European Telecommunications Packet Regulations rejected 

    EU: media lobby’s monitoring proposal rejected

    The Telecommunications Package will not prescribe uninterrupted monitoring of the internet as demanded by the Conservatives on behalf of the media and entertainment industry. On Monday evening, the Industry, Research and Energy Committee (ITRE) and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) of the European Parliament voted on around 1,000 changes to the EU Telecom rules, consolidated into over 30 amendments. The compromise proposal put forward by the rapporteur for the draft framework directive, Catherine Trautmann, was accepted. The Conservatives are said to have become more sceptical about “internet monitoring”.

    Read the full article.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:56 pm on July 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Foundations: GNOME Hires Stormy Peters 

    The GNOME Foundation – engaged to further the goal of the GNOME project to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software – hired Stormy Peters as Executive Director.

    Stormy will be focusing on accelerating the adoption of GNOME desktop, working with the board of directors, to strengthen the foundation by attracting new industry members and community contributors.

    Luis Villa welcoming Stormy on board said:

    This is obviously a big commitment for GNOME. It has been a while since we’ve had a full-time employee, and we’ve clearly been doing pretty OK without one – we continue to have good relationships with our advisory board, we still have a strong community, and we continue to develop very strong, relevant software. So there is an obvious question of ‘why now?’ My answer is that this a time of opportunity for GNOME – we have a ton of opportunities in the mobile space; we’re starting to see Linux desktop uptake at places like Dell and Asus; and we serve an important role as a critical infrastructure provider for exciting, dynamic projects like Mozilla and OLPC.

    The GNOME board felt the need to employ a professional with a proven track of record to face challenges and to pursue opportunities diversely treated by the actual organization. As result from a recent academic research, volunteers are key drivers of peripheral activities, while community-integrated paid developers have an important role in project  development, maintaining the infrastructure aspects of the code base.

    Attracting industry members and similar strategic tasks are not an autonomous peripheral participation,  a term used to describe activities that support and complement code development within /OS projects, like translations, interface aspects visible to the user, writing, marketing and artwork.

    Is Stormy Peters the right person for that job? She shared with me a little background of her.

    I’ve been involved with the GNOME community for eight years now – they were my introduction into the world of open source. After my first GUADEC, I was hooked by the GNOME community’s passion and excitement about creating a free and open source desktop for all as well as an awesome development environment.

    Luis Villa reporting about Stormy hiring process says very good things of her, so she is probably the most suited for such job. A tough job, requiring to accommodate pretty different needs, being even if the GNOME Foundation is a sponsored community project.

    I didn’t find much about GNOME Financial information, and I asked Stormy the following question:

    How does the GNOME Foundation pay your salary?

    The GNOME Foundation has a number of income streams from sponsorship fees to GUADEC (their annual conference). The current funding will cover my salary, but the hope is that my involvement will increase the community and industry involvement as well.

    Stormy will be creating her own job, and it is a probably a very new one.

    I wish you best of luck!

    Technorati Tags: StormyPeters, GUADEC, GNOME, GNOME Foundation

     

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