Mail merge in OpenOffice.org – mail merge in OpenOffice.org made clear.
Microsoft Invites to ODF Workshop in Redmond – Erwin Tenhumberg, who is leaving Sun to join SAP, reports about the event.
Open source tour of Europe: Portugal – Matthew Aslett reports about OpenOffice.org/StarOffice in Portugal since 2004, just as happened in Italy.
epractice.eu, the portal created by the European Commission offers a service for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners, reported about Lazio e-Citizen, a digital inclusion project.
The programme responded to European directives on the Lisbon Strategy and its objectives were to increase the residents’ awareness of the importance of digital literacy, the benefits that e-skills bring to their personal and professional lives, and to fight against social exclusion. The project developed a strategy to bridge the digital divide based on specific criteria: gender, age and skill levels.
Don’t be a secret keeper by *Drangongly*
I asked Alessandra Devitofrancesco (ECDL foundation), author of the Lazio e-Citizen case reported on epractice to tell me more, and she kindly put me in touch with the AICA (ECDL member) responsible of the initiative, Pierpaolo Maggi.
He explained me that the project has been developed using the open source course management system Moodle, and that the portal is accessible also through Firefox and Netscape. On the contrary the article on epractice and also e-citizen FAQ report (bold emphasis is mine):
The schools, universities and Permanent Territorial Centres which were involved in the Lazio e-Citizen project were chosen according to different technological requirements:
- Availability of one or more rooms with at least 12+5 desks and Internet access (ADSL or wireless)
- LAN network among all desks and shared printer
- PC Pentium 4 (or superior) or equivalent (i.e. AMD)
- Windows 2000 or later versions
- Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 or superior
- Accessories: audio set and headphones: CD ROM reader, minimum video resolution SVGA 800×600
It is time for outing, I publicly invite project’s promoters to disclose the specific technology choice (moodle), how it has been used and, last but not the least, telling people that the portal is accessible to open source.
eAccessibility and eInclusion are definitely also about allowing open source users to access information.
Roberto, thank you for this news. I’m glad to hear of Lazio’s turn to OSS like Moodle. It would be even better if the Lazio e-Citizen effort was fully OSS, to include compatibility with Mozilla Firefox which would make it usable on any OS (Mac OS, Win, Linux.)
If Pierpaolo Maggi is interested in speaking with any of the Mozilla Italia community, I’m sure they would be interested in helping e-Citizen’s software work on Firefox.
Hi Gen,
thank you to join the conversation. Pierpaolo wrote me that it works fine with Mozilla, but he didn’t tell me on which OS. I will forward him your kindly offer.
SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, a competitiveness cluster aimed at developing the local economy and enterprises’ competitiveness, using partnership and training to produce and deliver enabling innovations, just run its third internal convention. Among the five thematic groups, since October 2007 has been included a technology-oriented working group on open source (Logiciel Libre).
Paris, capital du logiciel libre by Koninho
Roberto Di Cosmo, professor at the university of Paris-Diderot and president of the Logiciel Libre working group, invited me to join the event to learn more about what is going on in the Paris area in the free software arena.
Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva’s CEO, is the vice-president of the open source thematic group, while in the council are sitting representatives from big firms like Cap Gemini, Bull, C-S, along with people from INRIA, university Pierre et Marie Curie and Nuxeo.
Roberto explains that the goal of this group is to help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area by federating research laboratories, SMEs and big firms through R&D projects, partially supported by public funding in the standard scheme of competitivenes clusters.
The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors. On the other side, this framework has been put at work in the particularly fertile ground of the Paris area, that hosts 50% of the ITC R&D of France, with a significant presence of Open Source ISV, a large number of research centers and Universities with IT laboratories, that have a long tradition of contributing to Free Software, and an exceptionally high concentration if IT expenditures.
Roberto, how System@tic allocates resources to the projects?
A distinguishing feature of the R&D projects in a competitiveness cluster, is that they must bring together at least two industrial partners and a research laboratory. In the case of our group, resources are allocated in the following manner: 59% SMEs, 26% laboratories, 15% big firms. The projects go through a rigorous evaluation process, first inside the group, then at the level of the cluster, and then in the services of the ministry of Industry, the region, and the departments of the Paris area.
During the first year public investments sum up to less than five millions euro, less than half of the how much has been allocated for open source software by the Italian budget law last year, this year and next one. Italy is investing more money actually, but it is still unclear how such investments will eventually benefit the IT Italian ecosystem, though.
Italy is still missing a clear strategy about how to foster the Italian open source ecosystem through training, education, research and outreach, while France apparently has found its own path for developing it.
Dominique Vernay, Systematic president, during his opening speech congratulated the Open Source group for the speed with which it has started 4 high quality R&D projects, integrating quickly in the Systematic infrastructure.
Marc Lipinski – vice president of the Conseil Régional de l’Ile de France for higher education, research and innovation – gave a particular importance to the role of this group while addressing the over 400 delegates present in the room, stressing its creation as one of the most significant events in the last year for Systematic.
During coffee-breaks I spoke with few French open source actors, among others Cedric Thomas (OW2), Ludovic Dubost (Xwiki), Stéfane Fermiger (Nuxeo), Daniel Schaefer (Kalis), but also with open source customers, like Denis Teyssou (AFP) or Marie Buhot-Launay (Paris Region Economic Development Agency), inward investment adviser for ISV companies wanting to invest in the Paris area.
People had a very positive feeling with regard to the approved open source projects, and looking at projects like scribo is easy to share their thoughts.
SCRIBO – Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies – aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents. SCRIBO has a total budget of 4.3M? and is partially funded by the French administration. It brings 9 participants together: AFP, CEA LIST, INRIA, LRDE (Epita), Mandriva, Nuxeo, Proxem, Tagmatica and XWiki.
Italy beat France on a soccer field, but on the open source ground we have a lot to learn from them.
Hm… I wonder why the hell Di Cosmo didn’t tell his students about this …
Profoss last week organised an event on OpenOffice.org deployments in professional environments.
Running with the seagulls, by * Toshio *
The event was opened by Roberto Galoppini, who talked about the approach and methodology available for a successful OpenOffice.org migration. After an introduction to the OpenOffice.org community and the way OpenOffice.org has been promoted in Italy, with significant results (doubling of download year over year), Roberto went ahead with advices on OpenOffice.org migrations, based on his own experience. I won’t make a recap of this talk here, but as often, the most obvious points are those that are worth repeating: involve your users, evaluate the situation before migrating, etc. Worth noting is that integration of OpenOffice.org with other enterprise systems might cause troubles at some point. Maybe a repository of approved or certified OpenOffice.org extensions might be helping here, but Roberto doesn’t see a global initiative happening soon, or unrelated to commercial interests of a company.
Next was Eric Descamps, project manager at the Belgian Post for the pilot on OpenOffice.org. After evaluation of the business case of an OOo deployment at the Belgian Post, it was discovered that the returns were more or less the same if the deployment started in a window between now and in 2 years. As a result, the project is now frozen, but can be restarted anytime. I guess this is a good argument when negociating with Microsoft. Let’s hope it won’t be limited at that though. Because the pilot at the Post brought interesting information. As an example, most problems encountered by users where due to format conversions. And this is in agreement with Roberto, who advised to switch to ODF altogether when switching to OOo.
During the break, Bruno Lowagie, from iText fame, gave a demo combining iText and OOo for the generation of PDF documents: the template bring edited in OOo, and the final document generated by iText.
After the break, it was Machtelt Garrels‘ turn to talk. Machtelt is the co-founder of the Belgian chapter of the OpenDoc Society, and gave a passioned talk about avoiding the common pitfalls during a migration. As mentioned above, it’s funny to see the most obvious things be worth repeating. One such thing is that management has to give the example. How can an employee be motivated by a change to OOo if his own managers don’t take the step themselves?
Her talk was followed by a panel discussion where all speakers participated.
This panel discussion closed the third Profoss event, which was again highly rated by all participants.
Profoss was started one year ago to provide quality information about the use of free and open source software in professional environments. Open source technologies are still too often dismissed as unreliable, unsupported geek toys. This is a judgment generally based on unverified allegations or due to ignorance of the open source world. Profoss wants professionals to take their decision to use or reject open source technologies on hard facts.
To reach that goal, Profoss’ first initiative was to organise events bringing non-commercial, informative content.
This was followed by other initiatives like a news website, directories of software and professionals specialised in open source and a planet aggregating feeds from blogs talking about professional open source at planet.profoss.eu.
If you want to be updated about Profoss activities, you can join the newsletter.
RRDTool, the round-robin database tool, announced the release of RRDtool 1.3. The new release includes additional capabilities and functionalities, and it has been rewritten to make it more modular.
Tobias Oetiker, the author of many famous open source tools like RRDTool, MRTG and SmokePing holding a seat on GroundWork Open Source’s Project Lead Council, approaches software development from an hacker perspective: to scratch a personal itch.
Tobias Oetiker (on the right) by QFamily
Since I had issues to solve and did not find existing software to do it. Then because I use OSS almost exclusively in my work, I found it only fair to share the results of my work too. After all OSS only works when several parties throw their goods into the basket.
How all this started?
I wrote MRTG and SmokePing because I needed the functionality. So essentially I wrote them for myself. And since I like to see people enjoying using my tools, I put them out there. In the case of rrdtool, I did not need it directly, but based on the experience from writing MRTG I had a pretty clear vision as to what tool is missing from the system managers toolbox.
So the motivation for writing rrdtool was primarily drawn from the positive feedback I got from mrtg users. As it turned out, I had actually hit a nerve with all three of my tools since they all got pretty good use across the net.
For most of the time while developing the tools I have been working for ETH Zurich and did the tool work mostly in my spare time. Since I had a fixed income from the University I did not explore commercial opportunities.
Originally economic incentives weren’t the cause behind such code developments.
What about the economic incentives, today?
I found that publishing software as OSS has the nice effect of triggering more feedback than in a closed environment and also draws contributions every now and then which is a very nice plus the economic value is in me being known quite well for my work which makes it very easy getting contracts, because people assume I know stuff, which is not entirely a wrong assumption <smile>.
There are also direct benefits, in the sense that some companies contract me to develop additional features for the OSS packages. I always draw up the contracts such that I can include the results back into the mainline. Most of smokePing extensions have been created in this way.
Tobias was the typical hacker described by researches interested in understanding motivations (intrisic motivations). Later Tobias was also also motivated by financial rewards (extrinsic motivations), coming from selling consulting services on his products, and he eventually ended open his own company.
Which are your source of revenues, besides consulting?
Well I am trying this with the sponsorship approach, the idea is that companies that profit from the products become a sponsor who just gives money to encourage the future development of the product. I use this money to pay for maintaining the products and developing some additions which are not covered by some other contract, just because I think they are necessary a further source of income is google ads which works quite well due to the high traffic on the website.
Which are the advantages for your customers? And for you?
The big advantage of this approach is that the customers normally have a clear vision of which problem they want to solve, and since I know the tool well I can integrate an optimal solution which will continue to evolve even after the contract ends, since the extension is now part of the product.
This leads to a forth motivation to do it all. Being the author of these well known tools gives me a certain standing in the industry, which comes in handy when bidding for contracts, since customer assume (rightly) that I know stuff and I am able to finish projects.
Our biggest contract last year had nothing to do with any of the tools but the customer asked us only because he had seen my name mentioned in connection with monitoring.
Tobias creates tools in a way that users can get along without needing any extra support contract. The software is enriched as part of their service offerings, and as time goes by they enhance their toolbox. They do not sell tools, but the stuff they make the tools for.
Oetiker + Partner AG is a pure IT service company, for some probably the highest form of open source firm.
Happy hacking Tobias!
About RRDtool
RRDtool is a freely (as in freedom and in beer) available software tool for the collection and graphical display of time series data and is deployed to monitor computer networks and network traffic. Installed at hundred thousands of sites world wide, RRDtool monitors everything from small local networks to large IT infrastructures of internationally operating telecom providers. RRDtool is included in the family of Open Source tools developed by Tobias Oetiker, which also includes MRTG, and SmokePing, which is used for the measurement and display of line quality parameters in Internet connections. For more information about MRTG, RRDtool and SmokePing visit: http://oss.oetiker.ch
OpenOffice-based applications with Mono and MonoDevelop – Miguel de Icaza teaches you how to build OpenOffice solutions with Mono and MonoDevelop.
Italian Webinar – Materiale, Domande e Risposte per il Webinar “Guida alla scalabilita’ di MySQL” – Ivan Zoratti Q&A session held during the Italian webinar on MySQL scalability.
Go hybrid – Paul Bach is looking for projects hosted on CodePlex interested in participating a research aimed at designing Codeplex support.
Forrester survey finds lack of interest in OSS? – Savio on Forrester’s findings, interesting.
Port 25 fighting the good fight: A story of SIP compliance and standards adherence at Microsoft Corporation – James Governor reports about s Sam Ramji’s efforts to ensure Microsoft’s SIP softphone work with Asterisk open source PBX and SIP Server.
Open Source European tour – Matthew Aslett is taking a look at open source policies and deployment projects in some European nations.
Provincial elections will take place in the province of Agrigento over this week end, and apparently Agrigento has its own best open source candidate, Eugenio d’Orsi.
Agrigento by Stefano Liboni
I totally agree with William Hurley, explaining the importance of considering candidates also from this perspective:
Open source is in a position to influence patent reform and help the small businesses that drive our economy. Shouldn’t we consider taking a look at the candidates from this perspective? I thought allowing people to share their opinion on who they see as the best “open source candidate” would be a good way to start a larger discussion.
Assoli, the Italian Association for Free Software, earlier asked Italian Parliament candidates to engage themselves to promote the use of free software, maybe similar initiatives in the future will cover also provincial elections.
This information is misleadingly and is not true because the Arnone’s plan includes a part of open source philosophy, too! You can find the complete plan at the link http://www.peppearnone.net/ultime/programma.html
A part of the plan:
“sposeremo la filosofia alla base dell’open source, favorendo la partecipazione attiva di volontari allo sviluppo di quei processi necessari affinché il ‘sistema provincia’ assicuri delle risposte pronte”.
Best Regards,
Giovanni Spoto
Hi Giovanni,
I didn’t know that also Peppe Arnone is in favor of open source, thank you to point it out. Let’s have a look at the two different approaches now.
Eugenio D’Orsi’s press release reports:
Perché lo slancio nell’adozione e lo sviluppo di soluzioni non diventi una semplice dichiarazione di intenti, magari prendendo la forma di una delibera di giunta a cui non seguano azioni concrete, è mia intenzione attivare un dialogo consultivo con le realtà associative e imprenditoriali sul territorio, e grazie al loro contributo definire un piano di azione efficace, che consenta alla pubblica amministrazione di efficientare il processo di acquisizione e utilizzo di soluzioni aperte,permettendo al tempo stesso alle imprese di contribuire positivamente a questa azione.
According to that Eugenio D’Orsi wants to open up the dialog with associations and companies, in order to collaboratively define a plan to efficientize the IT procurement process. The role of IT firms seems central in his vision.
Peppe Arnone instead is willing to bring in the equations volunteers to help the province to promptly answer citizens’ needs.
Open source for public administrations is about foster open source ecosystems or is about involving volunteers?
Let’s see what is going to happen after the elections..
I would like to join the the ongoing discussion about open source software business models driven by Matthew Aslett who in turn was answering Savio Rodrigues‘s post on how to fix the ‘broken’ open source business model.
Production by The Library of Congress
Before getting into the conversation, it is useful to recap what is an open source business model. Researchers, tech writers and consultants often taxonomize open source business models mentioning just the license scheme and what is sold the most. The result is that the vast majority of the open source firms seem to use just the same business model. Under this approach we might consider firms like Zenoss and GroundWork as if they were applying the same business model – i.e. differentiating on features their commercial and community products. But the two firms are using different open source production models, resulting in different core capabilities and configuration of activities (2 of the 9 building blocks used to describe a business model).
Zenoss develops its own platform, building it with the classical corporate production model, where all stages of software production are carried on within the organization using some open source plumbing. GroundWork has adopted an hybrid production model, relying on existing projects and contribute directly to them, and also indirectly spending effort coordinating some inter-projects collaborations.
Differences like these can affect what customers choose to buy, eventually ending to better determine your customer segment. For example customers interested in Nagios, could be not happy with an open source project supported by a services organization. Instead they might prefer a software company offering subscriptions services along with a corporate community support. Others in order to avoid lock-in risk might want to buy only from a community driven open source firm, privileging one of the ISVs delivering services on Nagios.
Open source customers are more right than others.
Business models are a simplified representation of how a company makes business, and elements to describe it have to be choosen carefully.
Seems like the open source debate is heating up. PacketTrap Networks had a similar debate with others in commerical open source several months ago. The debate continues i guess. I tend to agree with Goodman from PacketTrap in his post here:
http://www.packettrap.com/blog/index.php/june-16th-2008-commercial-open-source-debate/
I read the old “debate”, and also their position paper on open source. They do not distinguish between corporate and hybrid production models, so that open source is always about communities in their perspective. Moreover in their opinion open source is always about coordinating volunteers, while just open source network management projects like MRTG or RRDTool are developed by a single developer.
Their theorem is pretty clear:
PacketTrap’s position that IT departments should be skeptical of POSS vendors (i.e. Hyperic, GroundWorkOpen)because shareholder profit motive overrides community and, for this reason, the long term viability of these companies is questionable
On the contrary Tobias Oetiker seems to be happy with GroundWork sponsorship, and I believe that asking Cacti guys and others we might get similar feedback.
Talking about long term viability, I am afraid that small proprietary vendors are a much more risky bet, though.
On June 25, the IDABC unit of the European Commission will organize an Information Day on the novelties of the upcoming new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which is currently under preparation.
Promoting the concept of interoperable systems is at the heart of the IDABC strategy. Taking into account the progress made in this area, the rapid evolution of the technology and the wish to no longer be limited to the IDABC context, a second version of the EIF has been prepared. This second version has been written in close collaboration with the relevant Commission services and with the Member States. Other, indirect stakeholders also provided their input.
The Info Day will take place on 25 June 2008 in Brussels. The registration is open until 16 June 2008.
More details on the Info Day can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en
Register to the IDABC web page to get acquainted to the free services/publications/ conferences of IDABC by filling in the online form.
Roberto Galoppini, and 
Djordje Lukic are discussing. 
GoodDebate, and
Reply