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  • Roberto Galoppini 10:14 am on April 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Identity Management: eID Cards and Free Software in Europe 

    Smart cards and digital signatures are presented as among the most important components of e-government in Europe, but they are still far from being an effective, Linux-friendly solution to reduce administrative and business costs. But the same tools may become a way to make the general public use or support Free Software.

    Almost 10 years ago, European Community directive 1999/93/Ce stated the principle that, in certain cases and under certain conditions, a digital signature can be just as reliable and legally binding as one on paper. “Qualified electronic signatures,” which are generated with a secure device and validated by an official certificate, belong to this category. For this reason, digital signatures and identification through smart cards are considered one of the main tools to reduce costs and increase efficiency in European e-government and public administrations. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported in March that Italian economy as a whole saved €260 million since some procedures to create a new company went entirely digital, and that, country-wide, online tax filings cost €90 million less every year than doing them with paper documents.

    Back in 1997, Italy was the first EU country to acknowledge the legal validity of electronic documents. The Code of Digital Administration that followed in 2005 laid down the official rules for using digital signatures and smart cards in the country. As a result, as of June 2007 Italy was also the EU country with the highest number of smart cards — almost three million — released for official purposes. In the coming years this trend will grow, due both to the need to comply with national and EU regulations and, above all, to reduce costs.

    In spite of all this, however, inertia, as well as lack of information and coordination, still limit the benefits of smart cards in Italy, especially for GNU/Linux users. Many procedures and tools are either redundant, obscure, or far from being technically and legally interoperable, even when they are open source.

    Read the full article, by Marco Fioretti.

    On the same topic read also the report on the 12th Porvoo group meeting, by Bud Bruegger.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:54 pm on April 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Voices: Videos from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 

    The Linux Foundation’s Annual Collaboration Summit kiked off  yesterday in Austin, Texas.

    The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization historically dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, is bringing together many open source protagonists over these days, there are few live video coming out of the summit today at YouTube.

    Check them out by yourself, among others Marten Mickos, Ross Turk and Raven Zachary.

    Technorati Tags: Linux Foundation, MartenMickos, RossTurk, RavenZachary

    Yesterday

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:00 pm on April 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: Open Parliament Initiative, join the petition 

    I am a citizen of the EU, and I want the European Parliament to adopt the use of open standards and to promote interoperability in the ICT sector.

    The signatories of this petition, representing a Community for Freedom of Choice and Market in the European Union, draw the attention of the Members of the European Parliament to the current situation where the institution’s ICT systems are locked into the products of one vendor, warns about the implications of this for participative democracy and for fair competition, and calls for action to promote Open Standards and Interoperability.

    Read and sign the petition.

    Technorati Tags: open standards, open parliament, petition

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:09 am on April 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Internet Governance Forum: Draft Programme for the 3rd Meeting (Hyderabad, 3-6 December 2008) 

    The third Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting will be held at Hyderabad on the 3-6 December 2008, a draft programme is available and open for discussion. Comments submitted to the IGF Website by 1 May will be reflected in a revised version that will be issued as a conference room paper at the consultations on 13 May.

    1 Introduction

    This paper aims to provide an input into the open round of consultations on 13 May 2008 to discuss programme and agenda for the third meeting of the IGF in Hyderabad. It gives a first draft programme outline, focusing on structure rather than content. The draft programme outline tries to make best possible use of the facilities that are available a..t the conference venue. It also takes into account the fact that participation at the first meetings in Athens and Rio de Janeiro exceeded expectations and that as many, if not more, people are expected to attend the Hyderabad meeting.

    The paper is conceived a rolling document. Comments submitted to the IGF Web site by 1 May will be reflected in a revised version that will be issued as a conference room paper at the consultations on 13 May.

    2 Basic structure for the Hyderabad meeting

    The proposed meeting structure builds on the successes of the Athens and Rio de Janeiro meetings and takes into account the comments made in the stocktaking process, both on-line and at the meetings in Geneva on 26-28 February. As was the case in Rio de Janeiro, the Hyderabad meeting will not be merely repeating the structure of the inaugural meeting, but will have its own character and will go beyond the formats used previously. The informal, interactive multistakeholder format was generally seen as one of the key factors of the success of the first two meetings and should be maintained as a guiding principle. Participation will follow the format used at the previous meetings and all entities and persons with proven expertise and experience in matters related to Internet governance may apply to register as participants.

    The basic format of the previous meetings, with main sessions and workshops, should be maintained. The five broad themes – access, openness, security, diversity, and critical Internet resources – will be retained but not necessarily as themes for the main sessions. The point was made that the general issues had been effectively covered during the previous two IGF meetings and that the sessions in Hyderabad should be more focused.

    Technorati Tags: IGF, Internet Governance Forum, Hyderabad

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:25 pm on April 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: Standards Organizations, how open are them? an Evaluation Methodology 

    IDC prepared a document for the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency (NITA) describing a methodology to evaluate Standard Setting Organizations (SSO) with regard to the degree of openness of the organization and thereby the degree of openness in their deliverables, i.e. standards.

    IDC starting from the ten rights that enable open standards mentioned before, evaluated ten organizations -  CEN, Ecma, ETSI, IETF, ISO, ITU, NIST, OASIS, OMG, and W3C – and all organizations had the opportunity to review and comment on the evaluation of their organization. NITA specified 9 of Krechmer’s criteria, where the exclusion of “Open World” stems from the re-purposing of “Open Interface”, extended to covering both and accordingly renamed “Open Interoperability”.

    IDC in conclusion states that there are differences between standard setting organizations in terms of “openness” and is implemented, concluding that it is difficult to make a distinction of which form of “openness” is the most appropriate. (More …)

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:04 pm on April 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Standards: Do Open Standards’ implementations meet their specifications? 

    IT vendors are not asked to prove that their software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications. Declarations of conformity to a file format standard is a self-certification process.

    My speech on the session entitled “Tomorrow’s data availability depends upon today’s data format“ at the OMAT conference was on standards conformance, an issue too often not considered.

    In the European Economic Area the CE mark is a mandatory conformity mark for certain product groups to indicate conformity with the essential health and safety requirements set out in European Directives. In short you need a CE mark to sell a plug or a toy, but you can sell software without any external test house which evaluates the product and its documentation. At the end of the day there is no organization that assess standards compliance, we can just rely on implementors’ statements of compliance.

    Ken Krechmer over the last ten years spent time and efforts to define the meaning of Open Standards, and he was the first to clearly explain the different views of all standards’ stakeholders.

    It is common to think of standardization as the process of standards creation, but this view excludes those who implement the standard (implementers) and those who use the implementations of the standard (users).

    Krechmer identifying each constituency’s view gives us a complete description of Open Standards emerge, and a key to understand what is in our interests. I introduced the OMAT’s audience to the ten rights that enable open standards using the following visual presentation.

    (Either JavaScript is not active or you are using an old version of Adobe Flash Player. Please install the newest Flash Player.)

    I went through all criteria, stressing the importance of some of them, like the “Open Meeting” one, establishing that all stakeholders can participate. A right not addressed by many Standard Specification Organizations like ISO, OASIS and W3C, all having in place a pay-to-become-a-member policy.

    “Open Documents”, the right to see any documents from a Standard Specification Organization included individual technical proposals and meeting reports, is a standardization right connected to Open Meeting. It come no surprise that the transparency of a meeting is related to the availability of all the documents from the meeting. Again, ISO and other organizations do not fulfill this right.

    I stressed also the importance of “Open Change”, the right that gives the ability to prevent predatory practices through license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace and extend tactics.

    Last but not least “Open Use” identifies the value of conformance for implementers and users. While multiple implementers can gather together to check if their implementations work with each other (plug-fest), users do need a formal entity taking care of the conformance process. Apparently ETSI is a candidate, it is up to you to judge whether it is a good or a bad thing.

    Note that only when all ten rights are supported will standards be really open to all.

    Technorati Tags: KenKrechmer, Open Standards, predatory practices, SSO, standardization body, file format

     

    • Ken Krechmer 4:25 am on June 16, 2008 Permalink

      Thank you for your very kind comments on my work. I think your suggestions about the need for specific aspects of openness are excellent. One aspect you did not mention, I think should be emphasized – open interface. This is the most difficult aspect to understand, but perhaps the most useful today as it offers a means to support both public and proprietary features in a standard. This provides a way around most of the intellectual property issues that bedevil standardization today. The paper The Entrepreneur and Standards http://www.csrstds.com/IECChallenge2006.pdf given an introduction to this aspect and the paper The Fundamental Nature of Standards (http://www.csrstds.com/fundtec.html) under etiquettes gives a more technical description.

    • Roberto Galoppini 3:13 pm on June 16, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Ken,

      I am glad to disseminate your message on open standards, is really important to let people know that standardization is a process, not a product.

      I always mention “open interface” in my speeches, explaining the importance of it. I also mention that “open interface” should go along with “open change”, in order to avoid predatory practices. I will try to cover these topics more extensively in the next future, thanks for your hint!

  • Egor Grebnev 8:24 am on April 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Education: Progress of Free Software in Russian Schools 

    Not much has been heard after a loud announcement last autumn that Russia is going to migrate its secondary education to a Free Software operating system developed locally. There have been many announcements of this kind in past, and only few of them eventually led to some worthwhile results. For example, China’s Jiangsu deployment of Linux in secondary education was deemed to be the largest in history, but the feedback gained from it was so poor (only few messages were posted in the online forum that was taken down eventually) that there is almost no doubt as to the outcome of this project. It could have played its role, however, in trading China’s deal with Microsoft that now allows students in China to legally buy Windows+Office bundles for only $3.

    And what about Russia? Maybe the school project is just another example of someone’s ungrounded ambitions and poorly made estimates? It may be too early to say for sure, but there is already some evidence that the project will not remain unfruitful.First of all, first deliverables have already become available. Openly and publicly (Russian). Among others, you are able to download the specially tailored Linux distributions, including a version tailored for older PCs with 128-256 MB of RAM and P-233-class CPUs and a Terminal Server edition that allows to use older PCs as thin terminals provided a decent server is available in the classroom.Secondly, the information is now coming from more than one source, which indicates that the regional participants of the project have both freedom and willingness to act (Perm, Tomsk, Moscow, all in Russian). The most curious is the website of the Perm region, where a map of the integration progress is available. The numbers in black correspond to the total amount of schools (first number is for city/town schools, second is for rural schools), the numbers in red correspond to the schools where Free Software is already being used.

    And what do the teachers say? The forum threads devoted to FOSS usage in schools are numerous, and are thus hard to summarize. Those of the teachers who are FOSS proponents are enthusiastic, and they try to reaffirm their position by pointing to the work that is being done by the Armada consortium and ALT Linux in particular as its most visible participant. The attitude of their colleagues varies from reserved support to skepticism, which sometimes comes from their inability to make computer peripherals work properly under Linux, and sometimes from the belief that the Microsoft monopoly is unbreakable.

    Are these skeptics wrong? We will see by the end of 2008.

    Technorati Tags: open source education, ALT Linux, Armada Consortium

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:50 am on April 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org: OOoCrackz, an Italian Extension to get in the Piracy Market 

    PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project association, announces the availability of OOoCrackz, an Extension that allow users to use the free and open source suite in a “crack mode”. The extension aims at answering the needs of 51% of the Italian market, that is in the hands of pirates.

    Funding Software PiracyWe fund organized Crime by dontaskme

    Davide Dozza, PLIO’s President, explains why the Italian association decided to develop OOoCrackz:

    Reading “The Economic Benefits of Lowering PC Software Piracy“, an IDC research sponsored by the Business Software Alliance, we understood that OpenOffice.org license represents an obstacle to the adoption of he suite for about half of the Italian population, actually using mostly pirate software.

    OOoCrakcz takes away three out of four freedoms, making illegal the access to the source code, the freedom to modify the code and redistribute it, just as every other proprietary software.

    OOoCrackz has been developed by a PLIO’s member, Paolo Mantovani, one of the most known expert on OpenOffice.org macros and extensions expert:

    The first release of extension allows only the activation of the “illegal mode”, but we are working on an evolution of the extension that will prevent you from releasing documents under Creative Commons licenses. The risk to manage is that the user could inadvertidly respect the copyright law.

    To provide you with a real experience of using a pirate software, OOoCrackz prevents the registration and block all possible updates. The idea behind such choice is to make soon your copy obsolete, eventually exposing the user to security problems as happens with illegal copies.

    Italo Vignoli, PLIO’s Marketing and Communication Manager stated:

    The PLIO annual assembly announced marketing initiative to improve OpenOffice.org penetration in the Italian market. With this announcement we are targeting the illegal software market, a segment not yet addressed by our offer. This will reflect in our coverage of the market, and therefore we foresee an increase of our market share.

    Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice, DavideDozza, PaoloMantovani, ItaloVignoli, OOoCrackz, Piracy Market, IDC, BSA

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:06 am on March 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Observatory Monthly news: European Commission, France, Germany 

    EU: European Commission to increase its use of Open Source  – The European Commission will take a more pro-active approach to its own use of Open Source. I hope dissemination of results will be on the agenda. In case I am here to help to spread the word through the internet.

    FR: Software fund selects first four Open Source projects – The French software research and development fund System@tic Paris Region’ has selected its first four Open Source projects for funding, it announced early this month. Même for myself: contact Roberto Di Cosmo to know more about that.

    DE: Open Source reduces costs for national air traffic control – Using Open Source software has helped the German air traffic control service provider, Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS) to lower its costs, while maintaining high quality IT services. When is it going to happen in Italy as well?

    Read them all.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:02 pm on March 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source at Microsoft: Microsoft engages SourceSense to develop a new version of Apache POI, some background 

    Microsoft and Sourcesense recently announced that are partnering to jointly contribute to the development t of a new version of Apache POI, an Apache top level project.

    Apache POI support for Open XML is now in development, to get here took about one year and the first release is expected to be available during the second quarter of 2008.Being personally involved in the process from the very beginning, I want to tell you about how building bridges and find ways to make Microsoft and Open Source firms work together is coming true.

    bridgeA useful bridge by petetaylor

    Last year I have been consulting to Microsoft Italy to help them to better understand the free software principles and the business model and to validate their thoughts on how to find ways to cooperate with the FOSS world on interoperability, licensing schemas and possibly joint initiatives.

    Andrea Valboni, Microsoft Italy CTO, at that stage was involved in the OOXML process, and one of the point of discussion about that format was: how people can use IT, how developers can take advantage from it. The issue of a reference implementation was coming out in the debate of that time. Here the full story, in Andrea’s words:

    I was discussing this over the phone with Roberto Galoppini (we have been not always on the same page,but our interaction have been always very respectful and intellectually honest), he was not very much convinced that a reference implementation could help developers, although a good idea. His point of view was more in favor of a set of libraries that can avoid developers to enter into the format’s details and concentrate on the application functionalities. I then asked whether he knew someone that can be interested in doing this.

    Having been the founder of the Italian open source consortium (CIRS) I do know many Italian open source companies, and I knew I had the perfect match with Sourcesense, an italian-rooted Open Source systems integrator with a strong international outreach and a great track record in participation to Open Source communities: I knew Gianugo Rabellino, Sourcesense’s CEO and a well know member of the Apache Software Foundation, was and is the right man for the job, and I was in touch with Marco Bruni, founder of Pro-netics group, an Italian IT group with solid Open Source roots and the company behind Sourcesense. I added two and two, and I made introductions.

    Getting back to Andrea’s tale, here how it goes on:

    So a beautiful sunny morning some days after that talk, I was sitting in a bar in Rome, having a coffee with Roberto and Marco Bruni, discussing about formats and listening to opinions of an open source company’s manager. Also the dialog I had with Marco was very open and frank, we both explained our reciprocal points of view and ideas, then he talked about Java libraries they are using to access Office binary formats. As I asked for more info, he talked me about the Jakarta/POI project [Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files] of the Apache Foundation.

    Sometime after that meeting, Gianugo was sitting in our office at Segrate, explaining to me and few legals the Apache License and more in general the open source licensing and how the Apache Foundation is working and the communities rules working under this umbrella: he was pretty clear, that’s are the rules, if we would like to create a cooperation.

    And it happened, the agreement took form day after day.

    I am glad I have been helping to make it happen playing the open source hub role, I really wish this partnership to be the first of many other involving open source firms, possibly European and Italian ones!

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, microsoft, sourcesense, marcobruni, pro-netics, sourcesense, apache, POI, OpenXML

     

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