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  • Roberto Galoppini 10:50 am on November 20, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Internet Governance Forum: IP Justice Report on line 

    The second Internet Governance Forum (IGF) hosted by the United Nations is officially over.

    The IGF, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 12–15 November 2007, was aimed to advance discussion on issues related to Internet governance, mainly on the following five themes: Openness, Access, Security, Diversity, and issues related to the management of Critical Internet Resources.

    The best part of IGF 2007 was undoubtedly the various workshops, “dynamic coalition” meetings, and best practice sessions, which were independently organized by the meeting’s participants. The level of quality of the dialogue in many of these sessions was outstanding, with diverse stakeholders coming together to engage on a common topic and present different viewpoints. All of the new ideas discussed at this year’s forum — indeed all discussion of “emerging issues” — came from the independently organized workshops and best practice sessions. As IGF Chairman Nitin Desai put it during the 2007 closing session: like the Internet itself, all the real action at this forum was at the edges.

    In addition to the robust quality of the non-main session discussions, IGF-Rio offered an incredible number (84) of meetings on a broad range of subjects – indeed so many that participants had to choose between several interesting sessions that were scheduled concurrently. But don’t fret: you can still watch or listen to all missed sessions for years to come via the Internet.

    Read the full report at IP Justice Website.

    Technorati Tags: IP Justice, IGF, Internet Governance Forum

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:44 pm on November 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Internet Governance Forum: Discussions on Open Standards and Access to Knowledge at the IGF 

    RIO DE JANEIRO – Intellectual property-related issues were a topic avoided by governments during the 2003-2005 World Summit on the Information Society, which gave way to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). But at the second IGF in Rio de Janeiro last week there were several IP-related workshops.Organisers of the dynamic coalitions on open standards, access to knowledge and the newly formed coalition on digital education said they were satisfied with the attention IP issues drew.

    David Gross, the United States delegation lead, said he had been interested to see how much IP issues had come up. “IP issues of course are always an important issue,” said Gross, the US coordinator for international communications and information policy. “But there are many other places devoted to that topic, like WIPO [the World Intellectual Property Organization] or WTO [the World Trade Organization]. The fact that people think that the IGF is a place for these issues was interesting to me.” But Gross called it a misused opportunity that issues of the free flow of information had not come up more instead.

    Read the full article at the Intellectual Property Watch.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:37 pm on November 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    The Future of Mobile: Tony Fish’s keynote speech 

    While at the Future of Mobile, the event organised by Carsonified Systems last week in London, I enjoyed very much Tony Fish‘s key-note speech.

    I asked Tony to pass me over his presentation in order to write an article for an Italian magazine, and here I am reporting just some of his notes regarding Digital Footprint.

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

    Footprints: Like Neil Armstrong we all leave footprints. 2.0 has a fascination with this data, in web 2.0 language ‘the next intel inside.’ I don’t associate footprints with identity. Footprints are about where we have been, for low long, how often and the inter-relationships.

    Therefore Digital Footprint is not identity, your passport, bank account or social security number. Digital Footprints come from mobile, web and TV – the digital data and metadata of who we are, the true value and why the ownership of this data is the battle ground to be won and lost, the reason why Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google wakes up thinking mobile before he looks at his email or worries about the value of double click or improving a search algorithm.

    However this footprint and its digital data I contend is mine. Google gets your hands off it, but who will I trust with my digital footprint if I don’t want Google to have it. I need a trusted, open digital footprint store. Collecting, collating and serving my footprints, through an open application protocol interface across all platforms. I want to share my footprint, as this will lead to service companies improving my experience as it will become personalized. But who should I trust and what should I trust them for. To understand this we need a small diversion to chat about advertising, as this is a model to justify your views and assertions.

    Advertising started with the age of assertion, “washing powder washes whiter than white”. It moved to the second phase of engagement, comparison and involvement – “look what your neighbour uses.” The current phase is about attitude – “Dirt is Good”, but advertising in what-ever shape or form requires channels and feedback, something it lacked until recently. Advertising is currently used to justify every business model, with the associated convergence or bundling issue of everything else is free. A symbiotic parasite. But the advertising to give you something for free requires an understanding of your personal data, based on your digital footprint. Therefore if I control your digital footprint, I control the advertising revenues. But as Google only controls the web footprint, control of the mobile is critical, especially when you consider Mobile adds whole new classes of unique data – location and attention.

    But there is a school of thought that says if I own my digital footprint data, I could sell this to advertisers directly, but this poses the difficult question of who would store it, how it is collected, shared and protected, great topics but not for now.

    I want you to consider line of sight advertising for a moment. Consider the following model. Suppose that a bill board, or a scene that it within your line of sight could be controlled by you mobile device. Advertising now becomes specific to the person looking? But how would it cope with the crowd. Would the utopia vision focus on those who are strong and marginalize the weak. The social gap becomes formed not by the technology but by those who don’t have the same opinion. We only get to listen to the voice we want – this is how you train a terrorist. As a design consideration – how about taking away the screen and then consider the uniqueness.

    Indeed, where is there value, is there more value in knowing what I am doing or who I do it with. The TV can provide some data, the web probably more, but the mobile would be unique.

    Therefore as you consider mobile and bring your experience – think about the context and where value is created, not why your doing it, but how others can and will extract value from it.

    Technorati Tags:   TonyFish, Future of Mobile, digital identity,  

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:54 am on November 18, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Tiemann on OLPC, FSFE Transparency, OpenMoko news, Intalio road-show: links 18-11-2007 

    Give One, Get One, Then Some – Tiemann says that the One Laptop Per Child project is one of the boldest vision.

    On the Road again – Intalio after releasing BPMS 5.0 decided to run a road show, Europe ates are December 12 Paris, December 13 Geneva, December 14 London. I’ll try to catch them up in London I guess.

    Enlightenment E17 Desktop UI running on the OpenMoko Neo1973 Mobile – Enlightenment UI desktop running on the OpenMoko.

    Magnolia Community Edition 3.5 (RC1) Available – Magnolia user mailing list announced the availability of version 3.5 RC1.

    FSFE’s Sun Fire T 1000 – Well done Georg, Sun will appreciate your help with word of mouth marketing. It is a transaperent sponsorship, I like it. On the contrary I am still awaiting updates on why you are supporting “Certified Open”.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:52 pm on November 17, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Mobile: Volantis goes Open Source, first thoughts 

    Volantis, the world’s leading supplier in the field of Mobile Content Adaptation, announced that they are going to release in open source a Volantis solution to deliver content to mobile users.

    The Volantis Mobility Server – a solution enabling content providers and carriers to benefit from a ‘write once view anywhere’ content strategy – is already available for download at the community area. Open Source release, under the GPL version 3, is expected within the first quarter of 2008.

    At the Future of Mobile I didn’t get a chance to meet in person people from Volantis, but yesterday I had a skype conversation with Mark Watson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Volantis Systems.

    My first question to Mark was about why they are going open source.

    It is difficult to write mobile applications without an application server like ours. Mobile web is not moving as fast as it should be, and Volantis by contributing with software to the market can help accelerate it.

    Is Volantis expecting to get voluntary contributions from the community?

    We would like that, we don’t want to necessarily depend on it. We don’t want to bet on that for our success.

    While at the present stage there are no plans in place to cooperate with other open source communities, I believe that commensalistic approaches are likely to happen. Let’s wait and see if eventually the Volantis Community will develop a symbiotic approach towards open source communities, and viceversa.

    As a matter of fact Volantis is the first mover in the mobile content delivery arena willing to publish its code under an open source license, and they spent time and effort to choose the appropriate license (Doug, you should also count them from now on!!).

    While Volantis sounds internally organized to keep its mobile equipment database updated – and they might not run Code Sniper or Phone Sniper as does Funambol – I see other similarities with Funambol. Just as Funambol, Volantis today is basically addressing the “top” of the pyramid (the carriers), but by opening its platform, Volantis can substantially enlarge its customer base with a try&buy formula.

    Last but really not the least, I believe that many small IT firms that couldn’t afford platforms like Volantis in the past can now step into this market. And maybe Mark is right in stating:

    We believe that for every potential web application in the PC world, there is going to be a mobile equivalent.

    My suggestion to Mark is the following: what about organising meet ups among IT firms interested in Volantis, just like the Atlassian Group?

    Technorati Tags: mobile content adaptation, open source mobile, volantis

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:20 pm on November 16, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Risk Management: a chat with Doug Levin, Black Duck’s CEO 

    Black Duck Software is an intellectual property management firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts delivering services to identify risks and vulnerabilities in an enterprise’s open-source code.

    Doug Levin, Black Duck’s CEO, today was available for a phone call to tell me more about how they help organizations use open source software and third-party code components while managing software licensing obligations and other business risks.

    Firms offering intellectual assets giving “horizontal” support, meaning companies that sell services not related to a specific package and not related to software development, could play an important in the European market.

    While Asia and USA are historically more acquainted with buying his services, Doug claimed that the European market would develop in the near future and he cited several open source project (Mandriva, ZEA and Alfresco among others) that the company has already worked both directly and indirectly. SourceSense among others is already partnering with them in three different countries, while other two medium sized IT German firms are also Black Duck customers.

    Software patents are not central to business accelerators for Black Duck; copyright and 3rd party and OSS license violations are central to Black Duck’s services, products and training.
    Talking about takers of GPL Doug stated:

    So far small gpl projects associated with FSF were the first to go. We are seeing GPLv3 adoption in relatively small numbers and not being adopted by large projects. SugarCRM and Sambva were exceptions in this respect.

    Doug and I agreed on the fact that SugarCRM made the best decision by not abiding to the OSI “badgeware approved license, and instead choosing the GPLv3, a license which is much closer to the community.

    I am looking forward to meet him soon in Europe, and let you know more about how Black Duck is going to help the European open source ecosystem.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, Open Source Risk, Open Source, Intellectual Property Management, Black Duck, Doug Levin, Software Patent

     

    • Mark Radcliffe 3:44 pm on November 17, 2007 Permalink

      While I have great respect for Doug, I know that you will soon see more commercial major commercial projects adopting GPLv3. I know that several of my commercial clients are seriously considering it, but are waiting for their next revision to make the announcement. I think that we need to wait until a year after the release of GPLv3 to understand the full extent of its adoption. For more thoughts on open soruce issues, you can go to my blog. http://www.lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com.

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:03 pm on November 17, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Mark, thank for joining the conversation. Today I just wrote about a mobile platform that will be licensed under GPLv3 terms.

      I agree with you, only educated customers can do such a choice at this stage, that is good for you, right? 😉

    • Doug Levin 7:50 pm on November 17, 2007 Permalink

      I enjoyed my convo with Roberto, love his blog and agree with Mark Radcliffe that in a year it will be a different license landscape. It will take time for software developers to figure out the merits of v3 relative to other OSI approved licenses.

      Black Duck tracks license trends at http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss. We are fastidious about only tracking deployed projects with licenses, not merely projects that express their intent to license in blogs and press releases.

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:39 pm on November 16, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source at Oracle, Android and Java, CentOS ethicality, Open Source Procurement: links 16-11-2007 

    What did Oracle ever do for open source? Part two. – Matthew Aslett on Oracle Open Source Strategy.

    Retail Therapy for OpenCms – Integration between OpenCms and the Java based commerce system KonaKart.

    Opening the right layers – Is the Google proposal splitting mobile Java delivery still further?

    Unhetical Open Source – James McGovernor argues about CentOS’s approach. Opinions?

    Red Hat & Hyperic Finally Made Me Happy – Savio was definitely right, Red Hat did it.

    Defense procurement ill-suited for open source – about Open Source Procurement by Public Administrations.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:37 pm on November 15, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Mobile: the (open source) Future of Mobile 

    The Future of Mobile took place yesterday in London. Among speakers Luca Passani (AdMob) and Andrea Trasatti (dotMobi) of the WURFL fame, and Dave Burke (google), to talk about Android.

    The event, organised by Carsonified Systems, now looking for someone to lead the Mobile event, was mostly aimed at developers and designers. Brian Fling – an apple-enthusiast – was the host of the event. The great key-note speaker Tony Fish asserted that “Digital Footprint is not identity”, with a fast and furious presentation that really impressed me.

    Luca talked about WURFL and WALL news, in terms of architecture and functionalities. The point on the new WALL NG was made with screenshots: Luca rebuilt the first page of Ebay UK for mobile and showed how the user experience was great on high-end devices, while degrading gracefully on older phones. He also spoke about the upcoming web application designed to simplify the contribution process, today mail-based.
    He raised the well known Vodafone issue – regarding the fact Vodafone is stripping out the essential device identification information that mobile phones send – receiving the applause of the audience. On the topic he remarked that W3C was not playing the “policeman role”, eventually arguing with a W3C representative attending the event.

    Andrea Trasatti explained the dotMobi strategy, and it came out that his open source attitude is not part of his new job at dotMobi. I took my chance to ask his opinion about Volantis going open source, and he told me that all these open source efforts (W3C included) are welcome. On a commercial tone, he believes that the dotMobi device database is going to make the difference, since open source projects like WURFL could fail to keep an updated database.

    But Volantis is the first (commercial) mover in this arena, and I believe that at the end of the day if their community is taking off, dotMobi might change its strategy.

    David Burke, defined as “frighteningly good looking“, got straight to the point showing the audience how easy it is to deploy a simple application with Android. He was really effective, as clearly results also from Mike Butcher’s live blogging.

    Talking about the Android technlogical club, David answered a set of questions about licensing and lock-down hypothesis the Android FAQ way, eventually failing to convince Mike:

    One questioner asked if Google would be subject to anti-trust allegations given that a lot of Google applications will come default with the handsets, but Burke gave the impression that this would be unlikely as handset makers could “swap out applications.” We’ll see I guess.

    So what’s the upshot of all this? In terms of content perhaps not a great deal. If one were to be cynical, one would say that this was mainly about a Google guy appearing in London (which has a big mobile community) at a conference aimed at mobile developers, and was in hiring mode…

    As a matter of fact the technological club behind the Open Handset Alliance seems unwilling to disclose the platform until they have eventually got their first mobile equipments on the shelf. For that we have to wait one year. A result that could be obtained also with a “deffered” GPLv2/v3. Apparently the club likes the apache license more, a risky bet considering OEM’s hystorical attitude to proprietarize the “commons”. See the “successful” Symbian fragmentation.

    I really hope Google makes it work, but lock-down strategies are enabled by not copyleft licenses, and this market has greatly proven to be unable to share any sort of standard, despite everyone yesterday spoke about that. And yes, I agree, “the Future of Mobile is not in the hands of Planet Mobile anymore“!

    Technorati Tags: Android, FOM, AndreaTrasatti, LucaPassani, WURFL, Volantis, Open Source Strategy

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:58 pm on November 14, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Internet Governance Forum: transcripts from Rio 

    The Government of Brazil is hosting in Rio de Janeiro the second Internet Governance Forum meeting. The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF.

    HELOISA MAGALHÃES: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to talk in Portuguese. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am a Brazilian journalist from the “Valor Econômico,” and I am deeply honored to take part in this meeting. For us journalists in economics and finance, this issue is of utmost
    importance. And for me as a Brazilian, there’s special appeal to this. We are a country full of inequalities, and the Internet has proven to be a means of overcoming the challenge. First, I would like to call upon Mr. Ronaldo Lemos, who will chair the session. However, before, I’d like to remind all of you that our intention is to promote a debate. This is to be an interactive session.

    Questions and answers — questions from the audience. I would like to invite those who are sitting at the back of the room to come up closer so that we can have a true interactivity, so that we can have a more joyous interaction. First of all, Mr. Ronaldo, I give you the floor.

    Read the full transcript.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:49 pm on November 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Migration: OpenOffice.org Migration (part 0) 

    Few days ago I wrote my first post about migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, but I want to start it all over from the very beginning, step by step.

    Andrea Trasatti after my post asked me more details over a skype conversation, and I decided to translate and share a slide-show about Migrating to OpenOffice.org.

    The slide-show was originally produced by Davide Dozza – PLIO President and co-mantainer of the Italian Lang OpenOffice.org Project – in collaboration with Carlo Daffara, involved with COSPA project, and myself. I eventually used it at a Java Conference back in 2005, when I gave a speech on the subject.

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

    There are many reasons to migrate to OpenOffice.org, ranging from cost savings – apparently still the most appealing reason for a change – to legal motivations or social ones. Last but not least the escape from vendors’ lock-in, considering that the choice is getting wider. To be honest there is even another reason why firms look into OpenOffice Migration: ask Microsoft a (big) discount!

    Whatever is your reason, you should consider to have a look at “supposed problems“, things that people are going to mention as big (unresolved) issues. Among them it is worth to highlight that one of them – functions appear to be elsewhere – is not as critical as before. Why? Just have a look at Office 2007, and wonder how long will it take to bring your employees to be productive using it!

    You’re not alone, many others have already traveled your road, so please take your time to look to successes and failures as well. Look at the Market share analysis, despite the difficulties due to the informal OpenOffice.org distribution process, they are meaningful and, at some extent, encouraging.

    Every migration involving end-users has to cope with psychological issues, because people don’t like learning to use new tools, and motivations are needed to overcome inertia to change.

    As matter of fact Communication is important, in terms of Internal Marketing, and customized version of OpenOffice, peer-learning and intranet tools could greatly help in this respect.

    Despite Big-Bang migration could sound cool, they simply don’t work. So once you have done a deep analysis of the situation, analyzed your documents and identified homogeneous class of users, you’re ready to go. Step by step.

    Outsiders, i.e. technlogical leaders also known as “champions” in the COSPA terminology, are those people to whom colleagues ask for hints and tips about software tools. Those people are key in a migration, both because they can help others or, if unhappy, prevent the migration to succeded.

    Migration tools and Enterprise management tool are still few, so if you use applications integrated with Microsoft Office don’t look for “packaged services” and consider go alone. But, if you are an IT firm, keeping in mind that European companies are often SMEs, and that the Public Sector – where office suite are often used as an individual productivity tool – is seriously wondering about OpenOffice migrations, consider that there is plenty of space to run a business on OpenOffice migrations.

    Technorati Tags: ,

     

    • Savio Rodrigues 5:50 am on November 16, 2007 Permalink

      Thanks for detailing your conversion to OpenOffice.

      I used a friend’s computer recently. He had MS Office 2007 and I didn’t recognize any of the icons or menus…talk about confusing! It’s a good thing I knew the keyboard shortcuts.

      I think you make a great point that the change from Office 97/2003 to 2007 is a pretty dramatic learning curve, so “it’s different” isn’t a good enough reason for companies to reject OO.

      Savio

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:27 am on November 16, 2007 Permalink

      You’re right Savio,

      change is going to happen anyway, even if you want to stay with Microsoft Office. Honestly I see Groove as a quantum leap for knowledge workers but.. how many organizations are going to take advantage of it any soon?

    • surajit basu 9:11 am on June 21, 2008 Permalink

      I have started an Open Source migration withing our small company.
      Thanks for the blog: this is really helpful.
      We have just started last week, and I thought a travelog for our company’s journey to Open Source would be good. So, I created this:
      http://open-source-journey.blogspot.com/

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:08 pm on June 21, 2008 Permalink

      Nice to know Surajit,

      I am really glad it helps.

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