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  • Roberto Galoppini 3:34 pm on October 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source ECM: Alfresco and Nuxeo news 

    Alfresco has announced that Proforma Global has selected Alfresco’s document management solution, while Nuxeo has just announced the availability of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform 5.1.

    Proforma Global is a division of Proforma, a $300 million company with 650 offices worldwide. It provides some 30,000 clients with fully integrated solutions for both print and electronic communications, designed to serve its clients’ industry-specific graphic communications, commercial printing, promotional and multimedia needs

    Proforma Global, a division of Proforma, use Alfresco to help one of its customers to collaborate on and update the look and content of product data sheets among personnel throughout the world.

    Matt Asay, Alfresco’s VP Marketing of Business Development, said:

    The great thing about Proforma’s adoption of Alfresco is that it was on its terms, not ours. Proforma evaluated the software for months before contacting Alfresco to purchase our support and other services. With Alfresco’s open source and open standards Enterprise Content Management solution, Proforma has complete control of its own content, as it should.

    This is the true value of open source: it returns control to the customer, letting them how or if to engage a vendor. For Alfresco, this has meant that we can’t rest on our laurels (i.e., our software). The software may get the customer interested, but it’s the value we provide around the software that closes the deal.

    I am happy to see that UK’s position as the open source laggard of Europe is changing in Alfresco’s opinion, and it’s not the first signal in this direction.

    Talking about Nuxeo, the updated platform provides an infrastructure designed to meet the needs of large scale enterprises SOA oriented, with first implementations in the media, energy and defense sectors.

    Stefan Fermigier, Nuxeo CEO, asked about the UK market commented:

    We’re going to announce next week our biggest deal in the UK and the UK market already represents approximately 20% of our global business.

    UK seems to start looking with more interest to commercial open source solutions today.

    If you are evaluating Open Source Enterprise Content Management solutions, have a look at Alfresco and Nuxeo QSOS sheets before, it might help you. Ohloh comparation is also available.

    Technorati Tags: Alfresco, Nuxeo, ECM, Commercial Open Source, StefanFermigier, MattAsay

     
    • Matt Asay 7:53 pm on October 25, 2007 Permalink

      Thanks, Roberto. Just one clarification: I’m the VP of Business Development, not marketing. I know nothing about marketing. 🙂

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:45 am on October 26, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Matt, sorry about that, I fixed it. By the way, in my opinion you know a lot about marketing! 😉

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:04 pm on October 24, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Open Source Developers: Simo Sorce 

    Simo Sorce is the Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer, hired by Red Hat in 2007 where he is a Senior Software Engineer, maintainer of Samba and expert on Windows Integration and Identity Management.

    Simo Sorce in 2001 has co-founded a consulting firm specialized around Free and Open Source Software platforms. He is also an international Free Software advocate.

    Simo Sorce Simo Sorce

    I asked Simo, who about six years ago when he supported my candidature as member of the Italian Free Software Association, to tell us more about his career and interest for free software.

    How did you become a Samba team’s member?

    While working part-time in the IT department of the University as a Linux/Unix administrator I was tasked with the job of making unix and windows systems talk together for file sharing and most importantly printer sharing purposes. Samba was the obvious tool.
    As I am naturally very curious I shortly started wondering how Samba accomplished to bridge the architectural differences between a Unix and a Windows system, especially from an Identity point of view. I knew both architectures and they are very different in some key areas. I started asking questions on the users mailing lists, and I was quickly told that the details were only in the source code.
    Being very naive I started reading the code thinking I could grasp everything in a short time. Soon I realized the code was much more complex then I expected but also realized the beauty of some of the challenges in that code, I was hooked.

    I started working on the passdb subsystem (the one that manages Identities in samba) and shortly saw the first few patches applied to the development tree. After some time I was contributing regularly and was gifted with the status of Team member.

    I asked Alessandro Rubini, Carlo Daffara their opinion about “the” community. What is yours?

    I think that “community” is an ambiguous term in the FOSS case, I see this world as a set of sets. Real communities exists only at the project level, and they are not necessarily very well defined at that level either. Usually the project community is composed by a more or less stable core set of developers, often employed by some company, and then a wide range of other people that contribute to a minor degree, or just uses the code and provide a lot of good feedback.
    The broader “FOSS community” is more or less the superset of all the single project communities. Not everybody recognize himself in this broader super-community, and some people tend to split it into something artificial like the Free Software vs the Open Source communities. What matters at a higher scale is the set of licenses used on one side and the field a project operates in on the other. Where the licenses are compatible we see a lot more interaction, when they are not a bit less and also some tension when two projects in the same filed need or try to interact. These interactions are the links that define the super-community, more or less, with obviously blurred edges.

    I think Simo raised very important issues here. Beyond licenses’ compatibility, that has its own role for example when it comes to M&A, but the idea of “super” communities is even more interesting. As a matter of fact many open source projects are using other projects’ outputs, and the way they interact will gain more and more attention.
    Samba is a “pure” community open source project, but the organization is quite different from larger communities like Debian, ASF or Eclipse. What about the project’s organization?

    Samba has indeed its own model, partially dictated by the project history and interactions with the industry and other projects. The Samba Team unlike the mentioned organizations is a very lousy loose group, membership is given by agreement of the existing members after on of the team members proposes a candidate.
    Historically the Samba Team has always been just the group of people that was trusted to have commit access to the shared CVS tree, and in fact was born only when Andrew ‘Tridge’ Tridgell and Jeremy Allison decided to start using a version control system.
    We tend to have a consensus-driven decision system. If most agree we all agree. We don’t take formal votes usually, if someone have a strong opinion against a decision it is his duty to speak in time and argue against it. As most of our decisions are technical in nature we tend to easily agree on a proposal and rarely we get contrasting opinion that we can’t easily settle. Also, usually, the opinion of the developer most intimate with the field being discussed tend to have greater influence than others. For non technical decisions we tend to follow the lead of the Team founders, Tridge and Jeremy.
    Recently we joined the Software Freedom Conservancy, and this gives us also a legal status. Before that we were legally just a bank account in Australia used to hold donations that we spent mostly to pay travel fares to remote samba developers that could not easily afford a trip to the 2 main yearly events in the Samba community, the CIFS conference in the US and the SambaXP conference in Germany.

    Rough consensus and running code, then. It reminds me the IETF’s approach for its working groups, a great one! I believe that this approach works well for a small group, though.
    Talking about open source firms, you worked for years by your own company, then you moved to the States and eventually joined Red Hat. Could you tell us something about your experience in this respect?

    The difference between working for a small firm in Italy and working for big corporations in the United states is huge. At an organizational level you have to change from a do-it-all mindset of the small firm to an environment where you have greater opportunities but also many more constraints. I enjoy being able to concentrate more on technical aspects and leave other aspects to dedicated professionals, but sometimes this means you have to play political games to do what you want.

    From the business point of view a small firm is agile, can easily re-focus and try to jump in new fields but is usually blocked by lack of financial agility. Here smallest firms are somewhat at an advantage compared to Italy, access to credit is much easier and you actually have real chances of getting funding if you have a very good business plan. But here things are also more brutal. Risks and rewards are higher. It is as easy to get in business as it is to get thrown out of it. Even in big enterprises you still feel the pressure on quarterly results, long term plans exist but there is a very short term focus that keeps all busy on quick results. In the previous company where I was closer to the sales people, a quarter was the life and death deadline, toward the end of the quarter sales got anxious and pushed you harder to help them sell. In Red Hat I am less exposed to this kind of pressure, but we have anyway very hard development project deadlines, from RHEL updates releases to Fedora releases to your own projects releases. You have to make your long term plans in a way that you can split them in short term milestones or it is very difficult to get away with a project.

    All in all I miss some of the features a small firm in Italy can give you, but I also enjoy the experience of working in a big global company. I think you have to try both to understand the benefits and the shortcomings of both, and then decide what you like most. If you are good you will have no problems making a living anyway.

    You are not alone saying that US is a better country for startups, but I agree with you that besides money a good business plan is the key.

    I see also another major difference here. While Simo was working by his own company he had to sell services only partially based on his favorite platform. Unfortunately the Open Source Ecosystem has still to develop a pyramidal approach. Until now System Integrators don’t act as “mediators” towards small specialized firms like his one. While I understand that it is not easy for them to set it up for a large number of OS projects, I really don’t see a reason to not do it with some of.
    Happy hacking Simo!

    Technorati Tags: SimoSorce, Samba, JeremyAllison, RedHat, Startups, Commercial Open Source, Open Source Strategy

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 8:23 pm on October 23, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Webinar: SMEs and Open Source 

    Labornet FILAS, a company created by Regione Lazio to sustain development and enterprise innovation processes offering courses for the enterprises development, organized a webinar on SMEs and Open Source.

    The webinar was aimed at exploring the issues and concerns around open source from IT firms’ perspectives, providing answers to questions about open source readiness.

    I was happy to join the initiative and therefore held my first webinar. I found breeze easy to use, but we experienced few problems with bandwidth and document standards (Open Document Format are not supported apparently).

    Attendees were impressed by the honesty of my speech when I went through OpenOffice Migration issues.

    Talking about how open source firms inter-relate to their communities, I described the symbiotic, commensalistic and parasitic categories. An attendee asked me if, in my opinion, all Italian IT firms were falling in the last one. Unfortunately, almost all Italian open source firms are not symbiotic to any community. Some are collaborating at some extent in a commensalistic fashion. As a matter of fact, the majority are parasite.

    Not surprisingly none of them see her company develop its own product, so the only approach they are considering at the present stage is both the best knowledge here approach, not the best code here (despite there are at least two Italian firms doing it, Funambol and Medialogic).

    Technorati Tags: breeze, Commercial Open Source, Funambol, Medialogic, Labornet, FILAS, Webinar

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 6:43 pm on October 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Jolt Awards Nominations: Nominations are open! 

    Dr. Dobb’s Journal invites all vendors to participate in the 18th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards, aimed at recognizing innovative products, books and web sites that have “jolted” the software development industry in 2007. Nominations for the 18th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards are now open. The deadline for nominations is December 3, 2007.

    JoltThe more participants we have the more fun the award will be by jc_iverson’s

    Software development has grown from an elite set of tools that everyone knew about and used, to today’s prolific industry awash with hundreds of products that morph and evolve with such swiftness and complexity that it is virtually impossible for developers to keep up with the changing market. Which products should they continue to use? Which upgrades and new versions are worthwhile? Which new tools’ performance and usability far outstrip their competitors? What is the new killer app? Enter the Jolt Product Excellence Awards: We recognize the most innovative, trend-making, ahead-of-the-curve products. Jolt-award winners are the software products, books and websites that developers should be using today.

    I have been introduced by Seth Grimes and now I am a Jolt Awards judge. Seth is doing it for the second year, and may be is not by casualty that Pentaho was the winner in the Enterprise Tools category.

    There are many categories, and while the regular cost for each nomination is 300 USD, Open Source and no profit companies can pay 40 USD, but products supported and funded by a non-open source parent company are not eligible for the reduced entry fee.

    Among Jolt Award judges quite a few are also fellow bloggers, like Jeff Atwood, Chris Minnick, Larry O’Brien, Peter Westerman and MichaelYuan.

    Technorati Tags: Jolt Awards, Pentaho, SethGrimes, JeffAtwood, Chris Minnick, LarryOBrien, PeterWesterman, MichaelYuan, Dr Dobb

     
    • Seth Grimes 6:56 pm on October 22, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto, I did suggest to Pentaho that they enter the 2007 Jolt competition. I made the same suggestion to a number of other companies that did not win an award and to one other Productivity Award winner. As I explain in the blog entry you link to (thanks!), I’d like to see even more analytics and enterprise-applications vendors enter.

      It’s worth mentioning that the Jolt judges have discussed criteria for assessing potential conflicts of interest and have created a recusal policy for cases where conflicts exist.

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:58 am on October 23, 2007 Permalink

      Ciao Seth,

      I am sorry if you felt like me pointing the finger to you, I just thought you took some role, as it happened to be actually.

      Unfortunately I am used to Italian corruptions stories, but believe me I never wanted to mention you were pushing them. On the contrary I believe you were right pulling Open Source Firms to join the contest, and I am willing to do just the same.

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:37 am on October 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Facts and Figures: links 21-10-2007 

    What enterprise software can learn from community sites: Gary LittleDon Marti interviews Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures to talk about VCs investments in open source firms.

    2007-10-18 | Open source VoIP being slowly accepted – Apparently Kerravala from Yankee Group thinks that at the current time Open Source VoIP is still immature..

    Catching up with Terracotta: Transition to Open Source, Adoption, Hibernate SupportAri Zilka Terracotta‘s CTO says that with open source your number one competitor becomes yourself, and to find more creative value-adds than just support.

    Social Responsibility Advocates Demand Open Source Action From Oracle – At the November Oracle Social Responsibility initiative two corporate/social responsibility advocates will likely require the Oracle board to “issue, at reasonable expense, an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders by April 2008 that discusses the social and environmental impacts of Oracle’s existing and potential open source policies and practices.” Is Social Responsibility the ultimate weapon?

    Software Patents: Innovation’s QuicksandJeff Kaplan reports that Professor Maskin researches showed that strong patent protection produced less R&D spending, and slowed productivity growth.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Open Source VoIP, Software Patents, Terracotta, Oracle, Social Responsibility

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 10:45 am on October 20, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Development and Strengthening of Local and Central Public Administrations 

    I just got back from Sarajevo, where I participated as speaker to an advanced course in web communications in the Public Administration. The course, aimed at public operators from Bosnia-Herzegovina, was designed to be an in-depth analysis on the use of Open Source in Public Administrations.

    SarajevoSarajevo by Giuli@

    I had the honor of presenting two seminar sessions, talking about Open Standards and Open Source Software. I opened my first speech focusing on what is a software patent, and how they (could) affect open data standards. I spent an hour or so talking about on Open Source Requirements, Principles and Practices and making analogies with the real world (power plugs, etc).

    My second pitch was all about pragmatic open source. I started speaking about how Organisational Wiki Adoption could greatly help communications and information flows within Public Administrations. The audience was pretty interested and we eventually ended comparing email, Instant Messaging and Groove against a wiki, in terms of usability, synchronicity of interaction and ease of participation.

    Attendees were concerned about the Open Source perception, and open source support, and I showed them some useful tools to manage software selections. Since only few open source projects offer enterprise support, I make them familiar with:

    I really enjoyed being there. The audience, despite the latency due to the translation, was participative and willing to know more and more.

    Is a country of contrast, where people died together, and now try to live together. A very interesting country, and I really hope to get a chance to be back.

    About the Communications for the Public Administration course.

    The project “Balkans 2 – Development and Strengthening central and local PA in the Balkan Region” is aimed to 6 Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro) and continues the activities already started up and partly developed with the Balkans 1 project which was held from November 3rd to December 31st 2004. This is an integrated project of “Institutional and Capacity Building” aimed to civil servants and executives from central and local Balkan administrations, divided into diverse activities of technical assistance, classroom and on-the-job training, information and communications on themes which have been identified and agreed upon together with the institutional counterparts of the involved countries on the occasion of numerous missions and meeting realized during the first year of activities. The dedicated areas are the following:- Civil Protection- Management of Protected Areas- Cultural Heritage- Communications for the Public Administration.

    Technorati Tags: Sarajevo, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Open Source Government, Open Standards, QSOS, SourceForge

     
    • Ryck Lent 2:16 am on October 22, 2007 Permalink

      Another resource for open source, specifically for organizations considering enterprise open source solutions, is the EOS Directory. It contains over 300 enterprise-class projects with comments and an independent rating for enterprise readiness, in English and Deutsch.

      Ryck Lent
      Community Manager, EOS Directory

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:01 am on October 22, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Ricky,

      I didn’t know about the Optaros EOS Directory, thank you! I found interesting the “track your popolarity” functionality, may be a top 10 list or more would be even better.

      Keep in touch!

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:45 am on October 18, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source at Microsoft: Microsoft’s licenses get approved by OSI 

    Bill Hilf at OSCON 2007 announced that they were going to submit shared source licenses to OSI for the approval process, and today Microsoft got official open source blessing from OSI (via ars technica).

    Although OSI validation of Microsoft’s licenses is a very big win for Microsoft and the open-source software community, this victory is overshadowed by Microsoft’s aggressive attitude towards open-source software. Certain vocal factions of the OSS community will express extreme distrust for Microsoft’s open-source licenses, which will make it difficult for the company to build a bridge with the broader OSS community. Microsoft’s unsubstantiated patent threats and blatantly dishonest studies don’t help the situation.

    Game of Life Game of Life by Demirtunc

    While Stefano Maffulli is not optimistic about it, on the contrary I still believe that as far as Microsoft’s partners will be progressively embracing open source, Microsoft will eventually turn this into a long term strategy. As a matter of fact Microsoft’s business is mostly about infrastructural software, and they might take advantage of the pervasive capillarity of Microsoft’s partners (750.000) to foster collaborative development over their proprietary technologies.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Strategies, Commercial Open Source, Microsoft, StefanoMaffulli, FSFE

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 8:28 pm on October 17, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Code Search: a talk with Laura Merling, from Krugle 

    Large enterprises embracing Open Source software need to to put some structure around their use, and they need tools – like search engines such as google code search, koders and krugle – to locate and manage these resource.

    Krugle Open Source Search, a search engine managing 2.6 billion lines of code, 600 repositories and over 100,000 projects, allows web users to search for open-source code on the Internet.

    FindingFinding a needle by Marion A’s photos

    Also Internal open source teams, responsible for keep a collection of things used internally, need to make them available for others in the organization, and here comes a need for internal code search engines, like Krugle Enterprise Edition.

    I asked Laura Merling, VP, Marketing and Business Development of Krugle, to tell us more about this area.

    As the number of languages increase, the number of development “platforms” increase, and the amount of code increases in the enterprise (and the public arena). There are these large “development silos” of products and tools that have been created by developers, and search driven development is an emerging need.

    Is the Enterprise Edition easy to sell?

    We have been brought in by senior developers, dev managers and architects the pain they have is things like impact analysis: I am changing this code, who else is referencing it?
    We have not had to encounter the CIO yet. The great part is that typically the people that bring us in have already written use cases they want it for and have already sold it up as needed. Most of them have a budget to some level, our target is mid-level management.

    Are you wondering to invite users to produce use cases, may be giving prizes?

    Absolutely – we did this last summer and got great responses – we really want use cases for the enterprise!

    How the company was conceived?

    Ken Krugler was working on the Chandler project with Mitch Kapor and was looking for code to some stuff he figured the code had to be out there somewhere. So he began “searching” for it he used regular search engines, went to repositories and nobody had anything that would help him find. What he already knew was out there so he decided to fix the problem and build a code search engine.

    As he started talk to other developers, there was a strong desire to not only have it to find open source code, but their own stuff in the enterprise. Imagine how much code a 20 year financial services firm or how much code a telco might have!

    Besides the Enterprise arena, Krugle DevNetwork powers also SourceForge.net, Yahoo! Developer Network, developerworks and now Amazon Web Services Developer Connection. So may be you are already using it and you didn’t know..

    Technorati Tags: Krugle, Source Code Search, Amazon, Yahoo, SourceForge, LauraMerling, KenKrugle, MitchKapor

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 7:54 am on October 16, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Commercial Open Source: more on what’s missing 

    Richard Stallman‘s article “Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software“ has now been eported and commented by Robin Good.

    Apparently my opinions didn’t convince Robin, that says:

    In reality, as Stallman points out very clearly in the essay here below, open-source advocates have long stopped promoting the fundamental issues of freedom that are the roots of the Free Software movement in favour of peddling a more commercial and pragmatical approach which looks more at issues like costs, reliability, security, innovation, and at the ability to have access and modify the source code of any software.

    As an outsider viewer, I think he is right.

    So I took my chance to better explain my thoughts, I report here my comment on his blog:

    I didn’t really want to counter attack Richard Stallman’s attack on open-source. I was trying to say is that also open source advocates are contributing to software freedom. It is a matter of perspective: while Richard takes care of users’ freedom, (some) open source firms also take care of software freedom.

    I disagree with Richard when he points out that open-source advocates have long stopped promoting the fundamental issues of freedom. He infers from the behavior of some of them a general statement. A the some extent I might say that “free software” is not consistent term because half of “free software” google-alerts are just about freeware and other no Free Software items.

    What I believe is important to say here is that a commercial and pragmatical approach can also take into great consideration software freedom. The importance of share and more to keep sharing-alike software (copyleft) for open source firms is synergic with free software advocacy, as it insist on the same values (but for a different reason).

    Are all firms interested in Open Source willing to stress the importance of software freedom? Of course not, some of them don’t care, while some end up licensing their products with proprietary licenses.

    Open Source firms (may be) are created equal, but some are more equal than others.. let’s keep them as Free Software’s good friends, as they are.

    As usual, comments and opinions are welcome.

    , , , ,

     
    • Josef Assad 11:20 am on October 16, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto, I just posted something which is relatively a propos to this article.
      Looks like we’re on the same page.

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:50 am on October 14, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source tips, patent infringments, Jonathan Schwartz: links 14-10-2007 

    The ‘Warrior’ within Jonathan Schwartz – interesting article on Schwartz life, via James Governor
    Tips: Firefox and OpenOffice document handling – easy instructions to see ODF document within your favourite browser

    Patent infringments Lawsuit Filed Against Novell& Red HatJeremy keeps us updated on the patent infringment issue. Read also Luis Villa’s post.

    OSS Venture Capital and M&A – Savio Rodrigues wonders about the Open Source market

     
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