Funambol – the Mobile Open Source company – few months ago started looking for a community manager, as I learned from Fabrizio Capobianco while he was in Rome to join the VentureCamp.
A couple of days later I got a phone call from my friend and fellow blogger Stefano Maffulli, asking me for Fabrizio’s email. Below the full story.
Roberto’s blog has been a kind of a Monster: a good daily read but also a way to extend the reach of a social network. When I pitched my CV to Fabrizio (Funambol’s CEO) I learned that the selection process had been going on for a while already and other candidates were being evaluated. Nonetheless I was invited to speak with Hal Steger, Funambol’s VP Marketing: I liked his attitude and he liked my multidisciplinary background (architecture, technology and the upcoming MBA). Funambol has a balanced mix of the good hacker’s culture I love and the necessary strength on financial and marketing management, something that I want to learn (and have been missing in my past work experiences).
It wasn’t a long shot after all. It will be fun to work with Funambol’s growing community and the company.
Architect Stefano Maffulli at work by Stefano Maffulli
I am glad that the time I spent sometimes collecting open positions within open source firms and jobs was of some help. Few months ago I also started to display a widget on each job posted by considerati, that I happened to get in touch with via openbusiness, but unfortunately such distributed job site had a limited success.
Stefano, are you already thinking of how to get off the best from programs like Code Sniper and Phone Sniper?
We have some ideas on what has to be improved to help Funambol’s community but we are also open to suggestions. For example, our software is in many places and it’s not easy for newcomers to find what they are looking for. I’m interested in hearing experiences of Funambol’s users with the software, the mailing lists, the repository and the company: they can come to me and I’ll help if at all possible.
Funambol’s architecture of participation welcomes small contributions, allowing individuals to more easily participate, I am looking forward to ask Stefano how is he doing in six months from now.
For the time being I wish him and Funambol all the best!
Read Stefano Maffulli‘s full profile on Linkedin.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Juju, 
devdanke, 
Dirk Riehle 4:38 pm on August 21, 2009 Permalink
Thanks for continuing the discussion! Just a short note on the term “commercial open source”. As far as I understand, it was coined by SugarCRM to distinguish Sugar from say GIMP or other open source software that had no primary profit motive in mind.
I’m actually not saying that the only commercial open source out there follows the single-vendor open source model. Acquia is a good example of a commercial company that is based on community software, so is TWiki. RedHat is commercial for sure too.
Because of this possible confusion that you are also pointing out, I have been moving away from “commercial open source” to “single-vendor open source”. From today’s perspective, SugarCRM overreached when coining this term.
jrep 5:14 pm on August 21, 2009 Permalink
Including multiply-sponsored projects in “commercial open source” is a good thing, I won’t argue with you there. But I’m still not convinced that “all” open-source work is “commercial.” There are loads of projects on Tigris.Org, SourceForge.Net, github, and all the other community sites that have no sponsorship at all.
Roberto Galoppini 8:36 pm on August 21, 2009 Permalink
@Dirk thank you to rejoin this conversation!
I believe you’re right, SugarCRM was probably at the forefront with naming it commercial open source, but I am not sure they want to exclude open source vendors like Acquia or Sonatype.
I appreciate your decision to move away from “commercial open source†to “single-vendor open sourceâ€, really.
@jrep I am following the definition of commercial reported by David Wheeler in his paper:
I must agree with David saying that “when we include the second meaning (which some people forget), nearly all FLOSS programs are commercial”.
Alain 3:37 pm on August 22, 2009 Permalink
Roberto,
At least the open source supporters are doing their coming out (thanks to Eric!)
Your analysis is perfectly correct (as well as Dirk’s one), but I’d like to moderate it on one single point :
I think that there is some open source initiatives that are not commercials!
Some open source initiatives, driven by (non profit) foundations (FSF, Mozilla, Apache…), are mainly motivated by altruism, openness and sharing (as well as by the ego of some of the contributors). Indeed, within thoose foundations, they are not equal : some are using licenses (GPL to name it) with very strong constraints about commercial use : the code developed from a GPL-licensed source code must be given back to the community with the same license!!
This is really the original (and in some way utopian) vision of Richard Stallman.
This is why I mostly agree with you. I even think that everything else is commercial (and marketing tactic)….
By the way, I’ve just read an awesome post from Vishal Vasu (http://www.vishalvasu.com/general/open-source-versus-open-standards/) that reminds us (from a user perspective) that, what is important, is that your software needs to support (useful) open standards!
Regards