The Italian OpenOffice.org Association (PLIO), two years after its foundation yesterday – during the annual assembly – appointed the new board.
Italo Vignoli is now PLIO’s president, Paolo Mantovani is PLIO’s vice-president. I want to publicly thank Davide Dozza for his great job during these two long years, without his efforts and determinations we would not have been to start it all.
The Venice International University, the Digital Media Metadistrict and Sun Microsystems will host the “Open Source Offering in Italy: an Analysis of an evolving Sector” conference, on the 10th of March, in Venice.
At the VEnice GAteway for Science and Technologies (VEGA) will meet up Italian academic researchers, entrepreneurs and open source community members to discuss research findings and how they fit into field experiences.
Registrations are now open, see you there!
Measuring the true Success of OpenOffice.org – Michael Meeks wrote a long post about OpenOffice.org success, mostly from a development point of view. Being Michael a Novell’s employee his perspective might be considered biased, but I totally agree with his recipe:
The OpenOffice.org Italian Association announced that OpenOffice.org in Italy broke the five million mark this year, yet another record for the Italian release of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite.
Davide Dozza, PLIO’s president commented the result:
Back in 2006, when we started counting OOo downloads, 800,000 downloads per year was an astonishing result to us. At that stage we couldn’t even imagine that the number would have grown to 1.780.000 in 2007, and beyond five millions in 2008.
Even if the number of downloads is not an accurate measure of the market share, it definitely shows the trend.
So said, there is still a lot to do, especially in the business arena. OpenOffice.org has recently started a Business Development Project, managed by Alexandro Colorado, who recently posed questions about how to set standards for OpenOffice.org professionals.
I agree that there is a future business in migration. We surely need better integration to OpenOffice.org from other systems, but I don’t see SUN as the major problem here. SUN (as in conjuction with IBM and others) are working hard to develop tools (e.g. ODF-Toolkit etc). I more see the various vendors of properitary business software as the big problem. We need integration from ERP, CRM and other critical business software.
I would rather point my fingers of those Microsoft Business Partners, that provide customers with no choise (as to select Microsoft Office).
First step will be the customers to ask their business software providers if they can deliver a solution without vendor lock-in.
Hi Leif,
I am glad you joined the conversation. Actually you are right, EAI is a two faces coin. As a matter of fact vendors are conservative, and they tend to be in the early majority.
The Colosseum wasn’t built in one day, nad even Microsoft spent time and energy to build its Office System partnerships network.
What I have learned volunteering for years is that communities can help a lot, and IT vendors are paying more and more attention to what people say, especially if they are bloggers under the radar.
We can make a difference, but Sun has to play its role, and they have good reasons to do it, before others like IBM will likely do..
Roberto Galoppini, and 
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