Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

Sourceforge 2008 community choice awards‘ nomination phase is closed, the finalists list is on line and it is time to vote.

I Am Also Partial To A Sip Of Wine Sometimes… by *lemonade*

This year’s pool is a mixture of old favorites and new names, and I am happy that OpenOffice.org is in the “Most Likely to Change the World” category, and invite you to vote for our beloved project!

Yes, I am partial to my favorite open source productive suite!

Technorati Tags: SourceForge, Open Source Community, Community Awards, OpenOffice.org, openoffice

Six months ago OpenLogic announced the Open Source Census, an initiative to quantify the global use of open source in enterprises. On the 16th of April OpenLogic eventually launched the collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software, and recently announced the first results.
Complete Lego Census by Cavalier92

 

• Ubuntu is the top Linux distribution on machines scanned to date - Various versions of Ubuntu accounted for almost 50% of all Linux distributions installed on participating machines. Debian accounted for 14%; SUSE Linux accounted for 12% of install base; Fedora Core 7%.
• International interest in Census - 66% of machines scanned in the first two months were outside the U.S. U.S. participants represented about one third of participants. Active global participation in the Census came from areas such as Europe, Canada and Australia.
• Top open source packages - The top 5 installed open source packages were in order were, Firefox, Xerces, Zlib, Xalan and Prototype.

I asked my twitter and blog buddy Stormy Peters , Director of Community and Partner Programs at OpenLogic, some feedback about the Census initiative. OpenLogic is an open source firm providing services to help customers to manage open source governance, taking advantage of the frequent lack of open source corporate actors. Apparently launching this survey OpenLogic is doing Forrester, Gartner or IDC job (the last is one of the sponsor of the initiative).

Why OpenLogic decided to launch an opt-in survey?

As OpenLogic worked with large enterprises, we realized that companies did not know how much open source software they were using. To help address this problem, we developed an open source tool, OSS Discovery, to allow companies to inventory the open source on their systems. As we started working with customers to conduct these inventories, we felt that it would be useful to aggregate this data in an anonymous way. From this experience, The Open Source Census was born. Most research firms use traditional surveys (of software vendors or of end users). Unfortunately, these methods are inadequate for open source since it is downloaded freely and companies do not always know how much open source they are using. IDC sponsored The Open Source Census to supplement the data that they get from other research methods.

Traditional surveys, basically done by phone calls to software vendors, simply don’t work: OSS procurement is done by clicking on a download button, most of the times. OpenLogic conducting such a survey sponsored by IDC is definitely a sign of the time.

What can you tell about the OS census so far?

We are happy with the initial response to The Open Source Census with almost 1500 systems scanned as of Jun 30. To date, most of the participants in the Census are individuals scanning and submitting data for one or two systems. This is expected since these participants primarily came from press when we launched The Open Source Census. We are now working to actively recruit large enterprises to scan a sampling of machines. We expect that many of these enterprises will scan hundreds or even thousands of machines. The sponsors of The Open Source Census are currently recruiting enterprises and we expect these activities to pay off in the months ahead as enterprises submit large blocks of scans to the Census.

Enterprises scans will tell us a lot of interesting things, I am not sure Firefox or Xerces will still be in the top ten, though.

Any comment about the reaction to news of Microsoft’s Support of Open Source Census?

From the beginning, we knew that we wanted The Open Source Census to be a collaborative effort – not just specific to OpenLogic. We felt that collaboration was critical to making The Open Source Census successful. Prior to launching The Open Source Census, we began the process of reaching out to a wide variety of participants in the open source community and ecosystem. The list included large platform vendors, commercial open source vendors, open source communities and organizations, law firms and analysts. Because this is an open project, we did not limit or exclude anyone from sponsoring or participating – as long as they agreed with the goals and process for The Open Source Census. We welcome all sponsors who might want to participate and help make The Open Source Census successful.

Beyond Stormy’s diplomatic answer all the fuss around Microsoft’s sponsorship is spreading the word about the open source census, and Matt Asay, Savio Rodrigues and Sean Michael Kerner posts are of help in this respect.

Side effect or not?

About The Open Source Census:
The Open Source Census is a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in enterprise. Founded by OpenLogic, the Open Source Census has a number of sponsors including OpenLogic and IDC. The Open Source Census initiative has open source tools designed to scan individual enterprise computers for all installed open source software. The results of these scans can then be contributed anonymously to the Open Source Census, where the aggregate data is published.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, openlogic, OpenLogic Census, IDC, Gartner, Forrester, StormyPeters

The pilot project to migrate schools of three Russian regions to Free Software has recently expanded its geography. Now it is possible for the schools outside of Tatarstan, Perm krai and Tomsk region to voluntarily apply for participation by completing a special form (Russian) published on the project website.

The project, if successful, may be the first step towards large-scale migration of Russian secondary education instutitions and, consequently, of the other state agencies to Free Software as President Medvedev stated last year (Russian) while being the First Deputy Prime Minister.

Children in the Putino village of Perm Krai running Linux

It is a hot summer for the project contractors since the schools must be migrated before September 1, when the new academic year starts. By now, according to the official website of Armada, the consortium that unites the firms involved in the project, the project is slightly ahead of schedule. Moreover, Armada’s CEO Igor Gorbatov expects (Russian) the total number of schools migrated to Free Software to surpass the target number of 1000 (the goal is to migrate 50% schools in the central cities and 20% in the rest of the three regions) so that there may be 2000 or even 5000 schools.

According to project statistics (Russian, but the numbers are quite self-explanatory) published by Armada on June 4, only 182 schools of 1084 had been migrated. However, the project members are actively promoting Free Software, the most notable activity being the on-site install seminars that are organized almost every week in various towns and villages of Perm Krai.

Technorati Tags: Russia, schools, migration, Armada, free software, Medvedev, Perm, Tatarstan, Tomsk, open source

After a hiatus of three years, the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) met for its 12th session on June 23, 2008 to June 27, 2008. Given the collapse of the talks to initiate a Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) to harmonize patent law with respect to prior art, novelty, inventive step and grace period, even the most prescient of WIPO watchers were at a loss in prognosticating the outcome of the WIPO SCP. In 2007, informal consultations of the WIPO SCP were not able come to consensus on deciding upon a work program for the WIPO patent committee.

As a result the the WIPO General Assembly (2007) instructed the International Bureau to

establish a report on issues relating to the international patent system covering the different needs and interests of all Member States, which would constitute a working document for the next session of the SCP. The Report would contextualize the existing situation of the international patent system, including reference to the WIPO Development Agenda process, and would contain no conclusions.

Under the stewardship of the Chair (Maximiliano Santa Cruz, Chile), and his two Vice-Chairs (Mr. Yin Xintian, China) and (Bucura Ionescu, Romania) working in concert with the International Bureau, this meeting bore witness to the flexibilities displayed by Member States including Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, the European Union, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Singapore and Switzerland to ensure that the WIPO patent committee embrace a positive agenda. This positive agenda is evidenced in the Summary by the Chair(SCP/12/4 Rev) posted by WIPO on June 27, 2008. It should also not be forgotten that during the patent committee interregnum, the International Bureau launched a series of patent symposiums that covered a range of issues including the research exemption and patents and standards.

Despite strong signals sent by Group B countries (rich countries) early on in the Committee that left no doubts that patent harmonization was foremost on their agenda, the conclusion of the meeting took a different turn, a balanced outcome that gave something to developed countries and developing countries, users and right holders alike.

Read the full article, by Thiru Balasubramaniam

To coincide with EURO 2008, Matthew Aslett is embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

We lost with Spain, and Matthew wrote his Italian Open Source Tour.

Key policies:
In October 2002, a commission for free software in public administration was established to study open source adoption. in May 2003 CNIPA (Centro Nazionale per l’Informatica della Pubblica Amministrazione) published a study (PDF in Italian) that recommended (amongst other things) that public offices should neither prohibit nor penalize the use of OSS packages. A working group later produced guidelines (PDF in Italian) as to how to remain compliant with the recommendations.

The Italian government put its money where its mouth was in December 2006 as Italian budget law committed €30m over three years to projects that stimulate the information society (although what happened to those funds is open to question) while in May 2007 Italy launched its own repository of open source software for public administrations, the Collaborative Development Environment.

In June 2007 Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, announced the creation of the second Open Source Commission to define guidelines for public procurement of open source software. In May 2008 it published its first draft report.

Key projects:
National open source success stories include the Ministry of Justice, which has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as has the Ministry of Economics and Finance.

Meanwhile the National Institute of Design and Mint is using JBoss, and Corte dei Conti is also using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In July 2007 the IT department of the Italian Parliament presented plans for the migration of 200 servers and more than 3,500 desktop PCs to Linux and OpenOffice. The migration was due to begin in September and take two years.

Regional government projects include Cremona, Foggia, Rome, Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Genoa, Bologna, Balzano, Savona, Umbria, and Tuscany again.

More details are available of Rome’s open source policy, Genova’s OpenOffice trials, Bologna’s open source projects, and Bolzano’s FUSS project.

Read the full article.

Congratulations to the Funambol team for raising 12.5 millions of funding in a series B financing led by mobile-focused venture capital firm Nexit Ventures, along with Castile Ventures (new investor) and was joined by existing investors, Walden International and HIG Ventures.

Investors are banking in a long term perspective, while Funambol is cash flow positive from the beginning of this year, so I asked my friend Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, the following question:

How is this money going to be spent?

A tight-rope walker (funambol) by hdc.

Our plan is to use the cash to scale up the organization. In particular, around sales and operations. Commercial open source companies tend to have leads in every part of the world, which is a great thing. However, in order to follow the leads through, you need people on site (in particular if you are selling a product to service providers). Therefore, we are opening a few more offices world-wide, where we already have customers, to properly serve them and expand our presence.

Sometimes easy questions are a valuable tool to get interesting insights. Open source ISVs facing the “turning OSS users into customers” are likely to meet Lead Users - a term coined by Eric Von Hippel referring to users of a product experiencing needs actually unfulfilled and who could significantly benefit from the solution to those needs - from all over the world. If thinking global is the natural choice for open source firms, acting locally requires individualization and customizations to your customers’ needs, yet a local structure to effectively implement such needs.

As mentioned in my first interview to Fabrizio, Funambol addresses only the “top of the pyramid” (carriers, large ISP, etc), enabling also the base of the pyramid - the “free” Customers - to generate value for Funambol, as it is happening with AOL who just selected Funambol to help with synchronization of its own online and mobile mail.

In the meantime Funambol ignited also a partnership with SpikeSource, in order to address through SpikeSource and their partners other layers of the “pyramid”. Fabrizio himself commenting the partnership said:

This partnership with SpikeSource enables every company, regardless of size, to benefit from the simple implementation of Funambol’s mobile open source application.

Funambol besides fostering its community and delivering its wireless sync application for the iPhone, is creating an open source (mobile) ecosystem around its platform, as every open source firm should do.

Kudos to Fabrizio and his team!

Technorati Tags: Funambol, SpikeSource, Spikeignited, Venture Capital, Nexit Ventures, Castile Ventures, Walden International, HIG Ventures, FabrizioCapobianco, lead users, free customers, pyramid market

Mail merge in OpenOffice.org - mail merge in OpenOffice.org made clear.

Microsoft Invites to ODF Workshop in Redmond - Erwin Tenhumberg, who is leaving Sun to join SAP, reports about the event.

Open source tour of Europe: Portugal - Matthew Aslett reports about OpenOffice.org/StarOffice in Portugal since 2004, just as happened in Italy.

epractice.eu, the portal created by the European Commission offers a service for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners, reported about Lazio e-Citizen, a digital inclusion project.

The programme responded to European directives on the Lisbon Strategy and its objectives were to increase the residents’ awareness of the importance of digital literacy, the benefits that e-skills bring to their personal and professional lives, and to fight against social exclusion. The project developed a strategy to bridge the digital divide based on specific criteria: gender, age and skill levels.

Don’t be a secret keeper by *Drangongly*

I asked Alessandra Devitofrancesco (ECDL foundation), author of the Lazio e-Citizen case reported on epractice to tell me more, and she kindly put me in touch with the AICA (ECDL member) responsible of the initiative, Pierpaolo Maggi.

He explained me that the project has been developed using the open source course management system Moodle, and that the portal is accessible also through Firefox and Netscape. On the contrary the article on epractice and also e-citizen FAQ report (bold emphasis is mine):

The schools, universities and Permanent Territorial Centres which were involved in the Lazio e-Citizen project were chosen according to different technological requirements:
- Availability of one or more rooms with at least 12+5 desks and Internet access (ADSL or wireless)
- LAN network among all desks and shared printer
- PC Pentium 4 (or superior) or equivalent (i.e. AMD)
- Windows 2000 or later versions
- Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 or superior
- Accessories: audio set and headphones: CD ROM reader, minimum video resolution SVGA 800×600

It is time for outing, I publicly invite project’s promoters to disclose the specific technology choice (moodle), how it has been used and, last but not the least, telling people that the portal is accessible to open source.

eAccessibility and eInclusion are definitely also about allowing open source users to access information.

Technorati Tags: eAccessibility, eInclusion, digital literacy, digital divide, moodle, lazio e-citizen, course management system, epractice, Lazio

SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, a competitiveness cluster aimed at developing the local economy and enterprises’ competitiveness, using partnership and training to produce and deliver enabling innovations, just run its third internal convention. Among the five thematic groups, since October 2007 has been included a technology-oriented working group on open source (Logiciel Libre).

Paris, capital du logiciel libre by Koninho

Roberto Di Cosmo, professor at the university of Paris-Diderot and president of the Logiciel Libre working group, invited me to join the event to learn more about what is going on in the Paris area in the free software arena.

Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva’s CEO, is the vice-president of the open source thematic group, while in the council are sitting representatives from big firms like Cap Gemini, Bull, C-S, along with people from INRIA, university Pierre et Marie Curie and Nuxeo.

Roberto explains that the goal of this group is to help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area by federating research laboratories, SMEs and big firms through R&D projects, partially supported by public funding in the standard scheme of competitivenes clusters.

The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors. On the other side, this framework has been put at work in the particularly fertile ground of the Paris area, that hosts 50% of the ITC R&D of France, with a significant presence of Open Source ISV, a large number of research centers and Universities with IT laboratories, that have a long tradition of contributing to Free Software, and an exceptionally high concentration if IT expenditures.

Roberto, how System@tic allocates resources to the projects?

A distinguishing feature of the R&D projects in a competitiveness cluster, is that they must bring together at least two industrial partners and a research laboratory. In the case of our group, resources are allocated in the following manner: 59% SMEs, 26% laboratories, 15% big firms. The projects go through a rigorous evaluation process, first inside the group, then at the level of the cluster, and then in the services of the ministry of Industry, the region, and the departments of the Paris area.

During the first year public investments sum up to less than five millions euro, less than half of the how much has been allocated for open source software by the Italian budget law last year, this year and next one. Italy is investing more money actually, but it is still unclear how such investments will eventually benefit the IT Italian ecosystem, though.

Italy is still missing a clear strategy about how to foster the Italian open source ecosystem through training, education, research and outreach, while France apparently has found its own path for developing it.

Dominique Vernay, Systematic president, during his opening speech congratulated the Open Source group for the speed with which it has started 4 high quality R&D projects, integrating quickly in the Systematic infrastructure.

Marc Lipinski - vice president of the Conseil Régional de l’Ile de France for higher education, research and innovation - gave a particular importance to the role of this group while addressing the over 400 delegates present in the room, stressing its creation as one of the most significant events in the last year for Systematic.

During coffee-breaks I spoke with few French open source actors, among others Cedric Thomas (OW2), Ludovic Dubost (Xwiki), Stéfane Fermiger (Nuxeo), Daniel Schaefer (Kalis), but also with open source customers, like Denis Teyssou (AFP) or Marie Buhot-Launay (Paris Region Economic Development Agency), inward investment adviser for ISV companies wanting to invest in the Paris area.

People had a very positive feeling with regard to the approved open source projects, and looking at projects like scribo is easy to share their thoughts.

SCRIBO - Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies - aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents. SCRIBO has a total budget of 4.3M? and is partially funded by the French administration. It brings 9 participants together: AFP, CEA LIST, INRIA, LRDE (Epita), Mandriva, Nuxeo, Proxem, Tagmatica and XWiki.

Italy beat France on a soccer field, but on the open source ground we have a lot to learn from them.

Technorati Tags: France, Italy, Open Source Government, ecosystems, DominiqueVernay, RobertoDCosmo, MarcLipinski, FrancoisBancilhon, Scribo, System@tic

Profoss last week organised an event on OpenOffice.org deployments in professional environments.

Running with the seagulls, by * Toshio *

The event was opened by Roberto Galoppini, who talked about the approach and methodology available for a successful OpenOffice.org migration. After an introduction to the OpenOffice.org community and the way OpenOffice.org has been promoted in Italy, with significant results (doubling of download year over year), Roberto went ahead with advices on OpenOffice.org migrations, based on his own experience. I won’t make a recap of this talk here, but as often, the most obvious points are those that are worth repeating: involve your users, evaluate the situation before migrating, etc. Worth noting is that integration of OpenOffice.org with other enterprise systems might cause troubles at some point. Maybe a repository of approved or certified OpenOffice.org extensions might be helping here, but Roberto doesn’t see a global initiative happening soon, or unrelated to commercial interests of a company.

Next was Eric Descamps, project manager at the Belgian Post for the pilot on OpenOffice.org. After evaluation of the business case of an OOo deployment at the Belgian Post, it was discovered that the returns were more or less the same if the deployment started in a window between now and in 2 years. As a result, the project is now frozen, but can be restarted anytime. I guess this is a good argument when negociating with Microsoft. Let’s hope it won’t be limited at that though. Because the pilot at the Post brought interesting information. As an example, most problems encountered by users where due to format conversions. And this is in agreement with Roberto, who advised to switch to ODF altogether when switching to OOo.

During the break, Bruno Lowagie, from iText fame, gave a demo combining iText and OOo for the generation of PDF documents: the template bring edited in OOo, and the final document generated by iText.

After the break, it was Machtelt Garrels‘ turn to talk. Machtelt is the co-founder of the Belgian chapter of the OpenDoc Society, and gave a passioned talk about avoiding the common pitfalls during a migration. As mentioned above, it’s funny to see the most obvious things be worth repeating. One such thing is that management has to give the example. How can an employee be motivated by a change to OOo if his own managers don’t take the step themselves?

Her talk was followed by a panel discussion where all speakers participated.

This panel discussion closed the third Profoss event, which was again highly rated by all participants.

Profoss was started one year ago to provide quality information about the use of free and open source software in professional environments. Open source technologies are still too often dismissed as unreliable, unsupported geek toys. This is a judgment generally based on unverified allegations or due to ignorance of the open source world. Profoss wants professionals to take their decision to use or reject open source technologies on hard facts.

To reach that goal, Profoss’ first initiative was to organise events bringing non-commercial, informative content.
This was followed by other initiatives like a news website, directories of software and professionals specialised in open source and a planet aggregating feeds from blogs talking about professional open source at planet.profoss.eu.

If you want to be updated about Profoss activities, you can join the newsletter.

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, openoffice, Profoss, RobertoGaloppini, EricDescamps, BrunoLowagie, MachteltGarrels