One year ago, talking about open source adoption in Italian Public Administrations, I reported some SourceForge traffic distribution numbers, showing that Italy was at the fourth place after Brasil.

Italy before was used to be at the third place, but the impact of open source in Brazil was and actually is, definitely stronger. Let’s have a look at the big picture, and how Europe and BRIC countries are today, as of the 29th of July 2010.

While you are looking at SourceForge traffic distribution by countries, read also the numbers.

US (blue) is at the first place, followed by Brazil (9.93%), Germany (6.46%), France (5.59%) and eventually Italy (4.28%). Globally Europe exceeds 40% of the global traffic (Western Europe ~ 16%, Southern and Eastern Europe both  ~ 9%, and Northern Europe ~ 7%), while Americas are around 35% and Asia slightly under 19%.

BRIC collectively holds over 18% of the world traffic, more than USA.

Disclosure. I am a member of SourceForge advisory board.

Resources Combine GWOS Monitoring With Webmetrics Web Site Services - Join this webcast to learn how Webmetrics and GWOS are coming together to deliver monitoring for all of your assets on a single console.
August 4, 10 am PST

Subversion Conferences Live - a series of one day conferences for developers, administrators and IT managers to be held at four locations in the US and the UK in September featuring live sessions covering Subversion’s future.

• 9/14 - Silicon Valley - San Jose Hilton
• 9/16 - Boston - Crowne Plaza, Newton, MA
• 9/23 - Sheffield, UK - Electric Works
• 9/28 - London, UK - Heathrow Airport Hilton

Webinar: GWT Cloud Applications-Fast, Fun and Easier than Ever - Europe - Following on from the exciting announcements at Google I/O 2010, join engineers from Google and SpringSource to discover how the latest innovations in Spring Roo, STS and Google Web Toolkit allow you to quickly and easily deliver high-performance rich internet applications written in Java.
September 16,  4 pm CET

Packt is about to launch the 2010 Open Source award - now at its fifth edition, formerly known as Open Source CMS Awards - an award organized to encourage, support, recognize, and reward Open Source projects selected by a panel of judges and Packt website visitors. This year they have a prize fund of $247,000 spread across six categories.

From August 9, you are invited to submit a nomination for an Open Source Project to be put forward to the final voting stage in each category. The following categories make up the 2010 Open Source Awards.

• Open Source CMS

• Hall of Fame CMS

• Most Promising Open Source Project

• Open Source E-Commerce Applications

• Open Source JavaScript Libraries

Also, this year I have been invited again to join the judge panel, and I look forward to share my thoughts and comparative analysis of open source programs with other judges and learn about their views about Open Source e-commerce applications.

Follow Packt blog for further information about the 2010 Open Source Awards.

SOS Open Source last week evaluated LimeSurvey, the PHP open source survey web application to create on line surveys, translated in many languages and downloaded over 485.000 times. (read more at SOS Open Source.)

“DuraCloud Open Source”: An Open Canvas for Cloud-based Services - DuraSpace CBO Michele Kimpton on will provide an overview of DuraCloud open source code features, discuss integrating repositories with Cloud infrastructure, review the benefits and challenges identified in the DuraCloud pilot program and talk about how to get involved with future DuraCloud development.
28 July, 11:00 AM PST

Standing Cloud - Removing barriers to using open source applications in the cloud - In this webinar Rackspace users will learn about Standing Cloud and how install and launch an open source application in the Rackspace Cloud in under one minute, plus how to use features, such as backup and restore.
Jul 29, 1:00 PM CDT

SOS Open Source, the automated methodology to find and evaluate open source software, has been recently covered by Content Here blog and in an interview for Data Manager, an Italian IT magazine. Below some excerpts from the two sources related to SOS Open Source’s goal and customer segments.

In “Open Source Project Filtering” Seth Gottlieb wrote:

I saw a demo around 6 months ago and was impressed by the graphs he was able to create. While this technique cannot be expected to make a technology decision for you (you need to know your requirements and to have hands-on experience for that), it can be used to filter down the market and help you decide where to invest your evaluation energy.

Seth points out nicely that beyond its easy to use layout, SOS Open Source put you in the driver’s seat when it comes to having fast the most accurate information to make informed decisions about candidates. Functional, performance and security tests can then be applied only to the most promising projects.

Speaking at large about SOS Open Source with Antonio Savarese, I mentioned that I’m differentiating among different customer segments. IT consumers ask for help to select open source projects, for tenders bidders is useful to justify their technological choices.

Open Source vendors use SOS Open Source results to make a press release about their high marks, while now some sponsors wish for all results to be kept confidential, asking me to describe pros and cons in details.

ADUC, an Italian association of consumers, a couple of months ago wrote an article to inform about easy-download bait-and-switch practices charging a fee for open source programs download, and later wrote a petition to the Italian anti-trust authority. 

In the past ADUC obtained succesful resolutions in similar cases, and I look forward to see if they will eventually manage to get Google stop sell google keywords ads to Euro Content ltd (easy download owner), as recently asked to the anti-trust.

Kudos to ADUC to help with this issue, OpenOffice.org users don’t deserve this kind of treatment.

Running Your Business with Open Source (Webinar or Los Angeles, CA) - The webinar will take the approach of starting a small business infrastructure with as little out of pocket as possible from Hardware to the Operating System to Software.
July 17 2010, 3pm EDTFree Webinar – Dive Into HTML5, Video Learn from the Masters - Jeroen “JW” Wijering and the Opera browser’s HTML5 video core developer, Philip Jagenstedt will answer questions about the various html5 video codecs (webM, Ogg, H.264), browsers that support HTML5, advantages, disadvantages, the future of HTML5 video, and more.
July 21, 11AM Pacific Time

Codendi Webinar - Xerox invites you to discover the Codendi platform, open source collaborative solution for software projects management.
July 27, 5 PM GMT+2

Confindustria Vicenza, the local chapter of the Italian manufacturers’ association, on the 13 of July hosted an event about open source entitled, “Open Source, a 360-degree view: pros and cons, legal implications and hence who can profit from it“.

The event (videos) was aimed to provide the audience with information about legal, organizational and technical impacts of open source adoption, among speakers a lawyer specialized in intellectual property laws (Luca Giacopuzzi), a researcher of the TEDIS center (Antonio Picerni), Confindustria Vicenza’s ICT manager Franco Battistello and myself.

Matteo Salinas opened the event welcoming attendees and introducing nicely speakers and topics.

Speaking about open source at large, I gave a presentation covering many issues, ranging from the dimension and growth of open source to the production of code and the open source community factor. How to find open source software and eventually how to choose the best open source tools were approached from a pragmatic viewpoint.

Picerni presented findings from a research about the Italian open source offering, sharing interesting numbers and figures.

Giacopuzzi’s speech covered all IP issues related to software production and distribution, bringing on the table real cases and examples.

Talking about desktop migrations I introduced the audience to the topic giving a picture of the whole process.

Franco Battistelli brought an interesting case study about their own migration from Microsoft office to OpenOffice.org. In numbers: 120 PCs, 263 document templates, and 50.000 €  in licensing savings (managed with internal resources)!

Giulia Marigo, ICT Manager at Coges Spa and member of Confidustria Vicenza’s ICT working group, closed the event showing a brand new internal forum aimed at sharing information about open source usage among associated companies.

Kudos to the organizers of the event!

Ready to Kick the Colo Habit? Using the Cloud Instead of Scaling Your Colo - The webinar will present Customer stories showcasing how real enterprises are using CloudSwitch to deploy and run applications in the cloud for rapid development and peak-period scaling.

Jul 13, 2010 1:00 PM EDTWebinar: Cost Effective Scalable BI with Jaspersoft - Jaspersoft Business Intelligence features unveiled.
Jul 29 10:00 AM Pacific Time

How to manage complex open source database environments - Learn more about the basic management procedures for Tungsten.
Jul 15, 2010 1 PM CDT

SOS Open Source has been used to find and select open source web-based project management with issue-tracking and time-tracking tools to manage multiple IT projects, possibly localized in Italian (or at least open for internazionalization and localization).

The pre-selection of project management programs started by focusing on some of the most famous web-based ones, excluding the following (for the following reasons):

• Kforge, Project HQ, ProjectPier because maintained by a small group;
• Collabtive, Feng Project, because too young (less than 3 years old);

Launchpad, and Trac were eventually added to the final list of candidates (Read more at SOS Open Source.).

Enterprise Open Source Software Procurement and Support Best Practices - The CIO Panel from the 2010 Open Source Think Tank - Colin Bodell (VP Web Platforms, Amazon), Tim Golden (SVP Product Management, Bank of America) and Yuvi Kochar (CIO, The Washington Post Company)- will gather together to talk about the open source software acquisition and support challenges they have faced and share solutions they have developed to overcome these challenges.
Jul 15, 2010 11:00 AM PDT.

Revolutionizing Rich Media in Blackboard: Introducing Kaltura’s Open Source Video Building Block - Join George Kroner, Technical Lead for the Kaltura Building Block and former head of the Blackboard developer community, and Leah Belsky, Head of the Kaltura Education Team, for a deep dive demo, a discussion of innovative use cases, and a glimpse into the future of rich media in education.
Jul 27, 2010 2:00 PM EDT

Webinar on Selenium – The most powerful Open source Test Automation tool - Kavin School offers low cost Selenium Automation Testing Tool training for the students who have no or prior experience in Selenium, register for Selenium Data Driven Testing Using Ruby Language - Tips and Tricks on Aug-14 at 8:15 AM PST or for Selenium Data Driven Testing Using Java Language - Tips and Tricks on Oct-10 at 8:15 AM PST.

The Open Innovation Demo Cup - a contest open to all open source projects and solutions getting ready for commercial launch or already on the market - will be held at the next Open World Forum on the 1st of October.

While last year a jury of experts awarded the most promising project in terms of innovation, use of open source technologies, and value creation potential - included companies like Bonitasoft and Kaltura - this year 12 companies chosen from written applications will be nominated and invited to give an 8 min presentation.

The Open Innovation Demo Cup is about products; it requires timed, live demonstrations; and does not allow slide presentations! In recognition of the difficulty of communicating the power and value of Open Source projects on stage in a short 8 minutes, the Demo Cup will honor outstanding presentations. Chosen for their style, passion, clarity, and sometimes for their sheer fun, these Open Innovation Awards reward a unique ability to deliver a great product and position it in the market, to show off its most compelling features, to differentiate it from other products — and along the way to entertain a tough and critical Open World Forum audience.

So this event is a three-fold opportunity for Open Source entrepreneurs: to present their company at an international event; to make contact with potential customers and partners; and for the winners and finalists, to enjoy the recognition that comes with a prestigious award which reflects the fact that their product has successfully convinced a demanding panel of judges.

To enter the Awards, all you have to do is to submit your entry, before 15 July 2010, in the form of a five to ten-page executive summary (in English, given that this is an international competition) along with an initial draft of the storyboard for the demo that would be presented during the final, to the following address: democup@openworldforum.org.

The 2010 Demo Cup is organized by the Open World Forum, with operational support provided by the Open Source Software Special Interest Group at the Systematic competitiveness cluster.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the open core debate, and a popular opinion seems to inflict some sort of excommunication to anyone having a less than pure open source monetization process. Therefore I thought that I would add some unsolicited input to this matter.

Now, what is a pure open source monetization process?

The answers to that question echo the armchair soccer coaches who have been entertaining the world with their wrong predictions, while teams with less theory and more practice have advanced to better results.

A popular theory is that a project must be 100% open source, no matter what, and the ensuing monetization process must be modeled after projects X, Y, and Z, which have practiced that for ages with brilliant results.

I have two observations for the supporters of this theory:

• It doesn’t work for all. What works for a browser might not be suitable for an operating system, and what looks good for an application server might be totally inadequate for a database.
• Projects that don’t conform 100% to the pure open source model (the so called open core) are not bad by default. They may actually turn out to be better than some “pure” implementations.

The first observation is the hardest to come to terms with. Supporters of a popular project are appalled when they hear that (insert totally unrelated open source project name here) does not follow their business model, but they are doing something else, and especially when this something else falls into the realm of the evil open core (More about this later).

The reason why different projects do different things to make a buck is that the success of a project depends on different conditions. If project A is a browser, and project B is a web server, the strategies to monetize on them are often totally different. The choice of operating systems, user base targeting, and associated services, can be really as distinct as selling your goods at WalMart or Radio Shack. There may be some overlapping, but overlapping is usually not what brings food on your employees tables. And there may be more conditions that influence a project success, as many startups and venture capitalist have learned at their expense. Projects started successfully in Germany may be a flop in Silicon Valley, and vice versa. Models that pump money by the barrel in the server market may go bankrupt if applied to desktop products, and so on.

So, before saying “you should do like RedHat“, ask yourself if your project meets the same conditions that have made RedHat an open source commercial success. And by same conditions I mean not only the target users, but also the environment, the skilled engineers, the community, and probably the vision that put the company in the right place at the right moment.

That leaves you with the choice of pulling a business model from the basket of the non-pure business models, where you do one or more of the following:

1. You license your code under the GPL or another free software license, and occasionally sell exceptions to the customers who ask for it (the so called dual licensing)
2. You distribute your (fully functional) main product for free, under an open source license, and sell closed source features, as plugins or different builds.
3. You leave your main product unchanged for all, but to your customers you give additional closed-source and not freely available software.
4. You leave your product unchanged, and sell services that require your customers to install and use special software to get the service.

If your project uses one or more of these techniques, it will find one or more people who claim that it is not open source or not free software, or both. This makes you, your employees, and most of your project users uncomfortable, and probably angry. Of course it’s open source, and of course it’s free software! It’s released under an OSI license: what do the pundits want more?

Yet, once the anger subsides, you take stock of your project and look at the results. Your users (the ones using your product for free, a daily reminder to the world that it is open) are happy. Your customers are satisfied. Your revenues are growing, and you can guarantee a paycheck to your employees every month. Not only that, but you are hiring, because your business is expanding.

So, what’s the matter? Why do you have to suffer the indignity of being called dirty names because you didn’t make money the way that project X or Y are doing?

The answer is that you shouldn’t suffer. The market decides if your project is healthy or not. If your project is released under an open source license, the sole fact that dozens of other projects spread it around as part of their distribution will reassure you that the naysayers are outnumbered and can scream until they drop with no consequence for you.

What should you care for, then? What should guide your business in an open source project?

My answer is Pragmatism

What’s that? According to the Wiktionary pragmatism is The pursuit of practicality over aesthetic qualities; a concentration on facts rather than emotions or ideals.

And, how do we apply this principle? Look at the data around you. Go to an open source convention. Enter any conference room. Looking from the speaker’s stand point, the room is speckled with the apple logos of Macintosh laptops. Go to the back of the room, and you will spot probably more Windows than Linux screens in the audience. And yet, most of those people are enthusiastic open source adopters. It’s just that they are not fanatically splitting the world between free and non free, like someone would like them to do. Most of the free software and open source users are just pragmatic. They use open source because it works well. A large part of Firefox users don’t even know that it is open source. They only know, by their experience, that it works better than IE, and they could not care less if the source is available or not. The truth is that the open source development model, which can produce high quality software, is not necessarily coupled with a definite open source monetization process, or even with open source awareness from its users.

Pragmatic users choose their hardware and software based on user friendliness. And this could be anything, depending on the user’s level of expertise and personal wishes. It could be the number of features, the ease of customization, or the compatibility with existing software and hardware, a good environment for playing games or for coding C++ applications. The definition can be anything.

In this crowd of pragmatists, there are some who like the project also because it’s open source. But the product must be good in the first place. I doubt that users may love a project that sucks or is a pain to use, just because it is free, open and liberally distributed. So, once you have a good open source product, then you will find a core of users who like to participate in the project, by contributing code, bug reports, fixes, documentation, or by talking about it at conferences and user group meetings.

If your users are not pragmatists, I’d say you are doomed. If you make a product that only pure free software enthusiasts want to use because you discourage using it with non-free software, then you reduce your chances of doing business, and you will be serving a niche of very happy users who are oblivious of their material problems, and they will let you wonder how to solve yours.

Summing up: before asking if a project is really truly and perfectly open source according to the purest principles, ask yourself these two questions:

• Is the product making its users happy while prospering economically?
• Who would really benefit from forcing the product makers to embrace purer principles?

DISCLAIMER I work for MySQL at Oracle. The opinions in this  article are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer.
(Giuseppe Maxia, MySQL Community Team lead at Oracle).

Yesterday Technorati’s Commercial Open Source blog page revealed Techorati Authority 424 and membership in the Top 100 Info Tech list, but with a totally different authority (546, see pictures below).

I am not the only one wondering what’s going on at Technorati. In the meanwhile Commercial Open Source blog’s authority falled to 119.

“Open Core is the New Dual Licensing Model” is the last of a chain of interesting posts against or in favor of open core, coming from different realm of experience: the analyst guy Stephen O’Grady, the free software evangelist Simon Phipps, the hacker Brian Aker and last but not least the entrepreneur Mårten Mickos.

Let’s dig now deeper into what is open core to business, and why it is not a business model.

The “open core (licensing)” expression was originally coined by Andrew Lampitt, and it was rightly pointing to the licensing side, but it ended to be used to refer to a specific kind of “open source business model” (emphasis is mine):

The open core model is about a particular business model that an increasing number of commercial open source vendors have chosen for its ability to both scale a business while serving communities.[..]

When it comes down to it, it’s all about value. If the open source core adds value to the community, the project will thrive. If the commercial license adds valuable features, the vendor will thrive as well.

All boils down to if the open source core adds or not value to the community. And a lot more maybe said about different approaches to apply the “open core licensing”, or as I would rather say how such licensing is part of the whole open source business strategy.

Take Funambol Open Core way, or the more Apache-ish Day Software approach is clear that not every business strategy based on an open core licensing policy diminishes Freedom.

Funambol balances community and business interests targeting two different customer segments (enterprises/carriers), yet developing a tight relationship with external developers through its architecture of participation.

Day Software is a different story telling about a variant of the open core definition - namely the community controlled core copyrights - but here the vendor doesn’t claim to be an open source vendor and this for some makes a big difference.

Free & Open Source Software in Outsourcing Projects - Black Duck Software Offers Webinar on Managing the Use of Free and Open Source Software in Outsourced Development Projects.
When: July 1st at 13:00 CEST
Audience: Project Managers, Outsourcing Managers, Legal, R&D and IT.
Register on line. In case you missed the previous SAP BlackDuck seminar here a 60 seconds version, here the full version.XEROX to Present on Enterprise Open Source PLM and Global Product Development - The live webcast will describe how XEROX office products has transformed their product development process worldwide with the Aras enterprise open source PLM software suite.
When: June 30, 2010 at 2:00pm Eastern
Register on line.

Awards start with the nomination process and this year are granted monthly in these categories, check out the Award Schedule to know about your favorite category (the first nomination will open on the 1st of August).

I will join for the third time the Jolt Awards jury this year, in the following categories: “Books”, “Testing and Debugging Tools” and “Change and Configuration Management Tools”.

Developers, vendors, and judges can nominate their favority tools. For more information about the Jolt Awards, contact Jonathan Erickson joltawards@drdobbs.com.

“The future of Cloud services and integration” conference held today in Rome was another opportunity to share ideas about opportunities and threats emerging from cloud computing. Security vendors (Trend Micro), academic researchers, postal police officers and representatives from IT and IT security associations discussed the topic in depth.

Valeri Cardellini, senior researcher at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” gave a panoramic view of cloud computing, reporting an historical perspective and yet providing the audience with comparisons charts.

Roberto Polillo - full professor at the university of Milano Bicocca - tailored his speech to an audience paying attention to development countries, sharing numbers, facts and previsions about such emerging market.

Maurizio Martinozzi - per-sales team leader at Trend Micro - introduced the cloud security theme, talking about the cloud security risks and possible approaches to minimize them.

Maurizio Mapelli, AIPSI Secretary, gave a speech about cloud privacy and regulations issues.

Domenico Vulpiani - Director at the Italian Postal Police - opened the round-table session stressing the importance of security policies and procedures, and reporting few anecdotes from his daily professional life.

Eventually it was my turn to share some facts about open source, open standards and open data. Talking about open source I recapped the (not so) short list of open source cloud offerings (starting from the “usual suspects” Cassandra, Drizzle, Eucalyptus and Hadoop to the probably less known Chef, collectd, ControlTier, Gearman, OpenNebula, OpenQRM, Puppet, RabbitMQ, Traffic Server) and service/platform providers (Abiquo, BitNami, Enomaly, eyeOS,  Joyent, Ubuntu, WaveMaker and Zenoss).

Open source plumbing matters to all cloud services providers, Amazon, Google and Microsoft itself. From a customer perspective it makes a little difference - while IT giants stand comfortably on open source dwarfs’ shoulders (and I agree with O’Grady that is  the way to go, at least  for global players). What matters to cloud customers is the availability of their own data, and also the ability to keep using them even changing cloud provider.

NASA open source interoperability collaboration seems a sound approach:

By demonstrating how cloud interoperability can facilitate international collaboration and seamless global access to public data, NASA hopes to accelerate the development of cloud standards and the adoption of cloud infrastructure services by the scientific community.

The Open cloud manifesto, the Free Cloud Alliance, the Open Web Foundation, the European Morfeo group or the FP7 Reservoir project are all striving to stay relevant, and maybe other will come. All in all we won’t get freedom for free, and this time the source code maybe not enough.

Technical Due Diligence for M&A: A Perspective from Corporate Development at SAP - Black Duck reported that total M&A business for Black Duck grew 100 percent from the same quarter a year ago, the webinar on technical due diligence for M&A will be led by Russell Hartz of SAP’s Corporate Development organization. Tuesday, June 22, 8:30 AM PDTWebinar: Introducing Magento Mobile - Join the Magento team to know more about Magento mobile (introduction, demo, Q&A). Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 10:00 AM PDT

How to Create an Enterprise Open Source License Compliance Program - Heather J Meeker attorney will discuss how to create an enterprise open source license compliance program. Wednesday June 23, 2010 11:00 AM PDT