During the development of SOS Open Source we analyzed over 60 tools to evalute open source software, and among them we came across Sonar. Sonar is a company-led project sponsored by SonarSource, one of the five winners of the Open Innovation Award held last year at the Open World Forum in Paris.

In my last year’s note on SonarSource I succintly wrote: “Solid product, promising line of development, they just need more public attention.” SonarSource was my second best after Kaltura, and I still think they deserve more attention.

More about Sonar evaluation at SOS Open Source.

Connecting the Dots: US SEC, ABS Mandates, Financial Modeling and Python - ActiveState webinar on the potential use of Python in US financial system (there is a proposal to require the use of Python in Asset-Backed Security market to give better transparency to regulatory bodies like the SEC.
September 22, 2010 10:00 AM PDT

Webinar: From RDBMS to Apache Solr/Lucene – Open Source Search for database developers - In this webcast, author and database/XML expert Nicholas Chase contrasts the conventional SQL-driven programming approach with the simpler, more streamlined approaches available with Solr/Lucene. He will explore how to approach search with Solr and get started on a real search application that produces useful search results, along with a sample application and sample data.
September 8, 2010, 09:00 AM PDT

DimDim myScreen 6 is here! - Not a webinar, but a webinar and conferencing open source tool now with new features, included the myScreen plug-in to share your entire desktop, a region of your screen or just a single application.

Sep282:30 pm

Red Hat Italia is organizing an executive meeting in Milan, on the 28th of September 2010. The event will focus on how open source can help to fulfill today’s business requirements with less cost and complexity.Gianni Aguilletti, Red Hat Italia country manager, will welcome attendees at 3 PM, and then I’ll give a speech about the state of the art of open source adoption and governance in Italy.

Werner Knoblich - Red Hat VP and General Manager EMEA - will talk about Red Hat news and strategies, and a customer success story will close the working session.

All attendees will be given the opportunity to visit the Museo Diocesiano at 5.15 PM, just before the aperitif/dinner with a selection of wine-food combinations.

The event is “invitation only” and is limited in terms of availability.

The Open Innovation Revolution - opensource.com kicks off a webinar series with a discussion on “The Open Innovation Revolution” with the author of the book, Stefan Lindegaard.
Wed, Sep 1, 2010 1:00 PM EDT

Open Source Software Adoption in Enterprise IT - Black Duck Software and Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research (who will join the upcoming open source analyst session at OWF) will discuss data showing increased developer adoption of open source platforms, frameworks and development processes, and how the IT management benefits of a mixed source development model.
Wed, Sep 15, 2010 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM EDT

Magento U - Summer Webinar Series - A registered “Getting Started” webinar series designed for beginning Magento.

A little blog post to tell you more about what we at SOS Open Source are working on this summer.

Here’s what we are working on right now:

• Open Source Project Management tools. STATUS: we are currently developing a prototype for our customer based on our tool of choice (Redmine). We plan to ship the final customized version in September-mid October. We hopefully be able to share our plug-ins and enhancements before the end of October. (read more at SOS Open Source.)

ECM as a Platform – A Foundation for Content Applications - Join this webinar to hear more about the limitations of “suite” thinking and how a platform can be the foundation to achieving true Enterprise Content Management.
August 24, 2010, 11 AM EDT.

Webinar - Write Once, Deploy on Any Cloud! Overview of Simple Cloud API - This webinar will cover the basics of the API and show you how to get started.
August 24, 2010, 9:00 AM PDT

Learn Why Harvard Business Publishing Uses Open Source for Content Management - Learn why HBP opted for an open source approach using Alfresco ECM, and how Rivet Logic helped implement a robust, scalable solution that resulted in dramatic productivity improvements and lower operational costs.
Sep 16, 2010 2:00 PM EST.

Open Source Network Security - This Webinar will provide an overview of the most popular Open Source Network Security tools (registered webinar).

Olliance Group and DLA Piper are organizing the 3rd Europe Open Source Think Tank 2010, to be held September 28-29 in Paris, France at the Hôtel Golden Tulip Royal Garden Champs-Elysées. The event will present selected case studies focusing on the growing commercial maturity and complexity of open source and the evolution of cloud computing and SaaS.

About the Open Source Think Tank.
The Open Source Think Tank is the only by-invitation event where leading global industry experts gather and work collaboratively to chart the future of the commercial open source software industry and shape the evolution of cloud computing. In order to facilitate interaction and relationship building, attendance is limited to CEO’s, industry luminaries, CIO/CTO’s, senior technology executives, legal experts and investors.

Companies have been concerned about software license compliance with respect to free and open source software for some time. Part of this is due to simple competitive FUD designed to frighten people away from using FOSS or to sell services and tools around it, and part of this was due to genuine concern with license compliance when lawsuits appear because of violations. The Linux Foundation announced the Open Compliance Program at LinuxCon in Boston today to help companies understand and manage such compliance needs. I describe and comment on the program on my CodePlex Foundation blog.

Companies have been concerned about software license compliance with respect to free and open source software for some time. Part of this is due to simple competitive FUD designed to frighten people away from using FOSS or to sell services... Stephen Walli

Black Duck Software Announces Legal Certification Program, Certified Legal Professional Directory - Black Duck announced the availability of a certification program for legal professionals with clients involved in acquiring technology companies.

Try Hippo Now - Sneak preview of Hippo CMS 7.4 now online. To know more consider to step by the upcoming Hippo GetTogether in Amsterdam.

Event Information: Pure and Simple: Creating a Winning CRM Initiative with Sugar 6 - Attending this live webinar you’ll learn how to customize and personalize SugarCRM.
Wednesday, August 18, 2:00 PM EDT

Introducing Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) - An introduction about how to use Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) to create high-quality, full-featured video playback experiences.
Tuesday, August 3, 10:00 AM US/Pacific

MySQL Multi-master Replication with Tungsten - This highly technical talk will introduce multi-master replication and show how to achieve it with Tungsten.
Thursday, August 5,10:00 AM PDT

Webinar: Making Financial Results Look Pixel-Perfect with QED Financial - In this live webinar, find out why QED team selected open source Jaspersoft Business Intelligence technology to integrate with its Q2® Investment Workflow Solution.
Wednsday, August 11, 10AM PT

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

I was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a change of plan from what I presented yesterday: The report is now available under a Creative Commons license.

Why the change of heart? My intention was never to make a fortune with the report, my main priority was covering my costs and time spent. And after 24 hours, I’ve achieved that. I have had several press requests for the full report, and requests from clients to be allowed to use the report both with press and with their clients.

This solution is the best for all involved, I think – I have covered my costs, the community (and everyone else) gets their hands on the report with analysis as soon as possible, and my clients are happy to have the report available under a license which allows them to use it freely.

You can download the full report now for free.

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.

(Reposted from Neary Consulting)

Today at GUADEC I presented the results (Slides are now on slideshare) of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME? How many paid developers are there? Who writes all this software, and why?

By looking at the modules in the GNOME 2.30 release, made last March, we aim to answer many of those questions, and give deeper insight into the motivations of participants in the project.

The GNOME heartbeat - pre-release peaks and GUADEC boosts

Here are our key findings:

• GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC
• While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
• Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.
• A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.

Company Commits Percentage Volunteer 101823 23.45 Unknown 73558 16.94 Red Hat 70790 16.30 Novell 45349 10.44 Collabora 21684 4.99 Intel 11160 2.57 Fluendo 10218 2.35 Lanedo 10090 2.32 Independent 8922 2.05 Sun 8862 2.04 Nokia 6183 1.42 Openismus 5303 1.22 Codethink 5276 1.21 Eazel 4734 1.09 Litl 4620 1.06 Canonical 4487 1.03 Movial 2988 0.69 Mandriva 2504 0.58 The Family International 2130 0.49 Entropy Wave 2056 0.47 (Academia) 1894 0.44 Mozilla Corporation 1040 0.24

One of the interesting things that we have done for the census is to look at who is maintaining modules by looking at commits over the past two years, and use this data to identify areas of the platform which see lots of collaboration, areas where the maintenance burden is left to volunteers, and areas where individual companies assume most of the maintenance burden.

There are a number of modules in the platform which see a considerable amount of co-opetition, including Evolution, Evolution Data Server, DBus and GStreamer. Most modules in the platform, however, are either maintained to a large extent by volunteer developers, or see the vast majority of their contributions from one company.

I see this information being useful for companies interested in using the GNOME platform for their products, companies seeking custom application development, potential large-scale customers of desktop Linux or customers buying high-level support who want to know who employs more module maintainers or committers to the project.

The GNOME maintenance map, with modules coloured according to the company maintaining them

Update: Two significant omissions in the maintenance map were pointed out to me. After correctly associating a number of commiters to a company, Lanedo is responsible for 16.5% of the commits in GTK+ over the past two years, and volunteers are also responsible for at least 17%. Red Hat are still the largest contributor, with 32% of all commits to the module. libsoup is maintained by Dan Winship, who left Novell to join Red Hat in 2007, where he developed and maintains the module.

Update 2: As I announced in this post, the report is now available as a free download via neary-consulting.com licensed as Creative Commons by-sa 3.0

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.