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.

Open core, Open core,  more Open core… the debate goes on and on, with Monty the latest to weigh in.

When you get down to it this is a fight over branding – which is why the issue is so important to the OSI folks (who are all about the brand). I don’t actually care that much how SugarCRM, Jahia, Alfresco et al make the software they sell to their customers. As a customer I’m asking a whole different set of questions to “is this product open source?” I want to know how good the service and support is, how good the product is, and above all, does it solve the problem I have at a price point I’m comfortable with. The license doesn’t enter into consideration.

So if that’s the case (and I believe it is), why the fighting? Because of the Open Source brand, and all the warm-and-fuzzies that procures. “Open solutions” are the flavour of the decade, and as a small ISV building a global brand, being known as Open Source is a positive marketing attribute. The only problem is that the warm-and-fuzzies implied by Open source – freedom to change supplier or improve the software, freedom to try the software before purchasing, the existence of a diverse community of people with knowledge, skills and willingness to help a user in difficulty – don’s exist in the Open Core world. The problem is that for the most part, the Open Core which you can obtain under the OSI-approved license is not that useful.

Yesterday on Twitter, I said “Open Core is annoying because the “open core” bit is pretty much useless. It doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.”

Now, I wasn’t expecting this to be particularly controversial, but I got some push-back on this. Dan Fabulich replied “Ridiculous. Like the free version of MySQL is useless?” Which leads me to think of Inigo Montoya on the top of the Cliffs on MoherInsanity turning to Vizzini and saying “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

With all this talk of Open Core, clearly some confusion has crept in. Perhaps it’s on my part. So allow me to elaborate what I understand by “Open Core”.

First, companies can’t be Open Core. Products are Open Core. So whereas Monty considers that from 2006 on, MySQL was not an “Open Source company”, I would contend that MySQL Server has always been, and continues to be, Free Software, and an Open Source product. That is, not Open Core.

Open Core for me means you provide a free software product, improve it, and don’t release the improvements under the free software licence. In my mind, Mac OS X is not “Open Core” just because it’s based on the NetBSD kernel, it is proprietary software.

Perhaps it would be useful to give some examples of what is Open Core:

• Jahia is Open Core – significant features and stabilisation work are present in the Enterprise Edition are not available at all in the Community Edition
• SugarCRM is obviously Open Core. Key features related to reporting, workflow, administration and more are only present in the commercial editions
• JasperSoft BI Suite is Open Core. Lots of useful features are only available to people buying the product.

The key here is that support contracts and extra features are only available if you also pay licensing fees. To take the oft-cited example of InnoDB hot back-up tool for MySQL, you can purchase this and use it with the GPL licensed MySQL Server.

This is why I say that Open Core products “don’t do exactly what it says on the tin” – the features you see advertised on the project’s website are not available to you along with software freedom.

I have talked to companies who deliberately avoid adding “spit & polish” to the community edition to encourage people to trade up for things like better documentation, attractive templates and easy installation – and don’t provide an easy way for the community edition users to share their own work. Other products have an open source engine that doesn’t do much except sit there, and all useful functionality is available as paid modules. Yes, a persistent, skilled, patient developer can take the Open Source version of the product and make it do something useful. For the most part, however, if you want to actually use the software without becoming an expert in its internals, you’ll need some of the commercial upgrades.

There is another name for this which is even more pejorative, Crippleware. Deliberately hobbled software. And that’s what I think gets people riled up – if you’re releasing something as free software, then there should at least be the pretence that you are giving the community the opportunity to fend for itself – even if that is by providing an “unofficial” git tree where the community can code up GPL features competing with your commercial offering, or a nice forum for people to share templates, themes and extensions and fend for themselves. But what gets people riled is hearing a company call themselves “an Open Source company” when most of the users of their “open source” product do not have software freedom. It’s disingenuous, and it is indeed brand dilution.

That said, let me repeat – I have no problem with companies doing this. I have no problem with them advertising their GPL-licensed stuff as Open Source. I would just like to see more of these companies providing a little bit of independence and autonomy to their user community. But then, that’s potentially not in their long-term interest – even if it is difficult to imagine a situation where the community-maintained version outstrips the “Enterprise” edition in features and stability.

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!

It’s 11pm on a sultry evening in Gdańsk. I’m in the city to attend WikiMania, the annual conference for wiki projects operated by the WikiMedia Foundation – especially, Wikipedia.

On this particular sultry evening, the second day of WikiMania has just about wrapped up. Buses filled to capacity with Wikipedians wrapped up in earnest discussion are shuttling the majority of attendees to the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, the Gdańsk shipyard.

I’ve taken my leave. While I’d love to see the shipyards, it’s been a full day and I was feeling a bit unwell after letting myself get dehydrated in the heat.

Earlier in the evening we had the privilege of being the first audience to see <Truth in Numbers?>, a documentary on the Wikipedia movement and it’s critics.

The film, shot and produced over a 5 year period between 2005 and 2010, focused on what Wikipedia is, what effects it has had, who the Wikipedians are, and what the criticisms are of Wikipedia.

The film felt like a media literacy piece that was designed to foster discussion and introspection. The audience of dedicated Wikimedians took the film in many different ways. By turns, it was praised and criticized. A socially awkward young man made a long comment that abstractly reduced to, “I’m disappointed that the film wasn’t made for my own needs.” One volunteer was visibly wounded by the film and commented that he felt attacked.  I threw in my two cents. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation offered her views. Small discussions and comments were twittered.

The film is worthwhile. It will foster discussions that will develop better media literacy – not just around Wikipedia, but also for traditional scholarship and media.

In some ways, perhaps the most shaken community member should have been Jimmy Wales.  The movie provided a balanced view of his faults, something that few of us would like to see. Still, after the screening, he was on stage, answering questions alongside the directors and seeming to take it all in stride.

In the criticisms of Wikipedia, I’ve always been surprised at how often people focus on Jimmy and the idea that he is the project leader– it seems clear to them that this North American white male of a suitably alpha age should be in control of the project. Perhaps this idea is more comforting to them than the idea that the control really vests in those who do the work.

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable people (Phipps, Ingo, Mickos, Aker, Aslett, Proffitt, O'Grady).

I add my take on the debate on the CodePlex Foundation blog.

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable... Stephen Walli

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable... Stephen Walli

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

I just posted my opening thoughts on the current debates over software freedom versus open source software as a foundation for a discussion about open core as a business model. They are over at the CodePlex Foundation blog. Please discuss there rather than here.

I just posted my opening thoughts on the current debates over software freedom versus open source software as a foundation for a discussion about open core as a business model. They are over at the CodePlex Foundation blog. Please discuss... Stephen Walli

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.).