][ stefano maffulli

Roberto reports about the Lazio e-Citizen project chose Moodle to deliver courses to educate elderly citizens (age 60 and more) to use computers and Internet, but they don’t say that openly.  I found it offensive, that AICA and all the other groups involved in the project failed not only to give credit to the Moodle project, but they also created artificial requirements for the solution  making it look like the training lessons need Windows 2000 or later versions and for the browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 or superior.  Goodbye browser interoperability, farewell Moodle’s effort to be platform independent.

It’s annoying to realize that Moodle was exploited so radically, it feels like a rip off. To give credit to the developers of the Free Software you use to deliver your services is the least you can and should do.  You should also contribute back your changes and learn to be a good citizen in the digital world, where freedom must be preserved.  I think the Affero GPLv3 is a better license for Moodle and other web based software as the best way to protect their asset from such rip off. Funambol wisely chose it immediately and more projects are using it, too.  Credibility and reputation are between the most important assets for Free Software developers and they should be guarded properly.

Probably, even if Moodle used the AGPLv3, it may have not prevented the Lazio eCitizen project from hiding it under the hood but at least it may have forced them to release back their changes. I suspect we will see more of these misguided/misinformed uses of Free Software in the future. We should get the best legal protection and get ready to educate people to behave correctly.

I realized that it’s true what they say about email clients: they all suck. Some suck less, some (the majority) suck more than a Dyson vacuum cleaner.  Mailing list archives are important for communities because they represent their collective knowledge. Having all archives all in one place is definitely better than having to redirect people to google search to find answers or tips.

I had to redirect a few thousands email messages from a mailbox archive to the new Funambol Forge discussion system.  Evolution allows redirect as does also Mail.app, so I thought it would have been banal: CTRL-a to select all messages, menu / redirect and that’s it. Wrong: both applications cannot apply the command to more than one message at the time.  Scripting the action seemed too much work, so I reverted to using mutt, the email client that sucks less (as its motto says). Load the mailbox (mutt -f mail.box) select/tag all messages (hit the key T), apply the command to all tagged messages (hit the keys ;b), write the destination address and wait for smtp to do its job. After a couple of hours the postfix server was done. The past archives of Funambol mailing lists are in the archive of the new Forge. Great: the new discussions are ready to roll, on Monday.

Aderisco con piacere alla campagna per donare il 5 per mille a favore della ONLUS Progetto Linguistico Italiano OpenOffice.org

Codice Fiscale: 90113350327

Il 5 per mille al PLIO

As Funambol community manager, one of my duties is to know such community. It sounds simple, but since lots of software is involved to gather this knowledge things get less simple. I need to dive into apache logs and I decided to use my good old friend Postgresql. If I could, I would put everything in a database The problem is that I also need to rapidly prototype reports to transform data into information for the board. To start navigating the data, I first followed this nice tutorial to load apache logs in PostgreSQL. Connecting the database to NeoOffice was more difficult, mainly because there is no native PostgreSQL driver in NeoOffice and PSQL JDBC page is confusing. Anyway, after trial and error, I found out that on Leopard OS X 10.5 you need JDBC3 for your PSQL version 8.3 (I used the dmg packages). To install the driver I followed the instructions provided here. Now I can start diving in the logs and prepare some reports. The board will be happy soon and I’m glad I’m on my way to better knowledge of this community too.

We’re back to square one, 1 ISO standard on each side of the barricade since Microsoft managed to convince the ISO that its proprietary standard, OOXML  deserves the approved stamp. For all the money Google and IBM have thrown trying to stop it, it seems they’ve lost this battle. But I’ve learned yesterday from a ISO member that there are still 60 days for any country to appeal the decision. Given the irregularities mentioned by many, this is not a remote possibility.

But anyway, I wish we would all move on and focus on two main actions for two main groups of people.  Developers should focus to deliver good code to compete with Microsoft Office.  Advocates and lobbyist should instead convince Microsoft customers and Microsoft execs directly to modify the Open Specification Promise in order to fix its shortcomings (and make it compatible with GPLv3).  I think this will help free software (whose interests don’t necessarily coincide with those of IBM and Google) and I’m sure that there are people at Microsoft ready to listen.

Only real hackers consider improving what everybody else thinks is already optimal. At Funambol we like to do just that and we decided to improve the iPhone user interface:

Funambol, the company that is known for putting the “fun” back in the mobile business, today released a high contrast user interface for the widely used iPhone, making it more fun to use and more accessible to select customers.

Read the rest of the press release with the working screenshots on Funambol for iPhone.

The protest of people on Facebook made the difference.  Mark Zuckerberg wrote on FB’s blog

We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.

The policy changed from opt-out to opt-in, no stories will be published without users proactively consenting and there is now the possibility to permanently opt-out. MoveOn.org is happy with the result.

I’m surprised by how long it took for Zuckerberg to speak up and I wonder if he really gets what Beacon has done.  My impression is that Facebook management doesn’t understand the privacy issue at all.  They’re young, which helps making mistakes but also helps learning.  I hope they have learned that Facebook has a big responsibility and won’t repeat such mistake in the future. Personally, I’ll focus my attention on other social networks for a while and put Facebook on the backburner it will take some time before they regain my trust.

After many years of working in a non-profit organization I became convinced that the main difference between for-profit business and non-profit business is in the availability (or lack thereof) of dividends. Plus for-profit companies prefer not to pay dividends and markets pressure corporations to act in stakeholder’s interests (not just shareholder’s) … I leave the math to you.
Given these premises I’m not surprised that Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Foundation, was paid good money in 2006 (see Mozilla Financial FAQ for a breakdown of her $500,000 salary). Charity Navigator’s FAQ (a site that helps US-based donors evaluate non-profit organizations) comment on non-profit’s CEO salaries:

it is important to consider that it takes a certain level of professionalism to effectively run a charity and charities must offer a competitive salary if they want to attract and retain that level of leadership.

And that’s the important bit. According to Charity Navigator, average salary for a charity CEO is $145,000 per year. That’s peanuts, compared to the $14 million compensation received by the average CEO of a S&P company.

Of course, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys, as my father-in-law says, and you don’t want monkeys running your charity. Mitchell has done a good job at Mozilla Foundation and she deserves recognition and an incentive to keep it up. Not only I don’t see a problem but I hope salaries for non-profit CEOs will get higher to attract the best managers.

The problems start if non-profit CEOs compensation is very high compared to total expenses. Peter Brown, FSF’s Executive Director, received about $70k in 2006 (9% of expenses) while Shari Steele, EFF’s Executive Director, received about $150k in 2005 (5% of expenses). Salaries are proportional to the size of the organization: EFF’s income is $2.7 million, compared to a mere $800k for FSF.

Unfortunately this level of transparency is non-existent in comparable non-profit organizations in Europe. I don’t feel comfortable donating without knowing exactly how my money will be spent in detail, especially regarding compensation for the executives.

I have received recently half dozen invitations to join social web2.0 services: Roberto pointed me to twitter during a real life chat in Firenze, other invitations came via email to services like Plaxo pulse, Naymz, hi5, Spook and others. Many people are asking to become my friends on Facebook but I don’t remember meeting them and my email archives since 1997 ignore too. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed

I like experimenting these tools, but I can’t keep up with the pace they start (and die). All of these services ask me to replicate information I have already written down on this blog or on my Linkedin profile. Signing up to all these services would require me to quit my paid activities and spend more time online than offline. At that point Alex Wright on the NYTimes would be right. But I agree with what Dawn Foster wrote about Social Networks, Relationships, and “Friends”:

my online interactions in social networks do not replace physical interactions with real people, they simply provide a way to augment the relationships I have with my friends.

For me it’s also a matter of following conversations as they were described in the Cluetrain Manifesto:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

Noticing Facebook privacy issues, I still wonder if I should keep considering FB as a legitimate place for conversations or quit (it is possible, although difficult). And when did we start using our real names online? I remember the old days when we all had nicknames and everybody was careful revealing his real identity. What made us change our mind?

Riporto un’iniziativa segnalata da Roberto Galoppini per imprenditori italiani che vogliano presentare idee ad un gruppo di dirigenti esperti e potenziali investitori.

Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO di Funambol, è presente nel comitato selezionatore quindi mi aspetto che anche le iniziative FLOSS saranno ben accette. La scadenza per presentare i progetti è il 20 Dicembre: è ora di spolverare il sogno nel cassetto.

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