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  • Stef 7:38 am on 20 May, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , neubot, open source   

    New release for Neubot, the Net Neutrality monitor 

    Neubot is a “software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet” in order to quantify network neutrality. The software is aresearch project on network neutrality of the NEXA Center for Internet & Society at Politecnico di Torino. The project is based on a lightweight open-source program that interested users can download and install on their computers. The program runs in background and periodically performs transmission tests with some test servers and with other instances of the program itself. These transmission tests probe the Internet using various application level protocols. The program saves tests results locally and uploads them on the project servers. The collected dataset contains samples from various Providers and allows to monitor network neutrality.

    Monitoring network neutrality is crucial because it enables a deeper understanding of operators behavior. This is paramount at a time when there is a broad discussion regarding changes in network neutrality policies. The availability of quantitative datasets collected by independent researchers should rebalance, at least in part, the deep information asymmetry between Internet Service Providers and other interested stakeholders (including regulators and citizens), and should provide a more reliable basis for discussing policies.

    It is distributed as: a .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu; a zipped application for MacOSX; an installer for Windows XP SP3+. It is also available in source format.

    Read Neubot 0.3.7 release notes.

     

  • Stef 11:28 am on 11 February, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , open source   

    Choose a good license and manage well the community 

    Some of the things that Mike Tienman said in this interview with InternetNews.com I could have said myself.

    I have come to believe that a license alone is neither a secret to success nor an absolution of sin.

    Exactly: choosing a free license is a moral choice but that alone won’t secure neither commercial success nor any other success of the project.

    “It’s a lot easier to bring tools to the community than it is to bring community to the tools,” Tiemann said. “I think that the importance of community cannot be overestimated.”

    How can I agree more? My job as community manager is to facilitate the community on the path to such tools.

    “I do believe that licensing is a key component that underpins a successful community effort,” Tiemann said. “The license, in a sense, dictates how the community can or should be expected to behave.”

    Basically, you need to choose a free software license and to manage the community in order to enable success.  Do you see why I could have said all this myself?

    via LinuxPlanet – Interviews – What Matters to Open Source: Licensing or Community? – More to FOSS Than Licenses.

     

    • Simon Phipps 6:33 pm on 11 February, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      I believe the time has come to formalise this “more than justthe license” idea. I cover a wide range of indicators in addition to the license in this talk: http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/a_software_freedom_scorecard

    • Roberto Galoppini 7:56 pm on 8 March, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Choosing a free license maybe a moral choice, but programs are released under free licenses for many reasons.

      People join communities for different reasons, possibly different from the author’s one. In Bob Young wording: “a community is just a group of people that share a common interest – they don’t have to like each other”. And beyond license’s choice the community governance model is of great importance too.

      All in all the license is just an element of the constitution, and as you pointed out tools – along with rights – can make the difference.

    • Stef 8:17 pm on 8 March, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      @roberto: I agree that the governance model is one of the tools to create a community. But, whatever is the reason to release software under a free license, moral choice should be one :) It’s like deciding not to pollute the waters when starting any business.

  • Stef 10:06 am on 3 December, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: acquisition, , deal, , funambo., merger, open source, , sun   

    Funambol asks EU to approve the Oracle+Sun deal 

    I was very concerned when DG Competition announced that they needed to take more time to investigate the merger of Oracle and Sun because of MySQL. The deal for me seemed not only natural for business reasons, but also naturally neutral towards consumers.  MySQL is safe also in Oracle’s hands because the project, with so many big companies knowing its internals, is basically too big to fail now. Even if Oracle should decide not to finance its development (which makes absolutely no business sense for them) there should be enough providers out there capable of offering support to users and further its development (software patents threat excluded).

    I’m very happy that Funambol has sent a letter to European Commissioner Neelie Kroes asking her to approve rapidly the Oracle + Sun merger. I totally agree with Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol’ CEO, put all his

    The database market is highly dynamic, and the software on which these enterprises are built can neither be owned nor their development paths easily controlled or curtailed.

    And the damage for this wait is huge, not just for the companies, but for the employee. With Sun loosing $100Million per month, there is not much time to waste. Says Fabrizio:

    The alternative to a full merger is likely to be the exit of SUN Microsystems from the database market. [...] Their likely exit from the market will harm the open source software market and further entrench the position of proprietary software providers.

    I hope that Commissioner Kroes listens and that Funambol’s letter can help clear her doubts.

     

  • Stef 11:52 am on 23 November, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , iad, incentives, open source,   

    How To Mix Agile And Software Developed By A Community 

    Back from Italian Agile Day where Stefano Fornari of Funambol with Marco Abis of Sourcesense animated a debate about mixing Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Agile development methods. I used to think that there was no issue because, after all, free software is a way to release software and it’s not a development method like many still think. Strictly speaking, what makes software free and open source is its license, not how it’s developed. But a lot of FLOSS is indeed developed in similar ways, with distributed teams, volunteer based contributions, merithocracy based leadership and so on. Some of these traits make FLOSS and Agile difficult to mix.

    At Funambol we love Agile, me included, and we love to try new things so we proposed an experiment mixing Agile methods with community based development into a new Funambol Code Sniper program. The slideshow below summarizes the basis of this experiment based on the assumption that the community is the Product Owner of the new software.  The community will have to define the user stories and also to define when they’re DONE.

    There are still a few grey areas, the biggest being how to distribute rewarding to contributors. I think they should be proportionate to the efforts put into the project. Even if it is possible to evaluate code contributions proportionally to story points (or hours/weeks), code is only a part of software development. Bug reporting, quality assurance, feedback and even writing user stories is important as well: how to evaluate these other kind of contributions? What do you think?

    Designing An Agile Community Program: Funambol Code Sniper v. 2
    View more presentations from smaffulli.
     

  • Stef 12:06 pm on 14 November, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , free software buisiness, open source, phipps, scorecard   

    How To Evaluate Free Software Business 

    There are many companies making money with Free/Open Source Software and it’s still not easy to identify a free software company.  I’ve always advocated to put respect of customers’ needs and ethics in digital society as one of the crucial elements to identify a free software business.

    Simon Phipps has put together a scorecard, a set of indicators to identify and evaluate companies that use, develop and sell free software based on the adherence to the principles of the Free Software and Open Source movements.

    His speech in Bolzano this week is worth listening to. I think this is the right path to advancing  our movement.

    A Software Freedom Scorecard [on Simon Phipps, SunMink].

     

    • Simon Phipps 1:04 pm on 14 November, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks, Stefano. The list I built for Bolzano was necessarily short, and definitely has gaps (it should list “software implements acknowledged open formats where possible” for example), but the two pages – one for community dimensions, the other for copyright/trademark/patent handling – are definitely the right place to start.

  • Stef 7:51 am on 9 April, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , open source, ,   

    Don’t call it Scrum 

    Gianugo Rabellino has given me more food for thoughts about my research on Free/Libre Open Source software development and Agile/Scrum methods. His latest post contains a sentence that summarizes my key finding so far:

    At the end of the day, this means that the customer is there – it just happens to coincide with the community as a whole.

    Talking with my Funambol colleagues, the pragmatic agilists, and looking at Ross Gardler presentation below, I have the confirmation that the Pentaho guys are on the right track with Open Scrum. I also learned that it’s better not to use the word Scrum if it’s not The Scrum you’re talking about. With that in mind, I’m now focusing on best practices for communication between developers distributed around the world (more in latest posts).

    View more presentations from Ross Gardler.
     

  • Stef 10:45 am on 20 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , open source, ,   

    SCRUM and volunteer developers 

    SCRUM development process

    SCRUM development process

    Funambol engineering team uses the SCRUM methodology to develop software. It’s a very interesting method that seems highly compatible with free/libre open source software development habits. It mandates fast release cycles (like the release early/release often mantra), teams that can self-organize. SCRUM also mandates fixed time (2 to 6 weeks) to complete a development cycle (called iteration or sprint). This last part doesn’t seem to be very compatible with contributions by volunteers.

    I’ve been looking for other free software projects that use SCRUM internally to understand how they involve external contributors, volunteers, in strictly time constrained release cycles. Pentaho wiki has a very interesting paper on the topic, but I still don’t understand if they have established a process to assign user stories to volunteer contributors.

    I wonder if some have tried and failed or nobody has ever tried this at all.

     

    • Patrick Ohly 1:51 pm on 20 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Another problem might be the communication with people who cannot participate in the regular meetings that are part of the SCRUM methodology. At least the goals for the current sprint are now publicly communicated, but external contributors still miss a lot of what goes on in the daily meeting and cannot bring up issues there themselves.

      This is *not* a call for meeting minutes or phone conferences – that would defeat the whole purpose of these brief, informal get-togethers, I suppose. I’m just mentioning it because it would indeed be interesting to find out how this can be combined with an open source project that has external contributors.

    • Stef 10:23 am on 21 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      That’s correct, another problem to address. There should be a way to bend/adapt the method in order to be compatible with the needs of the free software contributors. We’ll keep experimenting.

      I’m glad you appreciate the publicity of the sprint user stories.

    • Stefano 9:53 am on 23 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Communication is a key aspect in opensource development. I am not sure it is very tightly related to scrum, but more to how the team is structured (friendship, location, language). But it is definitely true that scrum like the other agile methodologies encourage a lot personal communication. The purist are for real-time, f2f communication, which is something not very applicable in open source.
      For this reason the issue of loosing a lot of such fluid intra-team communication is real. One idea I am playing with is that an open source community of developers is … a communitty… a social community. The idea I am working with is that a social network-like site would tremendously help open source development in general, but open source agile development specifically.

    • Stef 10:27 am on 23 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I agree with you Stefano: communication is a key aspect. Email is only one tool, but it’s too asynchronous to replace f2f communication. ‘Modern’ IM are better for two ways conversation. We could use more the Funambol IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, but that’s not enough either because conversations tend to get lost. I’m experimenting with identi.ca groups, which are very promising. I’ll write something about this in a few days.

  • Stef 2:27 pm on 22 January, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , mcnealy, obama, open source,   

    Cost saving is the wrong argument, but it may work 

    Scott Mc Nealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has been asked by the new Obama administration to prepare a paper about ‘open source’. From what I read on the BBC report, though, he is using a tired losing proposition:

    The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products.

    To me statements like these look too much like a “worn-out dogma” that open source is gratis, costs less, is more secure.’  These arguments have been demolished by plenty of evidence in real life and by academic research. They can easily sink under the fires of the Microsoft, Adobe, IBM and Oracle of the world.

    Probably there is a remote chance that the winds of change blowing in Obama’s sails will make Mc Nealy’s and OSI’s arguments float. What do you think?

    via BBC NEWS | Technology | Calls for open source government.

     

    • Carlo Pecchia 2:32 pm on 22 January, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Cost saving could (and should) be only one “weapon”. More solid arguments, IMHO, are: (1) reduced vendor lock-in, (2) roadmap visibility, (3) usage of local SME/Enterprises, (4) possibility to integrate with other software…

    • Stef 3:00 pm on 22 January, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Carlo: IMO, cost advantage of “open source” is simply a lost argument. If 10 years ago it could be accepted to get the ball rolling, nowadays there is simply too much evidence that FLOSS has no cost advantage. Any argument related to cost can be subverted easily by any professional lobbyist. Local enterprises in the US won’t be a good argument, either, since Oracle and Microsoft are local there :) Integration is not an exclusive of open source, neither is the visible roadmap. That leaves vendor lock-in, which goes hand in hand with open standards.

      But the best argument is the ethical argument of freedom:

      • to run: no discrimination of the people,
      • to study: better education is a big chunk of Obama’s plan,
      • to copy: no barrier to access to information and to technology
      • to modify: to better serve the society

      This is a difficult argument to convey to people, it’s not a message for the mass, yet. Work must be done to make freedom in software the next mass concern, like ‘environment’ and ‘green’.

  • Stef 2:20 pm on 20 November, 2007 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , open source   

    Ritorno dal convegno “Open Source come modello di business” 

    Ieri ho partecipato alla tavola rotonda dopo il convegno Open Source come modello di business da cui sono rientrato poco impressionato: mi sembrava tutto troppo 1.0, già  visto. Non mi hanno impressionato le ricerche presentate da un dottorando di ingegneria, I modelli manageriali dei progetti Open Source e Qualità  e costi del software Open Source. Non so perché, ma davo per scontato che fossero noti i lavori di Rossi e Bonaccorsi (2002), Daffara (COSPA, FLOSSMETRICS), IDABC, UNU-Merit, ecc che “Open Source” non è legato ad un solo modo (distribuito) di sviluppare software, che i repository di SourceForge contengono pochi progetti attivi ed economicamente significativi, che la qualità  del codice è mediamente alta (ma che non ci sono termini di paragone con la qualità  del codice proprietario, essendo questo invisibile) e altro … Pensavo di sentire qualcosa di nuovo almeno dagli USA, invece il professor Anthony I. Wasserman (Executive Director of the Center for Open Source Investigation, Carnegie Mellon West) si è limitato ad un’introduzione generica al tema. Interessante l’intervento di Massimiliano Magi Spinetti di ABI Lab, sui risultati dell’analisi domanda e offerta nel settore bancario. È stato un convegno introduttivo al tema, speriamo che la Fondazione Politecnico ne organizzi presto una nuova edizione con nuovi contenuti. Evidentemente c’è ancora molta comunicazione da fare.

    Nel mio breve intervento alla tavola rotonda ho provato a spiegare che il Software Libero o Open Source non è un settore distaccato, non è un mercato diverso. Il settore è lo stesso, quello dello sviluppo software e le regole del business rimangono tutte valide. La differenza la fanno solo le licenze, gli strumenti legali che concedono diritti di uso, studio, modifica e distribuzione ai clienti. Punto. Open Source non è un modello di business ma è una leva strategica a disposizione del management, sia di chi compra che di vende software o servizi. E ho aggiunto che è una leva imprescindibile: nel settore è in atto una disruption, uno sconvolgimento degli equilibri stabiliti destinato a buttare fuori dal mercato tutti gli incumbent (e i fallimenti di Silicon Graphics e SCO o le nuove strategie di IBM e Sun lo dimostrano). Un caso da manuale di innovazione radicale con cui tutti gli attori, domanda e offerta, devono confrontarsi senza esclusione.

    Disruptive technology

    Per questo alla domanda “cosa possono fare le aziende italiane? L’Open Source può aiutarle?” non potevo che far notare che il FLOSS va valutato obbligatoriamente anche per le aziende italiane, se vogliono sperare di continuare ad esistere. D’accordo con il prof. Fuggetta: molte opportunità  esistono nei sistemi embedded, tutti i sistemi di automazione meccanica, automotive, negli elettrodomestici. Solo con il FLOSS si può sperare di restare sulla curva dell’innovazione e mantenere la speranza di non essere buttati fuori dal mercato.

    Update: Andrea Genovese su 7thfloor dà  una visione più ampia del convegno in generale.

     

    • Roberto Galoppini 4:01 pm on 20 November, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      E’ un fatto che il licensing dia la stura a modelli di business originali, ovvero non applicabili al contesto del software proprietario. Occorre prima però chiarirci sul significato dell’espressione “business model”, abusata in ogni dove e, perché no, anche in ambito di economie basate su beni comuni. E non è nemmeno detto che partendo da un lessico comune si finisca per dire cose nuove, basta guardare a come QualiPSo, il progetto multimiliardario finanziato dalla comunità  Europea, abbia snocciolato l’ovvio come rilevato anche dall’ottimo Dana Blankenhorn.

      Tornando all’originalità  penso che la mancanza di un corporate actor, se non per pochi, pochissimi progetti, apra spazi interessanti, e sia tutt’altro che marginale che Kim Polese possa raccontare come SpikeSource oggi spenda un decimo di qualche anno fa. C’è ancora molto spazio nell’identificare modelli di business che si basino su questa peculiarità , ed è anche interessante notare come questi non siano tutti “uguali”. Infatti in generale vale che i modelli di business in cui si vende il diritto di utilizzo di un asset e non l’asset stesso siano più remunerativi. In questo senso quindi una OpenLogic sembra avere maggiori possibilità  di Black Duck, ma è chiaro che questa è una semplificazione. In questo modo Open Source Risk Management sembrerebbe promettente, peccato che invece il mercato non la pensi così!

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