Archive for the ‘OSS Discussions’ Category

OSCON experience part 2

Monday, August 9th, 2010

OSCON 2010 is ended few weeks ago … and I’m still organizing all the inputs, contacts and comments I’ve collected …

During the exhibition days I had the opportunity to present what we are doing in QualiPSo (and if you’ve been there you know how much crowded our booth has been). Thanks to that I’ve met many people that shared with me their point of view, personal knowledge and experience about product and process quality. Some of them expressed their needs to improve what they have (at the moment) in terms of product life-cycle management introducing mandatory (and automatic when it’s possible) checks for the code they produce. Another particular aspect that somehow was always part of the discussion is the one about license (compatibility, obligations, …), and from what I heard, I noticed that the growing adoption of licenses, such as AGPL, combined with the Cloud explosion, makes integrators and service providers to act more carefully concerning this topic.

Anyway,  I have to say that cloud is for sure the key word of this OSCON edition. The Cloud computing, with a dedicated summit, and many editors presenting their cloud-flavor products, has been certainly at the center of the discussions.

Just one more thing, I think you can spend five minutes here: Speaker Slides & Video … for sure you’ll find one or two of your interest.

… to close this post, a link that testify my presence at OSCON :-)

ps: the image used for this post shows one of the (social) whiteboards used at OSCON to improve the interaction between people … very funny idea.

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OSCON experience, part 1

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

OSCONThis week, and starting from yesterday, is taking place OSCON (Open Source Conference) in Portland, Oregon. A very big amount of attendees is expected and from what I see this wonderful convention center will be able to handle all that people. The first two day are mainly dedicated to the tutorial sessions but on Wednesday the Expo Hall will open! I’ll be there to the QualiPSo and OW2 booths.

Yesterday, during lunch, I had an interesting conversation about Git (dvcs – distributed version control system) with some people that know much more than me (… and that’s easy) about it, so I felt free to make questions about usability and usage, if it’s convenient independently from the dimension of the project and/or the number of contributors, if it’s something only for geek or not … Now I have to take some time to complete my view and rearrange the idea on Git.

I think that the source code management system, whatever it is, is a fundamental component not only for code development but it also plays an important role on aspects related to the project management and quality monitoring.

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Teaching Open Source

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

Teaching Open SourceDo you think it’s possible to teach Open Source? It seems so …
Recently I’ve discovered the Teaching Open Source initiative which aims to teach next generations of software developers, analysts, system admin, etc. the ability to work eficently within Open Source communities.

The concept of “Open Source in Education is extremely unclear”, as stated in the site, and because of that, there they present clear declaration of intents that marks the boundaries of the scope of the initiative:

Teaching students how to contribute to and work within an Open Source project, collaborating with other community members on development, support, testing, documentation, bugfixing, and other collective tasks. This is teaching the “Open” in Open Source, and is the intended meaning of the phrase “Teaching Open Source”.

I really like that vision!

The whole initiative is structured in different projects and makes available, through the site, a set of informative and collaborative tools like blog, wiki, mailing list, an IRC channel, conference calls that allow anyone to contribute to the growth and development of projects themselves.
One of these projects is an in progress book, the Textbook Project, which I started reading pushed by a lot of curiosity. Starting from the early chapters, what struck me was the very practical approach, that can sound like: Students! Look for an open source project that attract you and get into it. This way you can touch with your hands how an open source project works, you can give your time and passion and have back a gain in terms of experience that you will be able to spend wherever you want.

I’ll keep an eye on it and report my comments on that initiative … meanwhile I hope it could be possible to start a discussion on education and maybe how it can produce (high) quality results … let me know what you think.

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Posted in OSS Discussions, Open Quality | 1 Comment »

The debate on Open Core business model

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

There has been a significant amount of interest in the Open Core business model since Andrew Lampitt articulated it and its benefits for combining open source and commercial licensing.

After a period of relative calm  the debate liven up again last month after the Open Source Business Conference when few analysts critically review the usage of Open Core business model made by many commercial open source companies.  I have collected all links to posts that I find more interesting to sum up this debate in three list on friendfeed:

  1. Open Core Predecessors: the debate on open source business models before the advent of open core
  2. The rise of Open Core: The early debate on open core business model started in August 2008 with the Andrew Lampitt’s post containing its first definition
  3. The debate on Open Core: The last weeks debate on open core model

All links in each  list are ordered by date (the first is the more recent). If you have some interesting links that I have not yet included, please send them to me. I will keep these list updated integrating them with all your suggestions. If you want to share with the SpagoWorld’s community your opinions on this topic please leave a comment down here or answear to this quick poll or  join the discussion on our linked-in group.

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Posted in Ecology of Value, OSS Discussions | No Comments »