Radical Open Source – Licensing

October 14th, 2011 by Gabriele Ruffatti

I’ve already posted something about this here.

Now, I’ll go straight to the point!

Proliferation of Open Source licenses is a complete mess, despite initial good intentions (anyway, not all open source licenses are used to foster openness of code and collaboration).

Why so many licenses? Many reasons! (the list of open source licenses here just takes into consideration the OSI approved ones!). Now, are authoritative organizations (including OSI) ready (or willing) to foster a convergence of the existing licenses to one single (or to very few) simplified licenses?

A backlog exists, I know. Let’s start from now adopting a new approach and let’s put pressure to communities and existing project teams to update their current licences.

This will probably give rise to some issue with communities (sometimes their licensing model is core to the community)! I’ll post something more about it soon: Radical Open Source – Communities.

Any more issue?

Legal compliance with national jurisdiction? Fine, let’s regulate just what we want/can regulate (just separate what prevails in the national jurisdiction and what prevails in the software license, regulating just the latter).

Anything else?

Too simple? Do you prefer to continue to accept the current situation? I prefer to move to a broader openness!

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Radical Openness

October 14th, 2011 by Gabriele Ruffatti

Next Ted Global 2012 is going to address Radical Openness. They say: “The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and open. Radically open — manifesting itself in open borders, open culture, open-source, open data, open science, open world, open minds. With the loss of privacy that it implies, openness carries its own dangers. But it breeds transparency, authenticity, creativity and collaboration.”

I think that now it’s the right time to collect some ideas, effective suggestions and to move a step forward!

At fOSSa Conference 2011 in Lyon  the Openness Track, dedicated to Open Collaboration, Open Cloud and Open Data, will close with the following unconference panel: Radical Openness: broadening the open world.

We aim at testing the fOSSa friends’ feeling, stimulated by fOSSa speakers, who will introduce their suggestions about which the next steps towards a broader open word are.

All the participants will take part in the definition of a common vision allowing to build a radically open world. A first concrete result will be the drafting of a manifesto envisaging a new model of economic and social growth.

By the way, come to the panel, rise your voice, share your ideas. Let’s build a Radical Openness Manifesto together! Register to fOSSa Conference now!

My aim now is to stimulate a debate in order to collect ideas and suggestions that I can submit to the unconference panel for you, if you’ll not come to the event. In this regards, I’ll post some thoughts soon in this blog.

What am I looking for? Anything you can submit about the Radical Openness theme. I’m an IT guy; therefore my focus is on technology and digital habits, but you can enlarge this context as much as you like.

I think that, if we adopt an open-minded approach, openness allows us to look at the upcoming challenges and opportunities occurring in many fields (such as open contents, open services, open data, open science…), giving prominence to the role of the individual, who, thanks to his/her participation in communities and networks, produces new value and brings innovation, within a sustainable and long-lasting development process.

Let’s go with some suggestions, now.

Radical Open Source: I’ve already posted something about this topic getting some feedback in the blog or through Linkedin groups. The author of an interesting feedback asked me to discuss about community dynamics, economics and value transfer (I can group the latter two, I guess). I’ll also add the licensing issue  (i.e.: open use, distribution, re-distribution): it’s a niche theme, but I’m collecting many criticism about it.

So, let’s go with the upcoming new threads on Radical Open Source-Licensing, Radical Open Source–Communities, Radical Open Source–Economics.

But, what about Radical Open Contents, Radical Open Data, Radical Open Government, Radical Open Science, Radical Open Education, Radical Open Access?

Would you like to add some more?

Send me all your feedback, comments, suggestions and criticism.

On the other hand, I promise I’ll publish them, open new threads on your topics and clearly outline my envision (about Radical Open Source, at least).

And, last but non least, propose them to the fOSSa unconference panel, if you’ll not come (however, I hope you’ll submit them by yourself in Lyon. See you soon! )

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What a Story is in Open Source

September 27th, 2011 by Gabriele Ruffatti

Since the beginning, SpagoWorld initiative and SpagoBI project have given rise to many success stories. Moreover, SpagoBI regularly provides many stories to OW2 Consortium too, as you can see here.

Looking at SpagoWorld and SpagoBI websites, you can find a little but important update. Now they give visibility to Stories instead of Success Stories. Why this move?

Here the full play.

Act 1, Scene 1

In 2004, Vasco Rossi, an Italian rockstar, released a song “Un Senso” (in English: The Meaning) singing “ … I want to find the meaning of this story …” The song was inserted in the Italian film “Non ti muovere” (Don’t move)  by Sergio Castellitto

Act 1, Scene 2

In 2009, the Italian left party Partito Democratico adopted the following slogan “Un senso a questa storia” (in English:The meaning of this story) for its primary elections.

Act 1, Scene 3

After some years, in 2010, at Open Source Think Tank in Paris (read the full post here)  during a conversation I grabbed this sentence: “If you have to promote open source, you must tell stories to potential adopters and you must put emotion into your stories”.

I understood that we have to give evidence to the fact that behind every story, there is one or more people with their histories, made of knowledge, experience, talent and passion.

Act 2, Scene 1

In August 2011, SpagoWorld and SpagoBI websites updated the label Success Stories to Stories, since they don’t want to collect only use-cases and self-referral success stories (provided by SpagoWorld/SpagoBI team and partners), but also stories coming from adopters, contributors and enthusiast people.

Act 2, Scene 2

Some days ago (September 2011), I grabbed this piece from a speech of the Italian philosopher Umberto Galimberti : “A story is a time filled with sense” (which sometimes can be called “meaning”).

Conclusion

Looking for the meaning of a story is a tautology, I guess. Each story is full of meaning, it’s meaning itself! Stories tell people’s life, they are full of learning, experience, meat and blood. Stories are time filled with sense.

Communities are made up of stories of people living their lives within their communities. SpagoBI stories demonstrate it.

See SpagoBI latest story here.

At the end, if you just look at the slides and at a recorded tour, you haven’t see the story. It’s the passion of who decided to tell it, to give his time to prepare it, his passion to find the best solutions, his emotion on the stage playing it. Thank you Stefano, it’s a real SpagoBI story!

Finally, if you have a SpagoBI story and would like to tell it, please send it to us. We’ll be very glad to contact you and then publish it!

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Which relationship between enterprises and the free software community?

September 19th, 2011 by Gabriele Ruffatti

Finally, the paper supporting my speech at the 5th Italian Conference on Free Software, June 2011,  is available.

It includes many quotes coming from the Community track of fOSSa Conference 2010 – by the way, stay tuned with fOSSa 2011: registration will open soon! – and from the Open World Forum Paris, 2010 – come to Paris this week to hear the novelties at OWF 2011! 

The paper goes further on with some reflections about communities that I made in a previous post.

Moreover, it points out what people actually mean by ”community” and what stimulates its continuous growth. This reflection includes the nature of the community and the different roles that are played within it by a wide range of actors, who participate in the community itself for various reasons and on the basis of adequate incentives.

A new part of my thoughts includes reflections about the difference between the concept of community and that of network and the roles they play in the ecosystems interacting in the ecology of value. As a new insight, I’ve posted the introduction here.

In detail, the story in the paper provides some reflections on a specific way of interpreting the community, in which an enterprise has set itself as the leading actor. It’s the story of SpagoBI community: state-of-the-art, challenges, next evolutions. It refers to a relationship that is somehow overbalanced, since Engineering Group – the company employing SpagoBI team – gives a lot to the community and receives little in return, well aware of the fact that it exploits the potentials given by the company’s name and dimensions, and that this is perceived as burdensome. Nonetheless, it continues to invest in concrete actions aimed at openness, transparency and at establishing a trust relationship, not only made of statements and good intentions, but also of concrete actions.

Therefore, I am taking again an opinion already inserted in a previous paper. It is: “As a matter of fact, the market is interested in free software for its being usually available for free, rather than for its freedom. This is particularly clear to those people who choose this model hoping to find a commercial opportunity in it. On the other hand, free software does not mean gratuitousness, but participation and sharing. Giving without receiving anything in return is nonsense, not only in terms of money, contacts and commercial opportunities, but also in terms of telling one’s own experience or giving a simple feedback on the solution. Briefly, in this environment giving is nonsense unless we give to share”.

It is not sufficient to believe in free software as the participation to the wide “knowledge as a commons” context, and as a place where free availability is crucial. It’s a key factor to encourage the active participation, seen as exchange and sharing.

We need to gain better insights into the role played by the network and consequently contribute to setting up a path that encourages altruism, trust and that acknowledges people’s merits. These are the values founding a transformation towards new knowledge-based models of producing and living.

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Communities, networks and open source

September 19th, 2011 by Gabriele Ruffatti

Let’s see the difference between the concepts of community and network.

This text is partially included in a paper that I wrote on the relationship between enterprises and the free software community.

Both communities and networks have to do with the identification process aiming to give everybody a place in the society. However, they work in two completely different ways: communities follow individuals, while networks are ever-evolving aggregation entities rising from people’s continuous connections and disconnections to/from the network itself.

The community is an entity somehow closed, organized in an organic way and consequently based on (explicit or implicit) operation patterns, including specific restrictions: you can join a community but you can also be expelled from it, if you don’t respect its rules. The community is perceived as a safe place where everybody knows each other. Moreover, it fosters one’s own personal achievements in different ways, often including terms such as love (of others, of one’s ideals) and gift (such as the free software communities whose gift economy is considered to be of great value). Last but not least, the community is an entity that preserves the personal identity and, at the same time, gives value to common identity.

The network is an open space, therefore characterized by few and simple rules. The participants have no special restrictions and it’s the individual who decides to connect or disconnect to it (e.g.: see the social networks, like facebook, linkedIn, twitter). It’s an unsafe place: each participant does not know all the other members of the network. This is also based on the fact that the network is continuously evolving, thanks to the over-mentioned voluntary connection and disconnection process. In opposition to the community’s “love/gift”, the key words of networks are gain/loss: people enter the net to fulfill their own expectations (for example, reputation or knowledge) and they exit when the network can not meet their expectations anymore. It’s a place aiming at giving value to the personal identity and realizing a “collective marketing”.

To sum up, on the one side, the community meets one’s own security needs, since its members belong to a group characterized by strong connections and a common will and feeling. On the other side, the network is a solitary place, whose members feel the need to set new relationships in order to seemingly feel less lonely and to feel part of a wider group, which is actually characterized by weak relationships aiming to satisfy people’s individual interests.

We are living a progressive shift from profit-based models to value-based ones.

Also if the border between community and network is not always so clear, reasoning about their different dynamics and their relationship inside business ecosystems is a key factor to understand the evolution of the open source model.

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