Software Freedom Day 2009 - Perugia, Italy

With the patronage of "Regione Umbria", and in collaboration with the "A.Capitini - Vittorio Emanuele II" ITC and OSSpg (http://www.osspg.net), FSUGitalia has organized (as it did last year) the Perugia, Italy, based Software Freedom Day, a worldwide held event related to the Free Software dedicated to schools and students.

The event is organized worldwide by Software Freedom International (SFI), the non-profit organization that promotes the Free Software, in collaboration with Free Software Foundation, Linux Magazine and Zac-Ware, and is sponsored by Google, Red Hat / Fedora, Danish Unix User Group and Linode.

The conference will be held on September the 19th simultaneously in various cities around the globe, and the Perugia date is at the 'Sala Conferenze' of the "A. Capitini" ITC in Viale Centova, 4.

This year there will be myself (Mariano Iumiento: openSUSE Ambassador) and Iacopo Benesperi (Mozilla Italia) as special guests, holding sessions about the openSUSE Project and the new Mozilla Firefox 3.5 functionallities.

One of the news for this year is that students are deeply involved, by helping them to prepare and present some of the talks from the agenda making them to convert from 'listener' to 'spokesman' and Free Software promoter: three teams made by students where one is a development team and 2 others dedicated to GNU/Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora). The agenda, materials, links and information are available (in Italian) on the new Events wiki page of FSUGitalia (http://www.fsugitalia.org/eventi). The international web site for the event is available at http://www.softwarefreedomday.org and the Perugia date specific link is on http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/teams/fsugitalia.

Have a lot of fun!

Open Source Day

In the actual crisis period, the IT market is suffering for costs cutting as well. There have been plenty of migrations to the Open Source solutions during the last few years that have convinced many 'decision makers' that choosing Open Source means to be able to reduce costs by keeping the same (or even better) service level.

Red Hat has helped much in demonstrating this statement with its solutions, and has also helped in promoting these scenarios by organizing, since 3 years, an 'Open Source Day' event with some companies that offer these solutions as their core business. The objective is to provide updates and news on the outcome from this market by highlighting their advantages in terms of costs and functionallities.

If you want to evaluate how Open Source Model can help your company to enhance the efficiency, if you want to be updated on the latest releases related to the Open Source world, or if you want to talk to people that have made the migration and that have accepted to share their experience with others, or if you want to get in touch with people from the Open Source world, coming from both local and International companies, then you should attend to the event.

Registration and more info is available at http://www.redhat.it/promo/opensourceday/index.php.

Open Source and the financial crisis

We all know about the financial crisis that is involving also (or even specifically) the IT market, even if IT is actually providing the intelligence of products and services: Everything Is Digital!

It is easy enough to understand it by looking at the last few months announcements: between September and November 2008 there have been layoffs announced for Google, HP, Nvidia, Yahoo, Motorola, AMD; on December 2008 layoffs announced for Sony (8K); in January 2009 6K layoffs @ Philips, 2800 @ IBM, Microsoft, Asustek and Lenovo are thinking about it, 3K @ Seagate, 100 @ Novell, etc..

It seems a bulletin of war, but it's the real situation people around the world are facing, and these are only the most clamant.

But not everything is dark, and somebody is able to find something good.
In this situation, Open Source software, that has risen to great prominence in the last 10 years, could start becoming 'the' alternative for the crisis of the proprietary software. It is known that Open Source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software.

Obama US President has his stuff to say about it too. The government ought to mandate open source products based on referenced implementations to improve security, get higher quality software and higher reliability, lower costs. The idea that government institutions could reduce costs by collaborating and building on reference implementations is a more convincing argument.

Gartner says: “In the RDBMS market, open source software is being adopted in 2 areas: open source RDBMSs and the open source OS Linux as a platform on which to run an RDBMS... Linux as an RDBMS platform is expected to see growth of approximately 20% in 2009, which is in dramatic contrast to Unix and Windows, which are expected to see growth of negative 4% and 14%”.

The web development, especially in its 2.0 version, made possible the increase and spread of innovation models based on the sharing resources among communities, institutions and enterprises participating in the realization of a project and of a common good at the same time. Starting on this statement of fact, we can explore the recent evolution of the property assets in relation to the governance of knowledge and business.

Many companies are evaluating Open Source solutions, and this is giving more evidence to them. Even companies that had never used Open Source before, are now demonstrating curiosity. Budget cutting will help CIO/ItManagers to start investigating more accurately to this world.

Open source is a philosophy of innovation since its birth.

Rome Camp - Thank You

Even if it's more than 1 month now, I just wanted to thank all of the people that joined my session at the Rome Camp 2008 event, where more than 350 people came to this 'barcamp' event to attend up to 50 sessions with three main objects: Environment, Technology and Society/Sociology.

All the sessions are on the web: http://romecamp.ilcannocchiale.tv. My talk about the Web Based Computing (I know, it's my frustration about the Web 2.0! :-)), can be seen, with all the others, in the 'Aula Studio' room.

It was really a pleasure to chair a session in this type of event where the type of attendees was heterogeneous, coming with different curiosities, and it was really interesting to attend other sessions too: there was really a lot to learn from all the discussions.

I wish to meet you all again in other events like this.

Rome Linux Day - Thank you

As stated in my previous post, on October the 25th, 124 cities in Italy have hosted the 8th annual Linux Day event.

I've had the opportunity and the pleasure to present a session at the Rome based date, within the La Sapienza University Faculty of Engineering.

The purpose of my session was to share my positive opinion about one of the trends that we are seing in this period: the migration to the Web.

I brought examples of how we can migrate our data and customizations on the web to make them always accessible using simple solutions, up to the possibility to have a desktop published and accessible online, either by using a real desktop or a webtop. All this stuff, by using ONLY OpenSource technologies!

My feeling is that the talk succeeded in making people interested. I hope to be right and to have the opportunity to exchange additional opinions with you all since I believe that Web 2.0 items are always stimulant and source of technology innovation in the era of Internet.

For those of you that are interested in looking at my presentation, the Italian version is available here, and the English version here.

You can also enjoy some pictures on Picasa, or Facebook, pictures and video on my Google Site.

You can also visit some other blogs talking about the event (in Italian) at:
- Linuxday 2008, riflessi e riflessioni di Antonio Doldo.
- Il meglio del LinuxDay Roma 2008 di Stefano Fedele.

I hope everybody liked the talk and look forward to share other similar experiences.
Any comments and feedbacks are welcome.

Firefox 3 World Guinness: me too.

Help Humanity: a small result

After almost one year, my small team has been able to reach the first target I defined in my original post 'Help Me To Help Humanity': the first 1000 RESULTS!!!

This is not the end, but just the beginning: the next challenge I want to provide to my small team, and to everybody wants to join us is to reach 2000 RESULTS within the end of the year.

I know it is aggressive, but big results come out from hard challenges!

So, please, register to the World Community Grid and join my group CHIMAR to Help Humanity!

Web 2.0 Generation Employee

Young employees will only want to work in Web 2.0 'compliant' companies.

People born in the late 80's do not even know how was the world without Internet. They are approaching today the business world by entering their first job experiences.

They grew by using tech gadgets to communicate with others, sometimes more than one at the same time (i.e. smartphone while using an instant messaging app while listening to the music coming out from the speakers of their iPod).

Some sociologists call them 'Generation Y'.

When they enter the work experience they expect to find the same tech tools they use everyday, but how many companies are ready to satisfy them? Not that much!

Generation Y people want to try every new tech gadget as they get to the market.

One of the problems is that the habit in using social networking is to 'classify' others, and when their manager is not even able to send an e-mail or access a search engine, well, there could be problems in keeping the value of the management. Some of the internal processes will become instable: it's not a valuable answer if you say "...this is how it works here!".

Another problem is the fact that Web 2.0 makes you to put less attention to privacy and security issues. This introduces a new responsibility for the IT Manager that has to educate these people to find the right balance between sharing and preserving data.

However, all of the new methodologies to communicate and share info that Web 2.0 can bring into the enterprise is surely a high value. So, it is worthwhile to approach the problems to solve them somehow to be able to benefit from the Web 2.0 value.