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.