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.

Real Web Based Computing

If you have any doubts about the Web Based Computing scenario I've talked about in My Post, well, give a look at this video and see what eyeOS can do for you. This is (I believe) the best Open Source example of how this technology can be brought to the world and how we could start accessing our data and preferred applications anywhere anytime.

I'll be chairing a session at the Rome based Linux Day 2008 on October the 25th where I will be talking just about this.

Linux Day 2008

October the 25th. This is the date for the 2008 Rome based Linux Day. This year it is held at La Sapienza, Rome University, starting from 08:00 a.m.

More info at:
- http://www.linuxday.it
- http://www.ls-lug.org/wordpress/?p=51
- http://www.ls-lug.org/wordpress/?p=53
- http://groups.google.com/group/linuxdayroma
- http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=28379368014

Register at http://www.linuxdayroma.org.

Address: Facoltà di Ingegneria di San Pietro in Vincoli dell’Università la Sapienza.

There is a possibility that I will be chairing a session related to the Web Based Computing.

Welcome to the Web Based Computing

There are important changes that we are going to see in the way the computing is accessed by users. Plenty of applications and operations that people do daily with the PC is on the Web (WebMail, Chat, videoconferencing, photo, social networks, books, trips, buy stuff, check for events, join forums and blogs, access information on wikis, check for maps, bank account, etc. etc.

Most of these activities are performed by using a web browser and a mail client that is installed onto the PC that we normally use and that is often customized on ourself (bookmarks, fonts, themes, old mails, folders, etc.). This requires the use of our PC for most of the activities because we have data and configuration stored in there. If we have more than 1 PC, we replicate everything on all of them.

There are many information that can now be brought on the Web allowing people to access them from anywhere by using all PCs that you have. Think at the centralized bookmarks, IMAP Mail storage, web based calendar and contacts, online feeds, photo album, documents, pictures, etc. etc.. Are you thinking at Google, Firefox and Thunderbird? You're right. The combination of these three solutions with their plugins/add-ons allow you to make all of your needed info available on the web: bookmarks, mail for all of your accounts (who has only one e-mail account today???), your photos, documents, calendar information, contacts, feeds, etc. etc. etc. You can then use the functionalities on all of your PCs and you're fine.

What if you are somewhere without your precious PC!!! You don't need to bring your PC, you need to bring your applications with you. So, imagine if you have a USB Pen Drive that you paid about 20€ with ALL of your preferred applications and their settings: you can plug it in a PC and be ready to access the web and the info you need.

What if you need your precious application because you need to download something from a torrent or you want to modify your picture!!! You don't need to bring your PC, you need to bring your 'desktop' with you. So, imagine if your USB Pen Drive has the image of your 'desktop' installed on it: you plug it in a PC and start your machine.

In both situations you do not have to install anything on the pc that you're using, so you do not have to bother anybody but just borrow minutes of their hardware.

All these things can be done today, but not everybody does them. We can configure all our desktops with our settings to be able to access our data on the web, therefore we can move our data on the web rather then leave them on the pc at home. More, we can configure lowcost devices (USB pen drives, external drives, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, or whatever) with our standalone applications to be plugged everywhere and used to set our environment.

What if you are somewhere and you need your powerful PC to be able to run some heavy applications, or because you need to launch some applications to be accessed lately from somewhere else... Here it is! We can bring our desktop on line as well, and access it through the Web with incredible performances. You access the web and choose to either launch your desktop (Windows, Linux, Solaris) or your particular application from any device. You do what you need and just close the browser: your system will continue to work, and you've done this far hundreds of kilometers from your workstation.

Think at these capabilities with a powerful device that you can bring in your pocket, you plug it into an ethernet port or you access a wifi/umts network, and you're set!!!

I do not mention the overall cost savings that these could bring within the enterprises (there should be a dedicated post with all items), but believe me, it's huge!

There are activities going on to achieve the needed results... stay tuned!!!

Google Chrome: Web 2.0 Browser

After all, Google (I said Google, not the last company born yesterday!!!) has released a brand new Web Browser that wants to enhance MS IE and Mozilla FF: it contains many performance evoluted functionalities!

Available starting from tomorrow. As per the usual Google methodology, the announcement has been done with a comic books!!!

Here a couple of links with the details:

- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

- http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

Yet Another Opensource Post

Ok. I think that everybody is now thinking that I am more Open Source oriented than Closed Source. Well, it's not completely true in sense that I'm not 'fanatic' and biased about Linux and Open Source 'anyway', but I like the way Open Source solutions are developed, and the fact that you have to work hard to set things up since you really have to learn them, while commercial software is mostly (not always) for 'super experienced users'.

I LIKE OpenSource, no matter what is better, but this does not mean I am convinced it is better. As an IT 'professional', I have to daily face with enterprise needs where it's not a matter of what I'd like to propose to my 'customer counterparts', but what is the solution that best fits their needs, based on a variety of considerations (costs, advantages, support, simplicity, benefits, etc.). It is often hard to convince people when the Open Source proposed solution is THE solution (it is not always, but almost, and when it is, it is not obvious for everybody).

I normally do not make wars, but I like to talk about differences. I do not have an answer on what is better, and I don't think that there can be people that could really state it: to be able to say what is better, one should REALLY know both solutions as an EXPERT, then he/she should look at which should be the criteria to judge (simplicity to use? simplicity to manage? stability? scalability? efficiency? performance? what?).

So, as a user, simple question to better explain: what is better between MS Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla Firefox (FFX)? I do not have an answer. I notice that FFX uses more RAM than IE. Some web applications cannot be accessed with FFX due to some ActiveX software or something like that (who's the guilty? Web App developers or FFX?). The actual IE 7 supports tabs and search bar as FFX has done for...years? I love the fact that FFX has hundreds (thousands?) of additional plugins to enhance your browser experience. This reason, by itself, is in my opinion one BIG difference, no matter if it takes about 10/20/30MB of additional RAM. There are a lot more differences, but who knows them all?
We could start talking in the same way about MS Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, or about the differences between Apache/IIS, or Squid/ISA, or... Plenty of discussions but do we know them all so hard to be able to state all the differences?

No, we're not, so let's look at the fact that we know for sure that Open Source software has a more frequent software updating and therefore a faster lifecycle and continuous improvements, that it is really well developed (there is no marketing behind it, and there has to be a reason to choose it!) and last, but not least, there is a cost saving.

More, it is often synonymous of innovation since most of the innovative solutions are Open Source code based.