OpenLife

Normally, I agree with most of what Matt Asay writes about open source and related matters at his “The Open Road” blog at Cnet. But here he is wrong:

Opera, Microsoft, and competition: A plea for an end to the whining

Today, a lot of people are using Firefox, Safari and other alternatives to Internet Explorer, but they remain “alternatives”. Here in Denmark, Internet Explorer remains the clearly dominant browser to a large extent due to that public institutions “forces” users to use Internet Explorer. I am not at all convinced that market forces will for a long time level the playing field.

And as long as there is no real competition between different browsers in a lot of important areas I applaud that small players like Opera takes on the not all envious task of using the courts to remedy the situation - however ineffective this remedy might be.

Technorati Tags:
microsoft, internetexplorer, opera, mattasay

Please, allow me to advertise and recommend my old mate from the Araneum days, Tim Clements. Tim will from 1 January 2008 be operating as an independent contractor specialising in project support services.

Tim’s firm is Mitigate:

Project support office

Build from scratch (define and implement) or support inflight projects. The office supports project managers by facilitating planning, risk management, lessons learned, knowledge management etc as well as providing administrative support following up risks, issues, status reporting etc.

Engagement is provided on a contract basis.

Workshop facilitation
Assist project managers by independently facilitating structured workshops for:

- Requirements definition
- Benefits mapping
- Project initiation
- Stakeholder identification & analysis
- Project scheduling & estimating
- Risk identification and analysis
- Risk management strategies
- Lessons learned
- Project closedown
- Project solving

Each workshop is structured according to the needs of the project manager and will generate pre-defined outputs (products).

Engagement is provided on a per workshop (day) basis.

Project quality reviews
Independent evaluation of the effectiveness of your project management environment to determine if your project(s) is on track to meet its goals. The reviews Identify issues and diagnose root causes resulting in a realistic list of recommendations and actions documented in a Project Review Report.

Engagement is provided on a per project basis.

Education and training
Aimed primarily at people who are new to project work, simple and innovative class-taught packages use scenarios to bring your new teams up to speed with concepts such as planning, managing risk, lessons learned.

Engagement is provided on a per package basis.

Technorati Tags:
timclements, mitigate

It seems that some people has seen through the ill-disguised attempt by the Danish government to secure Microsoft dominance in the Danish public sector:

Denmark Pretends MSOOXML Already an “Open Standard” and Mandates a Trial of ODF/MSOOXML: “Denmark has announced that open standards are going to be a requirement going forward there, starting in January, which is being hailed as a great step forward for openness. However, if you look closely, you will see that it is pretending that MSOOXML has already been approved as an open standard, equivalent to ODF. ODF is already an ISO approved standard. MSOOXML is not. It was specifically disapproved, and the next meeting will be in February, which is after the January starting date in Denmark. In short, Denmark simply doesn’t care about ISO approval.

Denmark ranks the two as the same, and mandates a trial of both. I wonder what the outcome of that trial will be? Why even bother to pretend?”

(Via GrokLaw.)

Technorati Tags:
ooxml, odf

Here is what seems a helpful program for users of traditional closed source applications to be downloaded and installed before use:

EULAlyzer™ 1.2 Analyze license agreements for interesting words and phrases.

EULAlyzer can analyze license agreements in seconds, and provide a detailed listing of potentially interesting words and phrases. Discover if the software you’re about to install displays pop-up ads, transmits personally identifiable information, uses unique identifiers to track you, or much much more.

The Benefits

* Discover potentially hidden behavior about the software you’re going to install
* Pick up on things you missed when reading license agreements
* Keep a saved database of the license agreements you view
* Instant results - super-fast analysis in just a second

And with additional features like the EULA Research Center, which optionally allows users to anonymously submit license agreements they scan to help us to further improve the program, everyone can be a part of the effort to make something that used to be so tedious, so easy.

Funny, that the EULAlyzer is only available in a Windows version

Technorati Tags:
eula

In the future we will wear wireless headsets for our mobile phone all day long and only take them off when we go to bed in the night: We are talking about 1G acoustic contact lenses.

More from the O’Reilly Radar: The Future of Cell Phone Headsets.

Technorati Tags:
acousticcontactlenses

Interesting news from the Netherlands:

Proposed legislation that would mandate the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) across the entire Dutch government has infuriated Microsoft. A group promoting open standards sees no threat, however, and has invited Microsoft to join its ranks.

On Wednesday the Dutch parliament will discuss a plan to mandate use of the Open Document Format (ODF) at government agencies. The proposal is part of a wider plan to increase the sustainability of information and innovation, while lowering costs through the reuse of data.

See Dutch government threatens to sideline Microsoft

If the Dutch government finds it reasonable to opt for one open standard - ODF - with a “comply or explain” provision why did the Danish government have to chose a double standards - ODF and OOXML - solution thus effectively securing that a large part of government will have to go for the OOXML Windows compatible standard?

Technorati Tags:
odf, ooxml

Italian open source specialist firm Conecta has published (as part of two EU funded projects FLOSSMETRICS and OpenTTT) two what seems to be very useful reports with guidelines for SMB for the adoption and use of FLOSS:

This guide (developed in the context of the FLOSSMETRICS and OpenTTT projects) present a set of guidelines and suggestions for the adoption of open source software within SMEs, using a ladder model that will guide companies from the initial selection and adoption of FLOSS within the IT infrastructure up to the creation of suitable business models based on open source software.

The guide is split into an 80 pages introduction to FLOSS and a catalog of 165 applications, selected to fulfill the requests that were gathered in the interviews and audit in the OpenTTT project. The application areas are infrastructural software (ranging from network and system management to security), ERP and CRM applications, groupware, document management, content management systems (CMS), VoIP, graphics/CAD/GIS systems, desktop applications, engineering and manufacturing, vertical business applications and eLearning.

The reports can be downloaded from here http://guide.conecta.it/.

Technorati Tags:
robertogaloppini, conecta

Matt Asay has an interesting blog post (”Not much SMB dollars today for open-source vendors, the 451 Group finds“) with comments on a recent 451 group report on Commercial Adoption of Open Source: The SMB market opportunity.

Some key finding, according to Matt Asay, from the 451 group report:

* 73.8% of open-source vendors surveyed believe that SMB revenue will account for <50% of total revenue, with wide disparity in how much the surveyed vendors feel will come from the SMB market;

* Open-source vendors are split on whether SMB will account for a significant increase in business in the future, 47.5% saying that it will and 34.4% saying it won't.

* The overwhelming majority of open-source vendors (72.1%) are taking a direct approach to selling into the SMB market, despite citing "Lack of expertise" (36.1%) and "Lack of awareness of open source options" (24.6%) as the key inhibitors to SMB adoption.

...which leads me to believe that open-source vendors are very naive about our near-term prospects in SMB. If the problem is SMB expertise and awareness, a direct model is the wrong way to go, especially since no open-source vendor beyond Red Hat or Novell has the marketing resources to make enough noise for SMBs to hear. Microsoft wins in SMB, in part, because it has a killer channel.

Some commercial open-source projects have started with an SMB focus and then "graduate" into the enterprise. But I believe that most commercial open-source projects would be wise to hit the enterprise first, starting with departmental implementations (the "SMB of enterprise," as it were). Large enterprises have the budget and inclination to seek out open source. SMBs simply do not.

It's not a question of whether the SMB market will embrace open source. It's a question of when. For most open-source vendors, that question should be answered, "Later."

Technorati Tags:
451group, caos, commercialOSS

Roberto Galoppini makes some good remarks of why open source business (often) requires efficient trademark protection:

Open Source Brand: No Logo Open Source?

Technorati Tags:
robertogaloppini, trademarks

Richard McManus of Read/Write Web provides a short and useful introduction to semantic webapps by listing the top 10 of such apps.

What is a semantic app:

A key element is that the apps below all try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users. Another of the founders mentioned below, Nova Spivack of Twine, noted at the Summit that data portability and connectibility are keys to these new semantic apps - i.e. using the Web as platform.

Technorati Tags:
semanticapps, readwriteweb