Matteo Ionescu, who originally brought my blog to 2.0 life, helped me to make more cosmetics changes, especially about new and old widgets, and my K2 template today comes with a slightly new look (new ‘top posts’ box, smaller ‘categories’ box, etc).

Comments and feedback are welcome, more is to come soon!

OpenOffice 3.1.0 Plus Win Portable USB (Italian) - The Italian school Ettore Majorana in collaboration with Ylvo COMPANY the created the Italian version. The English version is available at the PortableApps website.

OOo gets OCS - The OpenOffice.org Annual Conference website runs on OCS software.

I asked Jon Sobel, SourceForge Inc. Group President, his opinion about this change:

This is a significant change for the SourceForge site.  In addition to a more engaging visual experience for both developers and consumers, at a deeper technology level, we now have a modern, flexible platform to serve our community.  We are looking forward to realizing its full potential in the months ahead.

SourceForge new User Interface

With the new UI newbies may find open source software running on Windows at first glance. I am looking forward to ear end users’ first impressions, kudos to the SourceForge crew keeping innovating.

[Disclosure: I am advisor to SourceForge]

Last week the Italian government announced a joint effort with Sun Microsystems to foster the use of StarOffice by local public administrations, but the press release doesn’t mention either ODF or open standards. Improvements are needed, the lack of a European coherent strategic vision towards standards’ compliance.

The upcoming OpenOffice.org Con 2009 will take place in Orvieto (Italy) in November, and ist seems to me the ideal place to run a second ODF Plugfest within our ODF Interoperability Day. Over these days I’m contacting people from different organizations that might be interested in joining us at the OOo Con 2009, stay tuned to know more!

To know more about the ODF Plugfest search for odfplugfest on twitter or go through blog entries on the subject.

Italo Vignoli, PLIO’s president, said:

In Italy OpenOffice.org downloads exceeded the number of PC sold, steadily growing at an amazing rate.

OpenOffice.org fellows ask to vote for our beloved open source productive suite, and I invite you to do so unless you prefer other candidates (some of them actually like Trisano, Sahana or Medical deserve our attention too).

The new service automatically updates a mobile phone address book, creating a local number for each international number, allowing callers to make international calls at local rates.

Fabrizio two days ago, anticipating the news to be broadcasted today, said:

A year ago, I met with the founders of Jajah, who are Austrian and moved to Silicon Valley like me. We agreed we should launch the new service on a pilot country. I said “Austria”, they said “Italy”. They won. I am very pleased we chose Italy, since it is one of the countries with the largest mobile penetration. Now we are also the country with the lowest cost for international calls from mobile. I love this service because it is for everyone, from the manager to the immigrant.

Funambol keeps doing a great job partnering with carriers and communications company. Fabrizio is brilliantly putting in action his open source vision moving towards SaaS.

The Software Freedom Conference Kosova will be held on 29-30 of August 2009 in Prishtina (Kosovo), and it will bring together local developers and the international community.

Authors are invited to submit Papers, as a newborn and developing nation the focus will be on the following topics:

0. What is free software and open source?
1. How can free software help a developing nation?
2. Practical Work on using free software for Schools and Business?
3. How Government and Institutions can benefit from free software?
4. Local developers presenting work on projects.
5. Also any other topic relevant to free software.
6. Voice Over IP
7. How to work with Microsoft using Free Software and Open Source?
8. Copyright, Licensing and Patents

Papers and presentations -  preferably made available under the GFDL or Creative Commons - are ideally held in English, talks will be held in one of the four national languages: Albanian, Serbian, Turkish, English.

Follow SFCK09 on twitter or join the conference ning social network.

The report covers Italian IT market’s structure and evolution, summarizing results after surveying 1000 companies. The report compares also the Italian IT market with the most active European IT markets, and analyzes differences among Italian regions (Lombardia, Emilia Romagna, Lazio and others).

Registrations are now open.

The goal of this event is to spread the word about the vibrant communities and large ecosystems around Open Source Databases and to educate the attendees about what alternatives exist to commercial databases.

I asked Giuseppe Maxia, MySQL Community Team Lead, a summary of the event.

The Open SQL Camp is a gathering of open source database professionals, organized and attended by the community. Unlike vendor sponsored conferences, this event embraces all database professionals in the open source arena. Talks are highly technical and may span across several products.

The first edition of the Open SQL Camp was held in Charlottesville, USA, in November 2008. Although it was open to everyone, the main attendance was from the US. To give Europeans a better chance of participation, there will be several editions of the Camp, the first of which will be in Europe, and a US based one will follow shortly. Of course, overseas participants and speakers are welcome.

Among the databases being represented at this event, we will see, among others, MySQL, Drizzle, PostgreSQL, Infobright, SQLite, JavaDB. Core developers of the above projects are attending.