The next Focus Group Open Source meeting will focus on Open Data, and it will take place on the 25th of January 2012 in Rome, at IBM’s office (sponsor of the event). Among invited speakers Gianni Dominici (ForumPA), Federico Morando (Apps4Italy), Salvatore Marras (dati.gov), Ernesto Belisario (Italian Association for Open Government),  and Guido Vetere (IBM).

For more information and to sign up for the event, see the Focus Group Open Source blog.

SOS Open Source has still been my primary focus for a large part of this year, you may want to have a look at articles about  metrics, Open Source Application Lifecycle Management tools, white-papers and surveys. More will come, but definitely at a slower pace. So said, today you’ll find online the latest, about Zentyal.

Conferencing. Over the last year I have been charing Red Hat, SUSE and Google events, organizing a second series of events around open source for IBM (here the last of the year), giving speeches at few Cloud events and Open Data meet-ups.

The Open Source Road ahead has been a frequent theme for a while, maybe I’ll look into OSI’s future again, especially if the new appointed board will come up with interesting news.

EU-funded open source projects. After years spent talking about EU-funded projects it’s time to give them a try: I’m finally working on some proposals, plus I’ll be evaluating and reviewing projects.

About the future of Commercial Open Source blog. I’ll be writing blog entries time by time, but I’ll hardly doing it on a regular basis, though. My actual job is filling up my days nicely, and all my spare time goes to my family and especially to my lovely baby girl that makes my days and nights!

PR Agencies, open source vendors and projects with a commercial aim are highly invited to provide me with news, I’ll make this blog more open to external inputs as far as related to open source and business.

I wish to thank again my webmaster Matteo, best whishes for your WordPress-based SuperThemes venture!

1. Project Icons
2. Screenshots
3. Project Title, blurb, and full description fields
4. Feature bullets
5. Accurate project categorization
6. More frequent releases, and flag latest release
7. Rapid turnaround on tickets

All things being equal, projects with these elements are more prone to capture people’s interest than projects without them.

A user visits a Project Summary Page either because they know exactly what they are looking for - in which case you don’t need to provide them with nuts and bolts - or because they are looking for something, and they don’t know if your project solves their problems. In this latter case, you have just a few moments to make a good first impression. Here’s a few tips to help you do just that.

1. “Put an alligator over the pocket” (W. Allen, With our Feathers - “The Scrolls” - 1975).When you put a logo on your project, people associate it with certain core values like trust, quality, reliability, experience, etc. If you don’t believe it, read Woody Allen’s “put an alligator” and learn how Lacoste eventually became famous!

Read the full article at SourceForge blog.

The Zentyal Summit 2011 will be held on the 11th and 12th of November in Zaragoza, Spain. The event offers a meeting place for the Zentyal Linux Small Business Server community. The Summit is the best place to join hands-on sessions, discuss the Zentyal roadmap, get certified or just meet up with the Zentyal team and the whole ecosystem of partners, customers and community members.

Many thanks to the Zentyal team and the sponsors to have invited me to keynote at this event.  In my talk “From Projects to Products” will take a look on how open source projects can turn in to commercially viable products and how SourceForge can help in the process.

Registrations are open, see you there!

About Zentyal: (formerly eBox Platform) is an open source unified network server software package (or a Unified Network Platform) for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Zentyal can act as a Gateway, Network Infrastructure Manager, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Unified communications Server or a combination of them. Besides, Zentyal includes a development framework to ease the development of new Unix based services.

SUSE Italia celebrates Linux 20th birthday on the 15th of November 2011 in Rome, and on the 17th of November in Milan. The event is aimed at unveiling SUSE Italia’s new structure and the distinguishing features of SUSE Linux.

The event is tailored to the interest of actual and potential partners.

Andrew Alexeev, who recently joined the author of NGINX Igor Sysoev to take care of business development and marketing, told me more about company’s business strategy and the road ahead.

We started talking about the NGINX community, and the role it plays in the big picture.

We greatly appreciate what the open source community of users have been doing for us. We’ve got a 0.5%/month market growth without any marketing just by word of mouth. We’ve been getting useful reports and suggestions from the people, and we’ve been paying back with quick response, agile development and new features. We will continue to do that and upselling on the open source users isn’t our strategy.

So until now the NGINX community has been an effective and efficient tool to spread the word about NGINX, and also of help to define the project’s roadmap. NGINX (the company) may well be able to differentiate the project and the resulting product, because the former and the latter are targeting pretty different audiences (as seen and discussed in the Funambol productization case).

The visible commercial arm of NGINX is oriented towards Support services, but this is something is going to change soon, and an open core approach is the natural way to go. What will the NGINX offer look like in the next future?

Essentially we’ll be offering tools to monitor and manage performance, security and configuration (like integrating with OSS/BSS for instance), advanced load balancing capabilities, high availability/clustering. For  hosting we’ll be integrating with hosting management software (like *panels), and also tools to monitor and manage hosting environments better.

Their open core licensing sounds familiar, in fact as Funambol they are in the position to not upsell their own community. A number of things, ranging from their partner channel approach to how to involve developers, are still to be defined, but NGINX is going to be an open source business success (something 3 different VCs - namely BV Capital, Runa Capital and a private investment firm for Dell Inc. Chairman and CEO Michael S. Dell - show to have well understood).

I will check with Andrew later how things are going, and I wish them all of the best.

Both Sides Now: Open Source Inside and Outside the Cloud - Heather Meeker, Chair of the IP/IT Licensing and Transactions Group at Greenberg Traurig, and author of “The Open Source Alternative,” will explain the issues that have grown from the collision of cloud computing and open source.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 10:00 am PST

Making SharePoint Social with Acquia Common - Learn how to combine SharePoint’s workflow and document management capabilities with the content-rich, social experiences native to Commons.
Thursday, October 13, 2011 1:00 pm EDT

After presenting some quick facts of the historical background of Linux I invited Fiorello Cortiana to share his experience and vision around open source for Public Administrations. Andrea Trentini later gave a talk about how free software is taking at the Milan university.

Massimiliano Belardi - Sales Specialist at IBM - joined us for the second time with his talk about IBM continued engagement with Linux, providing the audience with more insights and case-history details. Marco De Felice - Delphis Informatica CEO - gave a speech around his experiences with helping customers to evalute and eventually perform z Series migrations.

Read more at the Focus Group website.

SourceForge played a fundamental role in the development of the open source world as we know it today, and we are working to make it more and more relevant to all its stakeholder groups, ranging from casual users to developers, enterprises and customer advertisers.

We are now testing new features to help our projects to grow, and as soon as they’ll be available to the general public we’ll let you know through our blog. We are actually scheduling one-to-one meetings aimed at better serving projects’ needs, so if you run a project and you want to know more about what we have to offer to you, drop me a line at rgaloppini@geek.net.