rants

Free Software is first about ethics, not only licenses nor development models.  Ethics in business has started to be considered as an important item and it’s not unusual nowadays to see Corporate Social Responsibility mentioned in business reports. 

That’s why I think that to qualify a Free Software Business we need to measure its orientation to doing good to freedom in the digital society.  I’ve talked about this topic also in the past and I’m still convinced that consideration like the following from Roberto should come after looking at the companies missions and CSR reports. 

we ended up classifying OS firms as those that:

• sponsor, support, facilitate an open source project, that is a project that has a license compatible with the OSD definition, in a direct or indirect way.
• the sponsoring/support must be continuous, that is it should not be a single, one time contribution.

I am aware that it’s not easy to measure ethics or freedom in digital society.  Neither is easy to measure sustainable development, but many have been suggesting ways for many years despite difficulties 🙂  Probably this could be a role for FSFE’s future activities?

The simplest ideas are often the foundation of powerful business cases.  Roberto’s idea of a Free Software franchise seems a natural evolution towards a market that adds  the power of a brand to the professionality and high quality services of many existing Free Sw Businesses.

I think that many potential users of Free Software, especially small businesses, can be reassured more easily with a brand if they need to buy services from small firms.

What’s a franchise if not the sum of the power of a brand, as Schwartz says, and quality of services?

An Open Source Franchisor could aimed at delivering to the market IT basic services using OSS, with a fixed-time fixed-price formula, training its franchisees to meet predefined performance criteria.

Simon? Jonathan?  What do you think? 

Update: Simon seems interested investigating this model further and has bounced the ball to Redmonk from his blog.

Commercial Open Source Software » Open Source Franchising: From artisanship to industrial

As some Fellows have noticed, FSFE has humbly published the new logo on its institutional web pages. This logo was discussed with the Fellows at the Meeting in Bolzano and picked between a few alternatives.  I’m glad most liked the same logo I liked. It is based on the concept of Osmosis and Metamorphosis and it connotates growth, development, evolution.  This new logo gives the right image not only for its simplicity and friendlyness but also because it pictures our movement perfectly.

Architects are taught from day one at school that pictures are worth a thousand words if you want to describe something.  Look at the picture of the specifications of Microsoft OOXML standard: doesn’t it scream Interoperability is IMPOSSIBLE to you?

Read more on Pavel’s diary

Marco ‘mascotte’ aka Madero rocked presenting Advocacy. I’ll ask him to publish his slides because they were clear and straight to the point. His exposition of the project in front of the crowd was very good, too.  During the Q&A time we got many suggestions from other experiences advocating free software in Italian schools.  That’s the good part of having people in the same room listening: you get good suggestions and you exchange lots more information than using just mailing lists.

Overall, it was very positive event, until I had to take the plane.  Take off aborted for a technical problem. It wasn’t fun to feel the brakes at the last minute on the runway and it wasn’t fun to hear that by the time the problem was fixed (rapidly, in 30 minutes) the pilot would have finished his work hours.  So he just left and we had to wait 3 hours to get a new crew.  I made a mistake flying Alitalia again after 2 years boycott.  This company must happily die and make space for better enterprises.

With the final words from the representative of University, ConfSL 2007 has ended.  Shane’s speech was good and clear, I had the chance to introduce FSFE’s activities including SELF, STACS and the italian activities, like GNUvox.  I put the slides here.

Next year ConfSL probably will be in Trento, if there are no more candidates (said by the professor from stage).

Tomorrow will be total community day with the Italian LUGConf and the presentation of Advocacy by Fellow madero.

Oh, come on!? This is not a community, it’s a list of companies  that are doing business with Microsoft and have been doing so for a looooong time. There is no space for discussions, comments, hints and tips, chats or any other form of interaction.  Anybody that agrees that his

Company Name and URL may be published on this website and shared with ISO national standards bodies.

What is Microsoft trying to demonstrate here? That they have many partners? It’s not a secret, we all know it already.  How that site is going to demonstrate that OpenXML deserves to be called an ‘open standard‘ is beyond my understanding. Unless Microsoft really thinks that the ISO national standards bodies can be fooled by a list of companies on a useless web site.

Well, at least hibernate now works out of the box. But gaim is a mess and evolution still sucks. Because gaim is such a crashing machine you won’t see me much online on jabber.fsfe.org 🙁 Until some good people include pidgin in official ubuntu reps.  Sorry for that.  I’ll hang around IRC, freenode.net, as reed.

Next time I’ll seriously consider going for KDE.

I think I have removed all proprietary drivers (I don’t have hardware that needs them anyway) but it was annoying to see that universe and multiverse are not only enabled by default, but proprietary drivers are installed even without a warning. That’s the bare minimum a distro should do.

I’m getting ready to go to Cosenza to the ConfSL conference.  The good news is that Marco will come too: he has been developing Advocacy in Milano and I can’t wait to hear comments and suggestions from other members of the Italian community. 

Dido, president of Assoli, has also confirmed that he will travel to Cosenza. I can’t wait to talk to him too.  Assoli has been working very well in Italy and it has grabbed a huge success. I hope we’ll find projects we can do together.

PS a friend told me that these are my lucky numbers 🙂

09 F9 11 02
9D 74 E3 5B
D8 41 56 C5
63 56 88 C0

Roberto has noticed that within the long list of ribbon campaigns over the internet, there isn’t any promoting Free Software.

I agree with Roberto that there is a need for connectors, especially we need a way to expand the community beyond its current boundaries.  I’ve been humbly trying to do this in Italy launching GNUvox and also promoting the Fellowship. 

Regarding the color of the ribbon, green is my choice.
 And instead of a ribbon, I would chose ‘plussy’ as a connector. The Fellowship as a wider connector?