Had a thoroughly enjoyable time in Rome at the Qualipso conference over the past 2 days. Thanks to Roberto Galoppini for the heads up via his blog.
Qualipso is a global consortium established to bridge business and public administrations to the Open Source world. It was established in 2006 and has members in the EU, Sweden, Brazil, China and more. It is financed in part by the European Commision and I am led to believe they have up to €10 million in the coffers. These people mean serious business!
The first day was quite interesting a was a good insight to the corporate view of Open Source. It was a little disheartening to hear lots of sentences with the word “use” and little mention of “participate” and “contrbute”. However, this is to be expected from the mindset of the corporate world. Additionally, given the corporate focus there was little discussed that I had not heard before but I have included below some “sound bites” that stuck in my mind. It must be said though that this conference was primarily a meeting of the Qualipso members and in that light it was useful to set the tone so everybody was singing from the same hymnsheet.
Day 1 Sound bites:
- ODM – Original Device Manufacturing business holds great opportunities for Open Source.
- Francois Banchilon, Chairman and CEO of Mandriva made an interesting comment about the creation of a €300 billion market for pcs in the pipeline from developing countries. A bit sensational but thought provoking all the same.
- Oliver Fendt of the Siemens Open Source Clearing House gave a very pragmatic response to my question regarding the importance of contributing and the existence of formal procedures for giving back to the community. Essentially, the will is there but given the culture of the corporate world it is a difficult for them to embrace the culture of sharing. This position hughlights the massive importance of organisations like the OSI and GNU who spend so much time and effort defining and enforcing FLOSS licenses. They are the guardians of the FLOSS culture and should be respected as such.
- Forrester have an interesting survey of Enterprise and SMB Software in America and Europe. I must get my hands on a copy!
- A delegate commented that Danny Rimmer’s 3 Cs for venture capital investment in Open Source projects was quite a limiting perspective. Very true in my opinion but an understandable model given VCs motives.
- Yuan Cheng, Deputy Director for Information Industry Bureau of Heilongjiang Province China gave an interesting high level view of the future of software. Notably, he made one point that innovation in software is reaching the limits that one single company obtain. We can see this from Microsoft’s loss of its position in supporting real innovation in recent years.
- I have a note to get Stefano De Panfilis’ presentation on Leveraging OSS. Information overload has caused me to forget exactly why but if I get a copy I will elucidate.
Day 2 started with a Debate on the Quality of OSS products ad processes. Nothing spectacularly new but there are lots of people working on how to formalise the quality of OSS. The chair of the debate made an interesting comment about how “trust cannot be claimed, it must be proved”. Also, it was heartening to hear a speaker comment that the importance is not to make money from Open Source but to create an economy around Open Source. A much more laudable and sustainable view in my opinion.
Phill Robb, R&D Manager for HP USA announced that they will shortly be open sourcing their application to automatically analyse and report the various Open Source / Free Software licenses a distro or application (which is often made up of other applications) used within it. A very important tool for businesses working with Open Source.
The highlight for me however was the debate on the Network of OSS Competence Centres. There was a debate on Open Source business models previously but it was a little wishy washy and didn’t provide any new information not widely known to people in the industry.
The Competence Centres network is the method of disseminating the work of Qualipso and consists of a set of physical resource (bricks & mortar) and virtual sites. These centres will be the outlets for Qualipso and will work in conjunction with the Qualipso Factory and Forge. The interesting part of this network is its architecture and specifically its control structure. The model is close to exactly the one that I have proposed in my dissertation so it was quite exciting to see an organisation wth the scope of Qualipso using such a design. I hope to write about this in more detail over the next while.
In summary, a huge amount of effort and resources has gone into Qualipso so far and it looks like there will be a lot more done. Despite some criticisms about the services operating at too high a level, which I both do and do not agree with (more about that in another post) I have every confidence that Qualipso will make great progress in linking the business and Open Source worlds.