Archive for the 'opensource' Category

Regarding the recent brouhaha over RedHat®’s cease and desist letters against people and companies offering JBoss® and Hibernate® training, here’s my two (Euro) cents:

1. RedHat® is perfectly in its rights to ask that people use their trademarks in the proper way, so as not to dilute it. IANAL, but should I ever offer Hibernate® services, I’ll be careful to do it under the moniker of “Support (or training) for the Hibernate® Object Relational Mapping Software” or somesuch, just to be safe.
2. Lawyers, as usual, are a bunch of wankers. First they send out threatening letters asking that companies do not use the Hibernate® and JBoss® names at all, then they backtrack and change their stance, hoping those who received the C&D letter will never read Bill’s blog.
3. Gavin King is at best disingenuous when he writes that “Apache owns and defends their trademarks”. If Apache defended its trademarks with the same ferocity as RedHat, you’d expect ASF lawyers sending out C&D letters to Covalent for putting on their website an announcement for “Apache, Tomcat, Geronimo & Axis Free Web Seminars”, just to name an example.

Having said that RedHat®, as a company that needs to make a profit, after all, can behave as any other “evil” corporation, if it pleases them, let me add the following: I might be an idealist, but I believe Open Source companies should act differently. Otherwise all this talk of community is just lame and hollow.

The first edition of the Open Source Business Academy was a resounding success. We had a good audience, considering it was the first public event we organized, and the speakers didn’t disappoint. Kudos to everyone who contributed to make this possible, in particular to Sun Italy for their sponsorship and to our CEO Gianugo, who dived into this with all his energy and more.

I’ve uploaded some pictures to Flickr, but they aren’t particularly good: my camera is lousy when the lighting is bad. Andrew took more pictures with a Canon DSLR and I’m sure they’ll be uploaded later. More media, like presentation slides, audio and probably even video, will be posted in the coming days to the event’s website or to ours.

If you weren’t able to make it this year, I hope to see you at next year’s edition.

Mark November 21 on your calendars: Sourcesense and Sun Microsystems Italia are organizing the first edition of the Open Source Business Academy.

This is a one day event aimed at business managers and decision makers who want to evaluate the costs and benefits of the adoption of Open Source in their company.

Confirmed speakes, so far, are:

• Mark A. Brewer: Chief Executive Officer, Covalent
• Simon Phipps: Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems Inc.
• John Powell: President and Chief Executive Officer, Alfresco
• Angelo Solari: Director, Software Factory, Telecom Italia

I don’t know the other speakers, but I’ve heard Simon Phipps speaking already, and he’s great.

All of us are totally psyched by this, as this is the first instance where Sourcesense is really coming to the forefront in a high-visibility event and presenting itself as one of the highlights of the business-oriented Open Source landscape. You can also read this post by Gianugo if you want to know more of what we’re up to.

The event will be held at the Enterprise Hotel, Milan, Italy and will comprise a plenary session in the morning and a series of parallel workshops in the afternoon. So, if you’re interested in making sense of Open Source, go register yourself and drop by on the 21st.