Sam Ramji of Microsoft announces the SourceForge Community Award for Best Project for Education, won by OpenOffice.org. Sam underlines the importance of affordable software for education, both for teachers and students.

Technorati Tags:
microsoft, openoffice, award

EnterpriseDB has just announced the results (PDF download) of a recent survey of open source database usage.

A few data:

- 83% have yet to pay for the use of their open source database.

- 11% did migrate away from Microsoft SQL Server, 6% from Oracle and less than 1% from IBM DB2.

- 9% have a preference for commercial databases that prevents the use of open source databases.

- 85% affirms that nothing prohibits their company from using an open source database.

Technorati Tags:
open source, research, migration, database

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, has said: “The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that is art. Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”.

He added: “I see this [need] for free software - beautiful, elegant software. We have to invest in making the desktop beautiful and useful. The iPhone, for instance, is effectively a pure software experience”.

Being a Windows/MacOS user, and a close watcher of the Ubuntu distribution (which will replace Windows sometimes in the future, although I will probably keep on using XP as long as I can, just because I’m lazy), I saw this objective getting closer and closer with every new release of Ubuntu.

Today, MacOS X is the best flavour of Linux in terms of usability. Therefore, any Linux distribution should be able to emulate the “look and feel” of MacOS X with a few tweaks and a better integration with hardware platforms.

This, in my opinion, is the real challenge, as a Linux distribution must be compatible with most personal computers while MacOS X has been developed for a specific hardware. The technology, though, should be capable of solving this problem.

Technorati Tags:
apple, innovation, iphone, macos x, open source, linux

Yochai Benkler, the leading intellectual of the information age, explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization.

Technorati Tags:
open source, innovation

Today, Microsoft Italy has announced its third MD since the launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007. I’m puzzled. What’s happening at Microsoft Italy?

Marco Comastri has left a few months after the announcement, and has been replaced by Mario Derba, who has been replaced by Pietro Scott Jovane after less than a year in the position.

In order to get a better picture, I will try to read between the lines of the interviews that Pietro Scott Jovane will release to the press in the next few weeks.

UPDATE

After having read several comments to the appointment of Pietro Scott Jovine, I have one very simple question: it’s more important the experience as manager of online media (or whatever they call them at Microsoft) or the background as beancounter?

I’ve never got along with beancounters, although I’ve always exceeded their expectations during my career. In this case, let’s hope for the better. A healthy and “open” Microsoft is important for the Italian IT market.

Technorati Tags:
microsoft

June has been an extraordinary month for OOo in Italy:

- 523.234 downloads during the month, one every five seconds, more than the PCs sold in the country.

- 2.096.043 downloads since January 1st, 2008. In 2007, the total for the year has been 1.788.096 downloads, i.e. 307.967 less than in the first six months of 2008.

- 3.066.748 downloads during the last twelve months (July 2007 - June 2008). Five million downloads in 2008 is an ambitious but realistic target.

There is a real time counter on the Italian Linguistic Project home page, at the following address: http://www.plio.it. The number is the grand total of downloads since January 1st, 2008.

Technorati Tags:
marketing, odf, openoffice, downloads

I have been mumbling quite a lot on the editorial strategy of this blog. Originally, I wanted to cover marketing of open source software following my experience about OpenOffice.org. I have soon realized, though, that the open source industry is too much technology oriented to read marketing stuff.

I have been silent for a while, trying to figure out a solution. Although some people start to write about the “end of blogging”, I didn’t want to give up.

I have eventually found a solution. “Open Opinions” will cover open source marketing with interviews to the people that actually handle the task inside companies and communities. I will ask questions (I actually am a journalist), and I will also be one of the people that will answer my questions (call them self interviews).

I will start this new editorial strategy with a self interview. I have been quiet for a long time, for several reasons. I have several things that have been eating me up inside and I need to get them off my chest.

Stay tuned.