Fabrizio Balliano

Subject says it all, here you have the official IDC note. Why was it canceled? None tells it.

I was there last year (or maybe 2 years ago, I can’t remember now) with a talk about UfficioZero and it was a good manifestation but… in the next months I saw a big commercialization of the initiative, with many sponsorship appliance requests (money guys, money) and I lost my interest in that.

Aitech-Assinform says on PI:

l’open source è solo una delle possibili opzioni per le amministrazioni, le cui scelte non devono essere dettate da ideologie ma da considerazioni di tipo tecnico, applicativo e strategico.

English translation (by me)

open source is only one of the options for the public administration. The choice shouldn’t be suggested by an ideology but by technical and strategical considerations.

Just 2 thoughts:

1. Public means public, a service for all citizens. Public Administration MUST choose with ideology and ethic in mind
2. Open source IS a technical and strategical requisite

In a few years the usage of mobile computers will grow, we know Ubuntu will work on a “mobile edition” thus powertop from Intel will allow us to build power cheap software, enhancing the Linux mobile experience.

Intel is also maintaining a set of patches for some Linux software, I hope those patches will be integrated in the mainstream releases as soon as possible because we need to make Intel know that we really appreciate their work for us.

Good work Intel, also for the open video drivers announce.

Things are getting really interesting in these days :)

Many bloggers talked about the Liberation fonts released by Red Hat but when I read the press release I thought “why none thought about that before?”

i hear people say “Linux doesn’t work, I open a Word document and it’s all broken”.

It’s the “90-10″ rule, 10% of a system causes 90% problems.

Our Linux boxes have really nice fonts, really nice UI and everything else but we need a massive users migration and TRUST to fix bug #1, inexperienced users take a livecd, boot, open one of their document and… ops it’s not as I did it!

Red Hat started to solve the problem, Liberation fonts will make documents on Linux pretty the same as you would see them on your Windows/Office machine.

New users will be pleased about that thus… Ubuntu and other distros, integrate those fonts ASAP!

Bolzano (Italy) passed to free software, I’m really glad about that, Italy WAKE UP!

Here you have a 7 minutes documentary (in Italian) about that transition, trying to explain a bit what the “free software” is

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITzX7zRgOkA]

Good initiative but please, PLEASE, stop talking about free software just saying that’s “free as in beer”, please put more attention on FREEDOM and LEGALITY.

From the Free Software Definition

“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price

Piracy… long story, troubled discussions but the point is that we have laws and we must respect those laws, stop! Copying proprietary software is a crime? USE FREE SOFTWARE!

I hear people say “until I can crack, I crack” oh damn how is it possible to think something like that?

In the last free days Italian government signed with Microsof to build 3 research centers in Italy, Microsoft investment will be off 1 milion dollar in 3 years (can I say nothing?) but none told about Italian investment.

What will those centers do? Build innovations with Microsoft products thus enhance Microsoft business.

I’m not against Microsoft, a company do its best for its purpose, that’s all.

I’m really in anger with Italian government, PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION MUST USE FREE SOFTWARE, PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION MUST DO THE BEST FOR THE COUNTRY AND FOR PEOPLE enhancing local business before taking money outside!

Free software for PA not only would bring a better cultural and ethical education, but would create work for all local activities (and we have SO MANY IT workers here)! Results: better economy, better occupation, enhancement of competence level for Italian IT workers, BEST SOFTWARE TO GIVE BACK TO THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY.

UCK and reconstructor are both good software to create a customized Ubuntu derivative.

I’m working hard on UCK in these days thus you can expect big changes soon, but I’m also a user of reconstructor and I can do some considerations, in this post I’l talk about the next UCK release so maybe you can think that something I’m saying is wrong but that’s because you’re still working with the old UCK.

• UCK is bash scripting, reconstructor is python GTK. For some things UCK is easier to script and customize because many users know bash, less know python
• reconstructor does many things that UCK doesn’t: gnome environment customization, alternate cd customization are just two examples
• UCK can used to automatically generate ISOs without user interaction
• UCK has a nice support to install language packs and customize gfxboot language selections
• reconstructor has a nicer GUI also if it’s GTK only, UCK GUI can be used within CLI/GTK/QT environment thanks to dialog/zenity/kdialog but we can’t build complex UI with those tools

So what are the conclusions? Both projects have the same goals, both have a common part of code that could be reused.

The next UCK version will bring a good set of small scripts that everyone can call to do every single task of a remastering, thus my thought is that UCK should concentrate on the back-end scripts and reconstructor on the GUI. I hope for the future that reconstructor could drop his back-end scripts and use UCK’s ones, working together to bring better software for everyone.

If you want, check out the development version of UCK.

Reading my latest post someone can say

hey you started many projects but what did you do for the fragmentation problem you’re talking about?

That’s absolutely right!

Something like 3 years ago we started the Knoppix italian community, after some time (maybe 1 or 2 years, I can’t remember) some other guys started another knoppix italian community, we told them they should join our project becase our was already known and active but nothing. We continued with our project for a bit but, monitoring the others’ work we found it was good and we decide to close ours to make users join the new one.

This is a good defragmentation I think, I don’t care about the 10 euro/month for the adsense banner on my site, I care about the idea, what’s the goal? 10 euro/month or the spread of knoppix? IT HAS TO BE THE SECOND!

Our website is still there just for reference but it’s read-only, hope we did a good work, I think so.

I feel this as a big problem in Italy because of my involvment in some free projects, I don’t know if it’s the same in other countries but I can imagine that’s pretty the same situation.

A free project is created starting from an idea of a single person, some other joins, some other say “hey I want to do this instead of this” and create another project. What’s the result? The failure of at least one of the projects.

It’s absolutely sad to see good projects dying because people can’t find common objectives and work together!

If you come second, don’t impose your ideas, join the community and work for it, if you really want to contribute put down your own pride and work for the free software, not only for yourself and your name!

Taken from this article on businessweek:

Dell Inc. has agreed to work with Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. under an alliance the rival software makers formed last year to make it easier for the Windows operating system and the increasingly popular Linux system to work together

Dell surely have its own reasons to choose Ubuntu for the desktop and Novell for the server but… could it be that Microsoft was not too happy for the Dell/Ubuntu partnership [...]?