Fabrizio Balliano

Back in 2003, with CreaLabs we started the e-Socrates project, creating the first Italian portal promoting the free e-learning philosophy, because we truly believe that knowledge must be free.

Some days ago Simone Brunozzi told me about an idea he was working on, a community made by students and teachers, together creating documentation that would be grouped in books, maybe printed, obviously released under a free license. Hey this is just a small resume about his idea, please visit his blog for further information!

This evening, driving back home after work, I was thinking about Italian high schools, let’s talk with some numbers (examples):

• every 2 years every student has to buy 10 books, 40 Euro every book
• 40 * 10 / 2 = 200 Euro/year
• let’s think about 2 million of Italian students (actually there are many more, but let’s take some margins)
• 200 * 2,000,000 = 400,000,000 Euro/year

Let’s imagine what my country could do with only half of this amount every year… with 200,000,000 Euro/year Italy could pay a huge team of teachers that would create all the books for the next year. All this books should be released under a free license and freely available for everyone to download. Many low cost print services could be used for who students that want a paper copy of the books (I think that a paper copy could be given to any student for free).

Amouts are higher than what I wrote because in Italy there are more that 2,000,000 high school students… what a better world could be…

Maybe I’m not the first having his idea, it seems so obvious…

Every member of the Italian parliament can now ask to replace his Windows workstation with a Linux one. Many people say that this is a revolution but I can’t completely agree. Thinking to the medium age of the members and their familiarity with the PC, how many of them will ask for Linux?

A prevision? 1/100 in 1 year, 1/20 in 3 years. And I also think this is an optimistic prevision.

Point is, if someone (with competence) decide to choose one thing, who has not competence should adapt or nothing will ever change.

Via Repubblica, Pollycoke, OSSblog, OSrevolution, Treviño.

UPDATE: the migration will be optional for 630 members, all other servers/workstation will be automatically migrated. Via Pietro Folena.

We already knew that but now it’s pretty official:
http://softwarelibero.it/riflessione-politiche-innovazione-ict

Italian government opened an OSS observatory portal but the point is that we don’t need someone who observe how the world of OSS evolve… Italy need to work on OSS, skill people and implement OSS.