Stop at Zona-M

Pesaro is a town of about 100 thousands people on the northern adriatic coast of Italy. Its Public Administration has been facing lots of critics from Free/Open Source software supporters because, in the last five years, it changed twice the same, important part of its ICT infrastructure. Both those changes bring consequences and open issues, both for the critics and for Pesaro, that have had little or no coverage at all so far, especially outside Italy (1). Before talking about them, however, it is necessary to summarize what happened.

Today, while cleaning up old backups, I found a text file named as this post, which I saved on November 17th, 2000, but never used. Cannot remember what I was planning to do with it, but here it goes. A bit naive, surely dated (just look at which Free Software companies I was suggesting to go for help…) but still interesting, considering how things stand today. Here it goes, unchanged:

(no, not really but…) In December 2014, italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi annunced soldipubblici.gov.it, a Web portal that provides official Open Data on public spending (“Soldi Pubblici”, that is) in Italy. Within a few hours, an italian Hacker,

If and when the author (including me, I routinely do that on OTHER websites I run, or contribute to!) of some web page, video etc.. tells you that you can copy it all elsewhere, by all means DO it. In all other cases, including “sharing” them on Facebook or similar networks, or sending the full thing via email, you do a serious disservice… not just to that author but, **above all, **to all the people with which you “share” that stuff.

You really can’t make this stuff up: I have just found, one after another in my RSS feed, two unrelated articles on Smart Dust that you must really read side by side: one about a wonderful future, another unintentionally exposing some of its, apparently, not-yet-considered consequences.

Three and a half years ago, I explained why it’s time to bring FPGAs to the masses. One year later, I wrote that this is the time for European microprocessors and FPGAs.. And guess what I just read today?