Stop at Zona-M

Pesaro, Microsoft and OpenOffice: the consequences

A few days ago I summarized the most questionable or uncertain points of the software odissey of the City of Pesaro, saying that I’d also post questions and consequences, both for the City and Open Source advocates, not mentioned yet in this story. For Pesaro, the road forward has little or nothing to do with the initial topic, that is Open Source Software in Public Administration. The advocates, instead, should rethink some of their strategies. Let’s start from Pesaro, but what follows applies to practically every city.

Microsoft vs OpenOffice in Pesaro: first, let's recap

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.

Catholics, Free Software and Free Knowledge, again

Almost ten years ago, I wrote about Free Software’s surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine, noting that, albeit certain statements sound _“as if they could have been written by Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), in fact, they come from the Vatican Report “Ethics in Internet” (EiI)”.

Some questions and suggestions to all commoners

I’m just back from the 2013 Economics and Commons Conference in Berlin. A great event, in which I took lots of general notes synthesized in another post that I’ll publish tomorrow. This one, instead, contains just questions and suggestions from me that I already shared at the conference, or I’d like to share with everybody interested in Commons. A separate post contains my critique to certain arguments against copyright I heard at the same conference.

If banking were more Open Source, we would need less Wikileaks

Help everybody love Free Standards and Free Software!

You will never convince ENOUGH people with the GNU Manifesto.