The pre-selection of project management programs started by focusing on some of the most famous web-based ones, excluding the following (for the following reasons):

• Kforge, Project HQ, ProjectPier because maintained by a small group;
• Collabtive, Feng Project, because too young (less than 3 years old);

Launchpad, and Trac were eventually added to the final list of candidates (Read more at SOS Open Source.).

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What is the role of open source development in telephony?

It is evident as the Open Source Community have significantly contributed  to change the paradigms, not just in the IT-Like world, but, overall in the last 3 years, affecting all the Telecommunication market.
Asterisk opened the way since the early 2004, reaching the 1,5 Million worldwide downloads in 2008.
OpenSER [now OpenSIPS] followed and many other open projects are approaching the Unified Communication market.

Microsoft keeps looking into the unified communication market, what is your vision in this regard?

(Disclosure: two years ago Microsoft Italy asked me to help them to find a VOiP open source vendor interested in put in place interoperability tests with them, and I introduced them to each other).

We appreciated very much your idea Roberto. Playing your “open source hub” role you created indeed a link beetween our open source firm and a proprietary market leader. Since that time we analyzed the possible integrations between the Asterisk market and the Microsoft OCS platform, also thanks to some of the Microsoft team.

We strongly believe in the potential synergies, so we have built a special Xenia Labs at the TopIX data center, where we have interconnected the Open Communication Platforms Asterisk based with the other open tools, for instance Yahoo Zimbra Zimlets, VTiger CRM and the Microsoft OCS Platform. In the unified communication ecosystem the integration among the different tools is really important, especially looking at the end user customer services.

Unified collaboration seems a key component of your present strategy. Are you considerating any other collaboration?

Looking at the unified collaboration world, we are even more open to the synergies with the sector players. We are evaluating right now the Google Wave, XMPP and VXML protocols, testing them and deploying them integrated with our framework in order to create a real value added market proposition.

Thank you Diego, and let me know when your Sip Web Phone Plug-in for WordPress will be available for download.

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Bill Portelli, Collabnet CEO, and Justin Erenkrantz, Apache Software Foundation President, answered few questions aimed at better understanding if and at which extent this is a win-win move. Let’s start from the corporate side.

Bill, how does this move fit into CollabNet’s open source strategy?

CollabNet leverages open source to create business value both for us, and for our customers and partners. For instance, open source

1. enables operational scalability and cost benefits both in our data centers as well as in our customers’ on-site deployments (e.g., one of our deployment options is LAMP based);
2. provides CollabNet’s users with ease of adoption benefits (e.g., all of the desktop tool integrations into CollabNet Team Forge such as our Eclipse and Visual Studio desktops are open source; and of course, the primary SCM we support is Subversion (among other SCMs);
3. amplifies CollabNet development and accelerates innovation by utilizing a highly leveraged and open development model (e.g., we bring our clients into our SW development process – both our proprietary CollabNet Team Forge software, as well as in working with the Subversion community which includes general community members, Subversion users, our business partners, and even our competitors).

Strategically, the transition of Subversion from CollabNet hosted Tigris.org to Apche.org was done principally because CollabNet, the Subversion community, and the Apache community all believed that we could accelerate Subversion innovation (point iii above) by leveraging the synergies between the Subversion and the Apache Community. Synergies exist due to:

i) Community Leverage – Given the large Apache committer base and their semi-annual developer events, Subversion will benefit from the additional outreach and large developer community.

ii) Longstanding affinity between Subversion and Apache projects – Subversion and Apache have a long history together. From a developer perspective, many of the same people founded and continue to work on both projects. From a technology perspective, both projects utilize capabilities and have driven innovation of the other (e.g., core Subversion, the Apache httpd web server and the Apache portable runtime library (APR).

Looking at the whole open source SCM offering, while Subversion code base keeps growing, active contributors are less than Git and Mercurial ones. In this respect joining the Apache foundation seems a smart move to gather more attention and contributors.

What are the direct and collateral benefits CollabNet is expecting?

As stated above, this move to Subversion will accelerate innovation, which in turn will benefit our clients and business partners, and CollabNet. In other words, whatever is good for Subversion is good for CollabNet as a key community member. Subversion has and always will be a community in which the personal and business gains which can be derived is a direct function of the value added development and marketing investment which is made into the community. As it founder, and historical steward, CollabNet will continue to invest, and even increase our Subversion commitments as Subversion’s adoption in the industry grows.

Sharing innovation efforts and reducing software production costs are key here.

Let’s now have a look at the community side.

Talking about the Apache individual-centric approach, I asked Justin if the fact that the incubation relies on an Apache person is a an opportunity or a seatback.

As a long-time contributor to Subversion and a member of the ASF, I’m personally very very excited to be a mentor to Subversion as it joins Apache. In the mentoring process, I’m joined by several other Apache members: Greg Stein, Sander Striker, and Dan Rall. Our responsibility will be to guide Subversion through the ASF processes as it becomes a new Apache project. In addition to the four of us, a number of other Subversion committers are already Apache members and committers to other Apache projects (usually HTTP Server and APR). This overlap of community was a significant reason for Subversion to join Apache – but we realize that not all incoming projects are going to have such familiarity even before the Incubation process begins!

The Apache Incubation model is centered around supporting new projects that our individual members are interested in. As we’ve discussed earlier this year, committers on our various projects (over 70 top-level projects) are elected to be members of the foundation. One of the coolest things that a member of the ASF can do is sponsor and mentor a new project into the foundation. Therefore, as a grassroots individual-centric organization, we are wholly driven by what projects our members want to see. In turn, we hope that the new project participants will eventually become members themselves and help us further expand the foundation. And, again, the mentors are involved (at a social level) in helping the new project learn the “Apache Way” and shepherding them through the Apache processes.

Subversion story is pretty unique and probably incubating existing projects with a background has pros and cons,
can comment on this?

Generally speaking, our incubation processes are focused on two aspects: legal and community. In a project like Subversion, it’s operated under the consensual decision-making processes that are the hallmark of the ASF. It already boasts a diverse range of contributors (over 55 ”full” committers and 20 “partial” committers) from a diverse set of backgrounds and employers. With such a strong community, there is little for Apache to teach about how to run the community.

A while back, the Subversion community created the Subversion Corporation to gather all of the intellectual property around Subversion. Under the Subversion Corporation banner, we collected all of the legal paperwork (in the form of CLAs and CCLAs) required to have a strong provenance for the Subversion code.

But, having this indepedent corporation came at a price: maintaining the corporation took us away from doing what we do best: create Subversion!
So, the Subversion community looked at our options and decided that the ASF represented a natural fit for where we wanted Subversion to reside going forward. We expect very little to change over the long run – but, there will be some short-term pain as we transition our services to apache.org.

–/–

Greg Stein in a interview answering a question about the Subversion ‘Apache-readiness’ status said that ASF letting Subversion bypassed the incubation process would have set a poor precedent. Even if Subversion will likely spend a small time in its incubation stadium, both because of the already existing community culture and because probably little IP clearance is needed, following the same rules for every project is definitely a wise decision.

Last but not least, can you tell something about the Apache mark?

Even though we give our code away under a permissive set of copyright and patent licenses, our community places a very high value on protecting our name. Through the labors of our community, we have established Apache as a well-regarded brand amongst the industry.

Therefore, while we are delighted/encouraged/supportive of anyone taking our code for any use that they can conceive of – we do not sanction use of our name in those endeavors. (Due to the ins/outs of trademark law, there is a concept called “nominative use” which is always permitted.)

We recently published our trademark policy which goes into much more technical detail (including explaining “nominative use” and other basics of trademark!) at: http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/

Thank you both for your answers!

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The GNOME Foundation after welcoming on board the Mozilla Foundation, and more recently Motorola and Google, keeps bringing on board third parties.

Reading the press release it looks like if the GNOME Foundation wants to explore the economics of technological clubs.

GNOME is actively cooperating with the makers of these platforms in order to make sure that they can use GNOME technologies as efficiently and effectively as possible and to enable cross-fertilization of resources. Members of the GNOME Advisory Board help the GNOME Foundation work with partner companies effectively and they also get a chance to collaborate with each other on their use of GNOME technologies. (emphasis is mine)

Stormy Peters, appointed Executive Director last July, confirmed my opinion through a google chat.

When I talked to all the Advisory Board members when I first started, it surprised me how many of them said they appreciated the space to talk confidentially to their potential competitors.

GNOME reaches a lot of users – millions for them. 14 million by one count. But none of them directly. They all have plans for GNOME, have things they add and have things they want to see in the future and things they’ve worked on that they’d like to add upstream. Having a place where they can discuss their plans together, so that they can best cooperate as companies and individual contributors in the project, leads to more cooperation and more innovative work upstream.

The Foundation likely has no plans to run direct marketing campaigns to tell GNOME’s stakeholders about the advantage of shared R&D, but it is already enabling coopetition now in some areas (e.g. GNOME Mobile).

The Collaborative Software Initiative or similar organizations have to build trust from scratch, on the contrary the GNOME Foundation is greatly valued by open source crowds, and not only. Still the GNOME Foundation has to prove to its present and future sponsors that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the costs, just like every technological club.

Community-led open source projects are transparent and accessible, but letting sponsors enter the game directly requires to pay attention to make efficient and effective open source collaboration markets.

Sponsoring the GNOME Foundation seems the easiest way to get into the club, but I would suggest interested parties to read also the GNOME Foundation membership guidelines. All in all the best way to (positively) influence a community founded project is still the same: engage, engage, engage!

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