Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 01:39:45 +0100 (MET)
From: Kevin Reardon <kreardon@na.astro.it>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Article in Il Sole 24 Ore


Dear LWN,

Here is a translation of the article about Open Source Software from Il
Sole 24 Ore that you referenced in this week's LWN (March 11, 1999). Any
errors are completely mine and I offer no guarantees about the accuracy or
quality of this translation (but I think I caught the gist).

kevin reardon

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Il Sole 24 Ore
 
Telecommunications, Technology, and Science

Friday, March 5, 1999 - Computers

    At the CNR (the Italian National Research Center), an idea is making
the rounds - to redirect the italian computer science towards freeware,
open source software Made in Italy. The Linux market grew 212% in 1998 and
is moving up as the first global server software.


    Will Open-Source Software be the key for the rebirth of italian
computer programming? The idea, at first glance, might seem odd. To base
everything on programs developed cooperatively among a volunteer community
of programmers (and distributed at no cost) might seem, at first, the
antithesis of the basic model of the software industry: to always develop
in-house, to sell software via licensing, to secretly guard the underlying
source code. Nonetheless, this week, the challenge made this week by Angelo
Raffaele Meo, a teacher at the Torino Technical College, is making waves
both inside and out of the academic community.

    His proposal, to create a national research program completely focused
on Open-Source Software (or, as Meo calls it, freeware), seeks both to
expand the usage of OSS as well as develop new programs in certain key
areas. Meo isn't new to the scene. In 1979, he coordinated an important
research program in computer programming at the CNR - perhaps the largest
program of reasearch and development undertaken in Italy in this sector -
that produced, among other things, also the software methodologies that
still today are the basis for the companies (like Finsiel) that make the
large systems used by the public administration.

   "Italy," says Meo, "has to deal with the rather disasterous situation of
its computer systems. Every year we spend over two billion dollars for
software products, in large part imported, without any appreciable exports.
We are even outclassed, in this field, by countries such as Finland or
India. And therefore it is time to look for some new strategies. And open
source could be the key: a robust offering of italian freeware could help
both to reduce our software trade deficit and to help the birth (in Italy)
of new competitve initiatives that could produce significant returns in
terms of added services, recognized namebrands, technology. Something that
could spread throughout the Mediterranean and elsewhere."

    Open-Source Software, born as the "ugly duckling" of compute
programming, alternative and underground, is today literally exploding,
even in the industrial and business environments. Take, for example, the
latest annual measurements by IDC of the operating systems used on servers.
In just the last 12 months, the share held by Linux (one of the primary
assets of OSS) of server operating systems almost tripled, from 6.8 to
17.2%. Today, Linux, having grown 212.5% in 1998 (almost ten times more
than the market average or Windows NT), is the fourth largest operating
system and has a market share as large as all of the traditional Unixes
combined. And it's not just Linux - Apache, a web server developed by a
group of web site managers, is today the largest web server, responsible
for over 53% of the web sites in the world (compared to 23% for the
Microsoft servers and 7% for Netscape's). They are telling figures. "In a
brief survey we performed at the Torino Politechnic," adds Meo, "we
estimated that there are approximately 3000 megabytes of software available
on the internet. It is an enormous resource, that touches every field of
computing and could be even firther refined, adapted, and guaranteed for
professional uses. Further, there are still frontiers into which to expand,
for example collaboration software via internet, within and without the
public administration and the businesses."

    This, in essence, is Meo's proposal, made last week during a day of
discussion held at the headquarters of the CNR, with all its major
representatives present. "A hundred million dollar project that could
return a billion, in terms of reduced software imports," says Meo,
"andcentered on four axes: catalog the existing free software; select,
certify, and test, even offering a seal of quality of the CNR; produce
documentation in italian; produce new software in value-added areas, such
as the collaboration software mentioned before."

    Will it be a success? It is too soon to say, especially because in the
academic community there doubts. "Meo's idea might be useful, but it won't
resolve the the problems of computer research in Italy," says Alfonso
Fuggetta, teacher at the Milan Politechnic. "There is a general question,
that extends to all of Europe, about the poor choices in funding (given to
support those projects already in existence or to the so-called
"precompetitive" research) that has shown itself to be inefficient. In
fact, neither true university researh nor the development of innovative
commercial projects are financed. This is the real problem."

    To pubblicly fund open-source projects runs the risk, according to
researchers, of putting the universities to work on commercial products
(even if they are apparently free), disturbing the marketplace. "It would
be better to have an initiative that wasn't focused on the universities,"
says Alessandro Osnaghi, one of the most well-known italian names in
operating systems, "but more for incentives for innovations, from venture
capital and financing to the planning for advanced businesses." And this,
perhaps, is the fastest path, and one that more than a few people (among
which are members of the government) are considering today with interest.

    On the other hand, the italian Linux/Open Source community isn't small
- "over 1200 participants at the last Linux meeting organized by Pluto (the
largest italian Linux/OSS user group) at the University of Rome last fall,"
says Marco Bravi, researcher at the university. "It is a robust and vibrant
community, to which the students, researchers, and individuals are recently
being joined by a not insignificant number of new businesses," observes
Alessandro Rubini of Prosa (http://www.prosa.it/), a new italian Linux
company. From specialized publishing houses, like Athena from Modena
(collaborators with Prosa of an italian version of Debian Linux) or Apogeo
of Milan (http://www.apogeo.it/), "all the way to a growing number of small
software shops," says Antonio Baldassarra of STT of Frosinone
(http://www.stt.it), "that, like us, have developed or market Linux
solutions and offer assistance. For example, our network for the Industrial
Association of Frosinone (hosted on our Linux server) has allowed us to
create a notable amount of internet activity, obviously based on our
hosting of web sites on Apache servers."

    There are even those in Italy who are building advanced custom hardware
for Linux. This is the case for Flextel (http://www.flextel.it/), created
by an group of ex-designers for Olivetti, that is putting the finishing
touches on an innovative server together with CSP (the Supercomputing
Center of Piemonte, responsible for an intranet among the local
administrations in the region). It is a sort of computer/network, based on
a multiple linux computers modularly integrated (in the same enclosure) by
an internal 2 Gigabits/sec information highway. "The idea, now finalized,"
states Antonio Marchisio of Flextel, "is of a multipurpose server at a low
cost. It is capable to integrate internally also routers and network
devices, together with arrays of disks and multiple, independent processing
units." Or, in the end, everything that is needed at CSP to manage, from a
single box, a network that branches out to over forty cities in the region.
"There is a lot of activity around open source software," concludes Rubini,
"and we are already seeing the returns. At Prosa we work producing advanced
software without the need to emigrate. And we would love if this spread to
many other young italians."

-- Giuseppe Caravita