Licences, project governance, free software in public administration and in business.
The figures behind decaying search results: Pew on link rot, Wikipedia's decline, the FiveThirtyEight archive answering 200 in place of a 404. Then the layer below, the index: as of 13 August 2026 Europe's only open web index has had its project closed since 28 February.
Read moreOn 27 July 2026 the Commission published its guidance on applying the Cyber Resilience Act. Chapter 3 devotes fifty paragraphs to free and open-source software, setting out two cumulative conditions for a project to count as FOSS under the regulation, where the line falls between contributing and being answerable, and which obligations reach foundations and stewards depending on the support they provide.
Read moreOn 29 January 2011 the Hudson community voted to rename the project Jenkins. The code's licence was free; the name and the infrastructure were not. Where the real control of a project sits.
Read moreThe first stable LibreOffice release (25 January 2011) gathers OpenOffice.org 3.3, the Go-oo patches and the Linux distribution patches into a single tree. A technical note on import filters, build and governance.
Read moreA technical reckoning of free software in 2010: from distributed version control to licensing, what really changed in the daily work of standing up sites and applications.
Read moreAdopting free software in the public sector does not end with the licence: someone has to maintain, integrate and support the code over time. A technical note on the role of firms, from the 2010 Tuscan context.
Read morePublishing source code under an open source licence is not the same as surrendering know-how: what remains protectable as a secret and what becomes public, in the light of TRIPS art. 39, Reg. EC 772/2004 and arts. 98-99 of the Italian IP Code.
Read moreArticle 69 of the Italian Digital Administration Code requires public bodies to grant their commissioned software for reuse, in source form and free of charge. I trace the legal chain that led here and the points where the obligation hollows out.
Read morePloneGov brings a co-operative model for the public sector to Italy, built on Plone: bodies pooling code instead of re-purchasing the same applications. Technical notes and the limits of the model.
Read moreCompatibility between open licences, and between open and proprietary ones, depends on the clauses, not on the code. GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, MPL 1.1, BSD and Apache 2.0 compared, with Italian law 633/1941 in the background.
Read moreMonths after GPLv3 and on the eve of Linux Day, a technical note on licences, proliferation and compatibility: what it now means to talk about free knowledge.
Read moreOn 29 June 2007 the FSF published version 3 of the GNU GPL. Anti-tivoization, an explicit patent grant and Apache 2.0 compatibility redraw the boundary of copyleft, while the Linux kernel stays on v2.
Read moreWorking on free software, you sell the services around the code, not the licence. A technical note on the subscription model and the state of licensing at the close of 2006.
Read moreThe directive of 19 December 2003 requires Italian public bodies to assess open source software and open data formats. Technical notes on how a Province portal is built today on a free stack.
Read moreAs of a few days ago there is an association of Zope and Plone users in Italy. I note why a Python-based server stack needs local coordination, and which technical knots make it hard to sustain without a structured community.
Read moreThe proposed European directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions reopens a question that Article 52 of the European Patent Convention had already bounded. A technical reading of the text, the Parliament's amendments, and what is at stake for those who write software.
Read moreNotes after a day spent discussing open source in public administration: the problem is not how much a licence costs, but who holds the data formats, the code, and the continuity of the service.
Read moreThe Open Source Definition sets ten criteria a licence must satisfy for OSI certification. The approved licences sit along one axis: strong copyleft, weak copyleft, permissive.
Read moreThe dual-licence model of MySQL, Qt and Berkeley DB rests on the GPL's reciprocity. A technical anatomy of a 2002 mechanism.
Read moreThe questions put to the Pisa panel already have a measurable answer in 2002: filed licences, foundation governance and third-party market share, not opinion.
Read more
