At Gioorgi.com, after working with a lot with software for over twenty years,  we have envisioned a clear idea about open source. This is the first article of a series tagged “opensource”: let’s start!

Richard Stallman Vision, based on GNU open source idea, is too radical from our point of view.

Stallman GNU License is based on a “copyleft” idea, which gives everyone the freedom to look at others’work, without taking credits for it. The license vision is very strict, so consulting is the natural option for an IT business based on GNU software, which is drived by Univestities, because of its basic freedom statement. Closed and paid software is still widely used, but open source is the key for the next revolution; let’see why.

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In the last seven months I have the need of sketching a bunch of interfaces, but I cannot find a valid tool. I was a Software Architect of a big huge project, busy also on other smaller projects as project manager.

I need a rapid way to sketch use cases, to pass them to a very young team.

Web interfaces are not easy to design, and we was in a very weird situation: the team was forced to use DAOs, with no O/R mapping tool. So I need also to map some interfaces to a database model, to help them building the model and the view classes

After some search, I ended up with MS Visio.

MS Visio is great, but too difficult to use, doing training is hard and so I must discourage its use. Worst, Visio costs a lot, and it is not included with the standard MS-Office Tools.

Visio offers only WinXP look&Feel, which is not the best for designing agnostic web interfaces.

Thank you to a friend of mine, I have the discovered the BalsamIQ Mockup project. Let’s see why it is a so good solution.

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