Introduction to Open Source Software

Jeremy Hayes

ARE WE TALKING ABOUT FREE SOFTWARE?

NO – OSS is not Free SoftwareRichard Stallman

American software freedom activist, hacker and software developer.

Founder of the Free Software Movement

Remember: Free is used as in “Free Speech” rather than “Free Beer”

SO, WHAT IS ‘OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE’?

Source Code Binary Code

• Firms seek to protect their Intellectual Assets– Trademarks,

Patents, Copyright, Intellectual Property Rights

• In the software industry… this means keeping your source code ‘Proprietary’

THE VILLAIN OF THE PIECE

“Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” (Winston Churchill)

• Microsoft is an example of ‘Closed Source’ or Proprietary Software

• You licence a copy of MS Vista or MS Office

• Microsoft fight hard against software piracy

• And why not? They spend millions on R&D…

• So what’s the problem?

BSOD

SO WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT OPEN SOURCE?

Linus Torvalds (Our Hero)

• Linux– Operating System– Torvalds posted code on the internet

and invited other developers to improve it.

– Tens of thousands of developers have worked on it (Open Source Community).

– Collaborative developments between software writers

– Worldwide workforce of enthusiasts– Surprisingly, the software developed is

stable enough to be used by commercial organisations

But surely unpaid‘volunteers’ couldn’t produce something so

useful?

‘Many eyes make bugs shallow’

Linux OS

– Has been adopted by end-users and by established hardware vendors such as IBM and HP which supply it as an option with their computers.

– Sony, Nokia, Philips Medical, JP Morgan are just some of the firms using Linux for mission critical activities.

– Market Share 2007• Servers: ~35%• Desktops: ~6%

Another useful Open Source Product

Mozilla Firefox• Netscape Navigator was

the dominant Internet Browser

• Lost Market Share during Browser War of late 90’s

• Released source code in 1998

• Led to development of Firefox

Browser War• Microsoft bundled (gave

away) Internet Explorer browser with Windows

• Cut off ‘air supply’ to Netscape

• US Vs Microsoft– Found that MS used its

monopoly position to crush opposition

– MS should be split into two companies

– Overturned on appeal

OSS in Munich• May 2003 - the city of Munich

decided to oust Microsoft Windows from the 14,000 computers used by local-government employees in favour of Linux, an open-source operating system.

• Although the contract was worth a modest $35m, Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, interrupted his holiday in Switzerland to visit Munich and lobby the mayor.

• Microsoft even dropped its prices to match Linux– a remarkable feat since Linux is

essentially free and users merely purchase support services alongside it.

OSS in Munich• Microsoft still lost

– The city did not wish to place the functioning of government in the hands of a commercial vendor with proprietary standards which is accountable to shareholders rather than to citizens.

• Modern governments generate a vast number of digital files.– From birth certificates and tax returns to criminal DNA records, the

documents must be retrievable in perpetuity.• So governments are reluctant to store official records in the

proprietary formats of commercial-software vendors. This concern will only increase as e-government services, such as filing a tax return or applying for a driving licence online, gain momentum.

• In Microsoft's case, security flaws in its software, such as those exploited by the recent Blaster and SoBig viruses, are also a cause of increasing concern.

OSS in Munich

• Government purchases of software totalled almost $17 billion globally in 2002, and the figure is expected to grow by about 9% a year for the next five years.

• Microsoft controls a relatively small part of this market, with sales to governments estimated at around $2.8 billion.

• It is a crucial market, because when a government opts for a particular technology, the citizens and businesses that deal with it often have to fall into line. (In one notable example, America's defence department adopted the internet protocol as its networking standard, forcing contractors to use it, which in turn created a large market for internet-compliant products.)

SourceForge

SourceForge Medical Science Apps

25

Commodification of softwareKnowing what to make open and when ...

Differentiating

Basic for the business

Commodity

Björn Lundell, University of Skövde, Sweden

technology life cycle

technology life cycle

technology life cycle

technology life cycle

“Commodification of software”Technology

Intra Inter Opencompany company

Cooperation

van der Linden, et al. Forthcoming in IEEE Software (www.itea-cosi.org)

GET READY FOR ‘OPEN EVERYTHING’

Peer Production • alternative model for organizing

production without reliance on markets, managerial hierarchies, property and contracts

• characterized by the decentralized accumulation and exchange of information

• potentially superior as a mechanism for discovering/applying human skill and knowledge to the creation of information resources.

• Includes;– collaborative authorship (e.g. Wikipedia.org), – user generated content and meta-content

(e.g. YouTube.com, Del.icio.us), – and various forms of ‘open innovation’

The Poster Children

Open innovation is:

• ‘The use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.

• Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.… This approach places external ideas and external paths to market on the same level of importance as that reserved for internal ideas and paths to market in the earlier era.’ (Chesbrough, 2005 p.1).

Ana Paula Valente Pereira, Founding Partner, WhatEver Consulting Group,and Eclipse Process Framework Committer

Types of Open Innovation

• Transforming to a new business by acquiring competence

• Open innovation as a problem finder• Open innovation as platform development

Peer Production Works When

• The object of production is information or culture, which keeps the cost of participation low for contributors

• Tasks can be chunked out into bite-size pieces that individuals can contribute in small increments and independently of other producers

• The costs of integrating those pieces into a finished product, including the leadership and quality-control mechanisms, must be low

- Tapscott and Williams (2006)

Facilitating Interactions Focus

Intellectual Property Innovation

Capability Configuration

Mediated

Solution Brokerage

e.g. Yet2.

Solver Brokerage e.g. InnoCentive,

NineSigma, YourEncore.

Direct

Solution Hierarchy

e.g. Proctor & Gamble’s Connect & Develop

initiative.

Solver Market

e.g. Threadless.

Can we peer-produce a service?• Developing and rewarding the community

– Reputation, Cash, Education, Entertainment • Interacting with the Community

– Network governance Vs organisational control– IP Management

• Developing and sustaining suitable business models– Revenue models– Using new services to enhance value offerings– Companies become aggregators of competence and components– Get it outside until the cost of evaluating it is more than doing it yourself– Competence required to shift from production to evaluation of

components

Beyond OSS, Why Should We Care?

• Where is the technology, information, systems etc?

• What does OI / PP have to do with “the interaction of information systems and the organisation”?

• What have we to contribute?• What should the focus of our enquiry be?• What theories / lenses are appropriate?

On strategy and perspective?

• For strategy we need organized information about the environment. Strategy has to be based on information about markets, customers, and non-customers; about technology in one’s own industry and others; about world-wide finance; and about the changing world economy. For that is where the results are. Inside an organization, there are only cost centres. The only profit centre is a customer whose cheque has not bounced (Peter Drucker, “The information executives truly need”, Harvard Business Review, 1995).

On strategy and perspective?o Need for inter-organisational / network perspective for

successo What about product (sequential) vs. service (reciprocal)

perspective?o Participation and governance by output-oriented control

o What about o openness, o value co-creation, o design for modularity rather than design by modularity, and o assumptions underlying architectures for participation?

o Participation and governance by social mechanisms?

Recommended Reading:• Chapter 1 and 2 from

“Understanding Open Source Software Development” by Joseph Feller and Brian Fitzgerald (Boole Q+1 005.1 Fell)

• Raymond, E. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/