Open source: can you ignore it?

Open source:
can you ignore it?

[email protected]

Lane Department of Computer Science &

Electrical Engineering

Feb 5, 2007

Roadmap

What is open source?

Where did it come from?

Why can't you ignore it?

Anthropologically: has been with us for centuries

Economics: too powerful to ignore

Legally: no future without it

Technical: unavoidable

So what social institutions will be adopted to handle it?

What isn't open source

The cathedral

typical closed development: source code is usually not provided (e.g. M'soft)

or, source code is available: between releases development is restricted to exclusive group (e.g. GNU Emacs, GCC)

The Bazaar

Develop code over Internet, in public view.

Exploits Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"

Everybody Loves
Eric Raymond

Roadmap










It was an accident

It was a time after

AT&T had built a
national communications grid

It was a time (1965) when

Gov. regs stopped AT&T building & selling computers

So AT&T lost control of how their wires were used

While customers wanted their computers to connect

Software uncopyable (or, nowhere to copy it too)

Everything only runs on 3 Burroughs 91a computers in the world

Where did it come from? (2)

Packet switching

No centralized control

Hippy-ness

Do anything, rush round
and tell everyone about it

MIT lab : time-sharing,
file-sharing, everything sharing

California home brew computer club

Wild experimentation, insane successes

Where did it come from? (3)

AT&T research rose to the challenge

Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie

Build a platform independent operating
system (UNIX). Convinced AT&T to
give it away for free

UNIX source widely used at universities

Read like Shakespeare

This was before...

Bill Gates or Steve Jobs: no one had
made $$$ from software

Gov. Regs relaxed on AT&T- who tried to
take back control of their product

Ownership of ideas:
the MIT experience

LISP machine technology

Developed in an open, sharing environment

Commercialized by two companies

LISP machines Inc. (sharing caring guys)

Symbolics (who got very serious about intellectual property, I.P. restrictions, locking it up, selling it)

One MIT hacker, Richard Stallman, rebelled

In all-night marathons, would reverse engineer the Symbolics updates and give them away to LISP machine Inc

Eventually, he gave up (workload)

But it taught him the power (danger) of standard licenses.

Stallman's printer and the birth
of the Free Software Foundation

Later on, working on UNIX distributions

Stallman wanted to fix a printer driver

Told that the source code was proprietary no access for Stallman

Oh no, thinks Stallman, not again.

UNIX going the way of LISP machines!

Set out to build his own UNIX

Stamped with the GNU public license

Right to share source, forever onwards written into the code

Stallman never
released a LINUX

Starting with portable C compiler (GCC),

Built a large set of free tools (e.g. EMACS)

But building the core the operating system
(the kernel) defeated the FSF

Enter Linus Torvalds

Wrote a kernel from scratch

Using the simplest design possible

Released it on the net, asked for contributions

Herded a large community updating it

Everybody Loves
Eric Raymond

What do we get?

Databases and file systems

Application servers

Portal servers

Programming languages

Frameworks

Components for application development

Development and test environments

Business process and workflow management

Web services

Middleware and enterprise integration

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)

Rules engines

ETL, data management and transformation

Search machines

Roadmap









O.S & Anthroplogy

OSS is inexplicable... or is it?

Remember the gift economy? Very old

Blood banks

Organ donors

Sharing of food in a hunter-gatherer society,

safeguard against failure of any individual's daily foraging.

Politician gives patronage and favors in exchange for support

Pacific Northwest Native American potlatch ritual,

leaders give large amounts of goods to followers

By sacrificing accumulated wealth, leaders gain honor.

Roadmap









OSS is very useful
(says the Europearns)

Information economy is (around) 10% of the GDP
and >50% of economic growth

What can we do to best boost that 10%?

Who writes software?

65% by individuals (often, working for a company)

15% by software firms (e.g. Microsoft)

20% by other institutions

Existing OSS base would cost Euro 12B to reproduce.

This code base is doubling every 18-24 months

Saves industry 36% in software R&D

Europe: Euro 1.2B in OSS development + support (560,000+ jobs),

Euro 263B in revenue / year

More OSS = more innovation = more jobs = more $$$ for everyone

Need New Business Paradigms

Build a playground where others can play

Make the playground useful

Charge small levies

Make it easier for others to join and change

Than leave and start their own

E.g. Redhat business model : $328M in the bank

Give away the operating system (LINUX-based)

Sell training, 24/7 support service in seven languages

E.g. IBM, $250M spend on open source research

Gives them an in to previously closed markets

Can lever that to sell other products

Mozilla Foundation: $72M profit in 2006

From kick-backs from click-throughs

Shocking idea

Build tools people actually want to use

And you'll be rewarded

Second Life

Multi-user virtual reality

Members by real estate where they
can build.. anything

$1,765 for 16 acres

$295/month maintenance

Members buy linden dollars

which can be exchanged for $US

Shops are built, goods are displayed and sold

Linden charges transaction fees

Rock stars do performances there

Corporations build heaquarters there

Oh yeah, and you can fly

Levering the OSS advantage

Second Life viewer recently made open source

Mods being built for (e.g.) disabled access to Second Life

Development cost=$0

Chumby: the anti-iPod

Open source software on a PDA

Wireless,handheld LINUX

Open and hackable

Adapt as you like

Hardware harder to imitate

Why bother?

Why not instead create some
fee-for-use product on the CHUMBY

Faster time to market

OSS is economically dangerous

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php

Out and out lie perpetuated by closed-source companies

Who see their market share eroded

Every serious thinker in the field discusses
how to evolve the concept of ownership

Not to abandon it

An end to

Perpetual copyright

Using the patent system to stifle innovation

Roadmap









O.S. & Legal

We need to change our legal
and patent system.

Prior to 1975

Not everything got patented

Not everything got copyrighted, in perpetuity

Patents weren't used as weapons in the FUD wars

Copyright was judged by humans,

not controlled by software written by the producers

Why do we need new laws?

We need freedom to change.

Pablo Picasso: "To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture."

Stallman's four freedoms:

0 The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

1 The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.

2 The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

3 The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

What would those laws mean?

Free to use, free to give, free to get back improvements

Richard Stallman -

Your software must be equally usable in an abortion clinic, or by an anti-abortion organization.

These political arguments belong on the floor of Congress, not in software licenses.

Some people find this lack of discrimination extremely offensive!"

The threat

The Internet's very design built a neutral platform

upon which the widest range of creators could experiment.

Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to "tame" the Internet

Stifling the creatitvity that created it

Transforming it from an open forum for ideas

into nothing more than cable television on speed

Innovation, stifled, directed from the top down,

increasingly controlled by owners of the networks,

holders of the largest patent portfolios,

and, most invidiously, hoarders of copyrights.

Paradise Lost?

But surely the Internet is more
that just a massive mall where
we can only buy-buy-buy

Albeit with trivial customization.

More things in heaven and earth
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Range of options offered on the web much less than range of possible options

Which of these narrowly defined options will I force you to buy?

My SCION could have come in many colors. But can my new car...

Fly?

Mate with other cars I like to auto-construct new ones?

Where do we practice unfettered imagination?

Free access to Resources? Dangerous?

A mature society has institutions that protects and secures dangerous resources

Guns have gun cabinets

Forests have conservation laws

Plutonium and anthrax viruses are locked away (we hope)

The same mature society allows free access to other resources

Shared language

Telephones, roadways

Publication of scientific theories

An open press where ideas are discussed

Free access to Resources? Useful!

Do we want centralized control of all resources?

Single point of failure

e.g. 2005: national power grid crashed by one tree on one power line

Soft resources are unique

using them does not exhaust them

information can be shared without being halved

the more we work on ideas, the more ideas we have.

Why OSS teaches the rest of us

Creativity always builds on the past

We build, not anew, but on top:

sometimes tearing at roots, often not

Free resource are crucial to innovation and creativity

Shared language, press, roads, power, phones,
published scientific theories....

e.g. Packet switching networks: no central controller

just connect and go, all packets treated equally

a neutrality that opens access to all

We are building more (digital) artifacts now than
at any time in the past.

How can we assure that the future can access the now?

Lawrence Lessig & the
Creative Commons

Lessig lobbies against current copyright law

But not against copyright law

False dicohotomy:

Patents/protection vs

Open source/no control

If the current copyright law
too restrictive

Write new licenses

Choosing a license

Simple interface

Two versions of
license

Human (short)

Legalese (v.long)

Roadmap









Technical

Can you make a resource available?

Yet keep it private at the same time?

Technically, maybe not

Stallman's empty passwords

Koza, data miners, electrical circuits

Bunny's hack of the X-box

Stallman's empty password

Stallman hacked the password control
of one system to tell users

I see you chose the password starfish. I suggest that you switch to the password carriage return. It's much easier to type and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.

At most, a fifth of the users on these machines switched to empty string passwords

Including Stallman

Koza's patent
learner

Repeated for 21 previously duplicated patents

Take a circuit design with a known I/O function

Fire off a genetic algorithm to reproduce the I/O, but using different circuitry

So, by describing something, you make it possible to break the patent.

Hacking the X-box

Andrew bunnie Huang

Reverse engineering intellectual property

Inducing business-model busting modifications to hardware

e.g turn an X-box into a cheap powerful x86 LINUX PC

And what is he doing now?

Conducting an experiment on making $$$ from open source business models

Founded Chumby Industries

Tension between privacy & availability

If it is accessible, then it can be pried open

By Stallman, Koza, bunny, etc etc etc

Surprising advantages to making
it open and available

More developers

More community

More profit!

So what about the sharp sticky things?

Sure, some things must be secured:

Guns need guns cabinets

We need social institutions to punish inappropriate access or abuse of digital resources.

But it's wrong to treat most
ideas like anthrax

Most of the digital material being locked away is:

Not radioactive

Not infectious

Not explosive

Companies need to realize

They have a choice how they use their scare intellectual resources

Ineffectal complex methods to lock up I.P.?

Or building new resources that attack larger markets?

So, can you ignore Open Source?

Anthropologically:

has been with us for centuries

Economics:

too powerful to ignore

Legally:

no future without it

Technical:

Unavoidable, for shared resources


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Open source. Can you just ignore it?

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Technology

Open source: can you ignore it?