Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004:Beyond Free Beer: Is Using Open Source A Matter Of Choosing Software or Joining A Political Movement?
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004:Why open source folks just steal good ideas and make monkey copies
Why open source software is full of bugs and security loopholes
Why it is always best go with a single large provider of software
An overview of what it means to develop software as open source.
An explanation of the different approaches to open source development and support.
We are here to advise UK HE/FE about issues around open source software:
working in partnership with other JISC services, eg Legal and the Mirror services
visible at http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk
We have a staff of 1.25 FTE, comprising one manager (0.25), one communicator (0.5) and two researchers (0.2 and 0.3).
and makes all its material available under the GNU Free Documentation License
The debate about free/libre/open source software is:
Software for which:
the licensing conditions are usually intended to facilitate continued re-use and wide availability of the software, in both commercial and non-commercial contexts;
Open Source is a development methodology; Free Software is a social movement.
In English, free has two meanings in one word, whereas the French distinguish libre and gratuit. Many practioners use the shorthand FLOSS (FreeLibre Open Source Software)
has no secrets: the innards are available for anyone to inspect
is not privately controlled: so likely to promote open rather than proprietary formats
is typically maintained by communities rather than corporations: so bug fixes and enhancement are often frequent and free
is usually distributed free of charge (developers make their money from support, training, customisation and specialist add-ons; not marketing)
How many people in the audience can say with hand on heart that they do not use one or more of the following:
You already know the score.
Ray Lane, former Oracle executive, cites six problems with open source:
(ZD Net March 2004 http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/ Six_barriers_to_open_source_adoption.html)
"The free license for an open source package is just a fraction of the cost to deploy and maintain an application. The support infrastructure and assurance is less defined, and enterprises must proceed at their own risk. In many cases, an enterprise can rely on the open source community for more informal support, which won't be sufficient for mission-critical applications."
We can
but can we ignore the issue of support?
We can
Licensing caveats: does this impact on who can provide support?
ISV endorsements: will anyone admit to being able to help us?
Who will support our software?
Not many of these come from the software supplier
Ask yourself where you obtained support in each of these areas the last time you deployed a:
If we replaced Outlook with Mozilla Thunderbird, and Moodle with Blackboard, how much would change?
You partner with institutions doing the same sort of work, and share resources to solve common problems. Some contribute code, others documentation, others training.
Examples: Bodington (VLE): http://www.bodington.org/; SAKAI: (producing open source Collaboration and Learning Environment software); uPortal (portal framework): http://www.uportal.org/
As part of their work for you, they contribute to open source efforts and open standards; this makes them saleable
It does not matter whether they support open or closed source
Some of the biggest players will develop systems based on open source for you:
IBM support Linux on their hardware, and a lot of open source web-services software (which they contribute to)
Apple have an open source operating system under Mac OSX, which they support
Novell have based their future on Linux server and desktop support
Sun will deploy open source-based desktops and office suites, and work on open source educational software: http://community.java.net/edu-jelc/ and https://edu-jelc.dev.java.net
All these see a place for licensing some software under open source terms as part of their business.
Some companies offer their software under more than one license. MySQL is a good example. They are a reasonable-sized company with three main sources of revenue:
Online support and subscription services sold globally over the MySQL.com website to all users of the MySQL server.
Sales of commercial MySQL licenses to users and developers of software products and of products that contain software.
Franchise of MySQL products and services under the MySQL brand to value-added partners.
MySQL is available under GPL or commercial license
F/OSS projects tend to be classified into two extreme camps:
A genius programmer creates something which others like. (S)he controls pace and scope of future development. The genius has a complete idea of what the finished software will look like. Changes to the design during the build process are very costly, but the resulting software very polished and uniform.
A group of people get together to fill a gap and take on different tasks. As time goes by, some drift away and others join in. There is always someone to take over. Design is by consensus, with people working on topics that motivate them. Design changes are relatively cheap but with no over-arching the finished program can be patchy.
Most projects fall in between. Most of them have a recognised leader, to whom other members defer. A gentle system of leadership challenge and deposition assures the health of the herd is kept up.
Read http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ (Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar)
A charitable consortium which
The core Apache server does not get abused because it is in no-one's interests to do so.
An individual employed at Cambridge to do good stuff. He
The classic dual-licensing system. The MySQL company
The cottage industry example
The classic big brother project
OSS is not just about programming. The TEI defines guidelines for marking up text.
The TEI move is largely driven by a desire to be distributed and used widely.
The JISC-funded open source project to do RSS aggregation
The story from hell. A very well-respected academic writes a typesetting system. You can do what you like with it, but if you call it TeX it must always produce the same result.
the devil and deep blue sea: you can put a changed version out under another name, but then no-one knows what it is
the owner of the copyright has no interest in change, but would not release copyright
there is an accretion of associated software which has no overall direction
users groups set standards for themselves but cannot enforce them
But it remains in widespread use.
The FLOSS study (http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/) is the best known of a series of studies by economists on how FLOSS works.
There is a big archive of papers at http://opensource.mit.edu
The informal data in following slides is derived from presentations at the Oxford Internet Institute workshop on open source, June 2004.
The studies show that people join an open source project because
The desire to learn technical skills by joining an open project is strong. Typical reasons for staying in OSS are:
implementation of open standards might as well be done in a shared way to save costs
pyramidal consulting works: making software open means that your support team can be spared the 80% of questions which easy, leaving you the remaining 20%
needed improvement funding to open source ie economically efficient. Work on the things you care about
the revenue margin on licenses is 85%, on support 54%; eg IBM and Novell are now depending more on services than licensing
Agile is a conscious revolutionary movement: http://agilemanifesto.org/. It prefers:
|
Individuals |
over |
processes and tools |
|
Working software |
over |
full documentation |
|
Customer collaboration |
over |
contract negotiation |
|
Responding to change |
over |
following a plan |
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Procurement and support of software follows processes in which open source per se does not really matter
but open source software automatically gets many ticks on the score sheet
The open source movement is another element of the change to human-oriented lightweight software development
Free software is a social movement independent of open source
Last modified: 16th June 2004
