Demystifying Free and Open Source Software

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace F/OSS in the Enterprise

Seth Galitzer (CIS)David White (CAPD)Kansas State University

Free Software – Richard Stallman

http://www.fsf.org/

Open Source Software – Eric Raymond

http://opensource.org/

Linux OS – Linus Torvalds

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/

What do we really mean?

Access to softwareAccess to codePermission for redistributionEverything else is philosophical debate

When we say “free”...

… as in ”speech”,not as in ”beer”

Just because it's free (as in beer)

It doesn't mean software

companies (or you) can't make money from it

Audience Participation Time

Tell us a little about yourselves...

Why not use F/OSS now?

FearOf

Change

Guess what

Users deal with change all the time MS Office ribbon interface

Mac OS Mobile devices Online apps

Things F/OSS doesn't do well (yet)

Personal Finance Video Editing Project Management GIS CAD Medical Sector

Things F/OSS does really well (so far)

The InternetDatabasesLots of other stuff

Strengths in general

Security (maybe also a weakness?)

ConsistencyOpen dataNo vendor lock-inYOU decide what is best

Desktop Applications: Office Productivity

Word/Excel/PPT/Publisher

Adobe Acrobat Pro

Publisher/InDesign

PDF Creator

Scribus

AbiWordGnumeric

Libre/OpenOffice

Desktop Applications: Internet – Web Browsers

Internet Explorer

Safari

Firefox

Google Chrome

Opera

Desktop Applications: Internet – Email Clients

Outlook

Mail.app

Thunderbird

Evolution

Claws

Desktop Applications: Graphics

The GIMP

Inkscape

Photoshop

Illustrator

Desktop Applications: Other

BansheeAmarokSongbird

ShotwellF-SpotdigiKam

3D Rendering

Media ManagementPhoto Management

Desktop Applications

=

The Cloud TM

Enterprise Applications: Outward Facing

LAMP Stack

Apache

MySQL/Postgres

PHP/Python/Perl

Linux

Enterprise Applications: Your Users

Digital Signage

Ditigal Asset Mgmt

Video Conferencing

Enterprise Applications: You

Monitoring

Helpdesk Ticketing

Enterprise Applications: Other

High Performance Computing (clusters)

The Cloud ™

The Bottom Line

F/OSS means choice

Resources

http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~sgsax/talks/demystifying_foss/http://kan.st/GE