G O

O P E N

O 8

W H Y

W H A T &

F L O S S :

?- Some months ago, Heidi from the Competence Center asked me to give a keynote at Go Open on the topic of, "What is Free Software and why change?"- With the lazy assumption I started writing a simple presentation on the basics of Free Software and the benefits that it offers to the different types of producers and consumers.

Thanks Alex Brasetvik!

Thankfully, before I was anywhere close to being finished, I had the good fortune to correspond with Reidar Conradi -- a professor at NTNU in Trondheim, whose name I likely just horribly mispronounced. Øyvind Hauge, a student of Reidar's, had just completed a survey of Norwegian software vendors.

• GFDL-licensed image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Hovedbygget_ntnu.jpg• Image of Øyvind Hauge courtesy of Øyvind Hauge

Adoption of Open Source in theSoftware Industry

Øyvind Hauge, Carl-Fredrik Sørensen, and Reidar Conradi

Norwegian University of Science and Technology{oyvind.hauge|carl.fredrik.sorensen|reidar.conradi}@idi.ntnu.no

Abstract. Is OSS undergoing a transformation to a more commerciallyviable form? We have performed a survey to investigate the adoption ofOSS in the Norwegian software industry. The survey was based on an ex-tensive screening of software companies, with more than 700 responses.Analysis shows that close to 50% of the software industry integrate OSScomponents into vertical solutions serving all major business sectors. Inaddition, more than 30% of the companies using OSS components haveover 40% of their income from OSS related services or software. Theadoption of OSS in the software industry may be a precursor of theOSS adoption in other business sectors.

1 Introduction

Open source software (OSS) is predicted to transform ”into a more mainstreamand commercially viable form” [4], where companies play an increasingly moreimportant role. A premise for this transformation is increased commercial par-ticipation in the development of OSS products and increased use of OSS invertical domains. However, only a few surveys provide empirical findings whichsupport this assumed transformation, and most of these focus on the use ofdesktop tools and horizontal infrastructure like the LAMP stack. Is really OSSundergoing a transformation?

To answer this question we have performed a large scale survey in the Nor-wegian software industry. Our analysis shows that close to 50% of the softwareindustry integrate OSS components into vertical solutions targeted at customersfrom all major business sectors. In addition, more than 30% of the companiesusing OSS components have over 40% of their income from OSS related servicesor software.

Our results show that the adoption of OSS in the Norwegian software in-dustry is significant. The participation in the development of OSS is howeverlimited. Nevertheless, it is reason to believe that OSS is actually undergoing atransformation into a more commercially viable form. The use of OSS in thesoftware industry may eventually influence the rest of the market when soft-ware companies integrate OSS into their products. However, a lack of softwarecompanies adopting OSS may hamper the adoption of OSS in other sectors [15].

http://zak.greant.com/go-open

- Reidar sent me a copy of the paper.- I expected yet another survey of how my companies were using free software as a part of their infrastructure -- and didn't look at the paper for a few weeks.- Surveys on adoption are interesting, but free software is now so widely distributed that these kinds of surveys are becoming less relevant in many areas.- An amusing (and old) point in case is this:

c:>

c:> strings.exe c:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\ftp.exe | grep Regents

@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.

- Windows XP command line- Ported UNIX tool called strings- Haven't tested whatever the current version of Windows is

Use

The exciting thing that was very different about this paper was that the researchers focused on the issue of how many companies were delivering solutions (and generating revenue) based on free software.

Integration

of the 569 surveyed software development organizations deliver solutions that

integrate Free Software components.

46.9%

…

They also write: "In addition, more than 30% of the companies using OSS components have over 40% of their income from OSS related services or software."

of those distributing Free Software-based solutions earned revenue from this.

89%

Let me slice the data a different way ...

12% earned 100% of their revenue from

Free Software-based offerings.

Of this group …

Th

anks

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p:/

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!

- Knowing this, the interesting WHY related to free software isn't, "Why should you change?"- Instead, it is why has so much of Norwegian software industry already changed?- First, lets take a step backwards to discuss the simplest definition of Free Software

Photo CC BY licensed April 8, 2008 http://flickr.com/photos/lilbear/222903861/

Free Software

• First, FS is software and popular software at that. • Even if you aren't a programmer, you probably know a few pieces of Free Software by name.

®

• The Firefox web browser• half a billion downloads

®

• The Linux operating system, running roughly 50% of the servers on the Web.

Free Software

• The first part of Free software is more difficult to understand.

• People often assume that it means free as in a free lunch.

• Photo from http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/resource/27soup.htm

1. Run2. Study3. Modify4. Share

• Run the software for any purpose• Study and audit the software • To modify the software and make it more useful for you• The freedom to share what you have learned, copies you have made and to even share modified copies

Open Source=

Free Software

• For purposes of this talk, the two terms are equivalent• For my own convenience, I've mostly been using the term Free Software.• If I said both, it would make the presentation a bout five minutes longer

Open SourceIsn't a Bad Term

• In fact, it gets to a key requirement for Free Software.• To be able to study and modify Free Software, you must have access to the source code.• Without the source code, you can't exert the freedoms of free software.• There is another key limit on the freedoms of free software - distribution

Thanks Dick Kutz!

- These freedoms are significant, but their effect is limited by the distribution channels for software. - In a pre-Internet era, the cost of sharing software on digital media was roughly somewhere in the area of 100 000 NOK/MB to 10 NOK/MB, a factor of 10000. - In the early days of computing, it was much cheaper to distribute software as printed text than in its native form on digital media.- This same factor helped create the modern consumer software industry

• Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Punch-card-5081.jpg

The pre-Internet consumer software industry from the early-80s to ealy-90s became accustomed a market dynamic driven by demand vs. real and artificial scarcity:* Rapid growth in the number of personal computers.* A diverse computing market with, initially, many different operating systems and platforms.* A lack of computer programmers.

* A broad market that is accustomed to consuming knowledge goods as physical goods.* A product that is knowledge, but that can be treated as a physical good.* Software can be treated as a physical good, because the most common form of distribution is on floppy disk or CD-ROM.* As media becomes cheaper and cheaper s/w companies begin introducing artificial scarcity

Thanks http://opte.org!

The Internet changes all of this

Image from http://www.opte.org/maps/

1/10 000NOK/MB

- I pay … but I could pay less (nothing) for less convenient service.- The cost of sharing is so low that knowledge can actually be treated as knowledge again -- something that is not tightly tied to a physical form. Something that can be consumed -- so to speak -- without diminishing its value.- Phsical media is also dropping in cost, but it isn't broadcast media- Same cost to share

- Cheapest broadcast media- The radio is still 10 - 100x more expensive and doesn't allow sharing at the same rate

8 Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle

Large distributions like Debian are counted as one project. Popular projects such as

GNU Emacs are counted as projects of their own, little known or obsolete packages

such as the Zoo archive utility are ignored. Many of the projects that were included

in a Debian distribution around 1998 are not popular enough today (as stand-alone

projects) to be included in our copy of the Ohloh database.

And again, we get the best fit for the resulting curve for an exponential model

with an R-square value of 0.88.

Table 3: Model of number of open source projects added

Model R-square value

y = 1.0641e0.035x 0.884

where,

y: Total number of open source projects

x: Time from Jan 1995 to Dec 2006 in months

Figure 5 then shows the total number of projects and Table 4 shows the correspond-

ing model and its fit with the data. Again, we get the best fit for an exponential

model with an R-square value of 0.96. The doubling time is 13.9 months.

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

3500

4000

4500

5000

Nov-93 Aug-96 May-99 Feb-02 Nov-04 Aug-07

Time

To

tal N

um

be

r o

f P

roje

cts

Figure 5: Graph of total number of open source projects Release dates for a sample of 5000 FLOSS projects

Thanks to Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle from SAP Research

- This chart is from a study by SAP Labs researchers on the total growth of free software. Note the growth trend- This is no minor change. This is a fundamental rewrite of of what has value. - The Internet allows distributed collaboration between independent parties with little cost.- This is no minor change. This is a fundamental rewrite of of what has value. The dynamics of artificial and actual scarcity that drove the pre-Internet software industry are becoming irrelevant.

• Chart from http://www.riehle.org/publications/2008/the-total-growth-of-open-source/

If you understand this, you may think that all companies are changing because they are forward thinking visionaries. Any number of Norwegian software companies our visionaries, I believe that most Norwegian software companies are like other software companies around the world -- working to be profitable for the coming quarter and looking for tools to ease the development process, trying to run their businesses.

I think that some of the most common reasons that companies adopt and produce free software are as follow:

Reduced TCO

- Licensing- Support- Ability to choose an appropriate scale of support - self-support - local - … - IBM- 80% TCO French Tax Office

Market Requirements

Build for MySQL

Risk Management

Fewer vendor dependencies

Competition

- Disruptive or competive competition- MySQL- LAMP

Market Failure

- PHP- Nynosk + Saami OpenOffice.org

DistributesControl

AvailabilityCurrent Future Finding Collection

Indexing Storage

RelationshipsSocial Meaning

BrandSecurity

TrustPatronage

Personalization

Material Copies

Expertise

Better Than FreeEssay by Kevin Kelly

We each know something of the history of the printing press and how it is has been the a key tool for modern societies.

In our new era, the net is the printing press.Free software are the books.

It took the press 300-400 years to become commn around much of the populated world.

The net has grown into a monster that consumes ~ 5% of our global energy output within my lifetime.

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