F. Questier, Free Libre Open Source Software - Guest Lecture for the course Business Aspects of Software Industry of Prof. M. Goldchstein and Prof. T. Crispeels, with students from management science, computer science and civil engineering, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (17/04/13)

1. Free Libre
Open Source Software
Guest Lecture for the course
Business Aspects
of Software Industry
Prof. dr. Frederik Questier
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
17th of April 2013

2. This presentation can be found at
http://questier.com
http://www.slideshare.net/Frederik_Questier

4. Learning objectives
➢ What is FLOSS?
➢ How is it developed?
➢ What are possible business models?

5. Learning objectives
➢ What are good reasons to
➢ use FLOSS
➢ contribute to FLOSS
➢ as an
➢ individual
➢ organisation?

6. Contents
➢ Ethics
➢ Software model
➢ Development model
➢ Business models

7. Our social responsibility:
how open is the future?
Werken met portfolio's
04/10/05 | pag. 7

8. Early software days
➢ In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was
produced by computer science academics and corporate
researchers working in collaboration.
➢ Source code was generally distributed with the software
➢ Examples:
➢ IBM “SHARE” user group
➢ Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS)
Source code: if encrypt(password) == encryptedpassword, then login=1, end
Compiled code: 00100101110101001100110000111101100011000111000110101

9. Open Letter to
Hobbyists:
“Your sharing is
stealing”
Bill Gates, 1976

10. "The most fundamental
way of helping other
people,
is to teach people
how to do things better
or how to better their
lives.
For people
who use computers,
this means sharing
the recipes
you use on your
computer,
in other words
the programs you run."
10

11. 1980's: RMS defined
“Free Software”
➢ The freedom to
➢ use
➢ study
➢ distribute
➢ improve
the program
11

13. 1998: “Open Source” sounds
better as “Free Software”?

14. Different kinds of software
➢ Proprietary software (closed source – 'commercial')
➢ $$$
➢ Shareware
➢ x days for free, afterwards $
➢ Adware
➢ for free, with ads
➢ Freeware
➢ for free (small projects and often spyware!)
➢ Free Software / Open Source Software
➢ Free as in Freedom, not as in free beer
➢ OSS, FOSS, FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software)

15. Free Software Licenses
➢ The freedoms are guaranteed and enforced by licenses,
e.g.
➢ GNU GPL (General Public License)
➢ The 4 freedoms + copyleft (share alike)
➢ if binary offered, source code must be offered too
➢ (on request, at low cost)
➢ must stay GPL.
➢ BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution)
➢ Attribution
➢ No copyleft requirements for distribution
➢ BSD code often in closed source software (MS, Mac, ...)
➢ Apple Public Source License v2

16. 1991 comp sci
student
Usenet posting to the
newsgroup
"comp.os.minix.":
“I'm doing a (free)
operating system (just a
hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for
386(486) AT clones.”

17. 6117 persons, 659 companies
have contributed to Linux kernel

18. Linus Torvalds
“Making Linux GPL'd
was definitely
the best thing I ever did.”
18

19. "Congratulations, you're on the winning team.
Linux has crossed the chasm to mainstream adoption."
➢ Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forrester Research,
LinuxCon, 2010
“Linux has come to dominate almost every category of
computing, with the exception of the desktop”
➢ Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation Executive Director, 2011

20. Linux runs 92% of Top 500 Super Computers

21. Top 20 of 381 Linux Distributions
tracked by distrowatch.com

22. Copyleft Frederik Questier, Vrije Universiteit Brussel 22

24. Copyleft Frederik Questier, Vrije Universiteit Brussel 24

25. Copyleft Frederik Questier, Vrije Universiteit Brussel 25

26. “Halloween Document I” (1998)
Microsoft confidential memo:
➢ “OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue
and platform threat to Microsoft,
particularly in server space.
➢ Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and
free idea exchange in OSS has benefits
that are not replicable with our current
licensing model and therefore present a
long term developer mindshare threat.”
➢ FUD tactics can not be used to combat it.

27. “Halloween Document I” (1998)
Microsoft confidential memo:
➢ “Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very
dramatic evidence ... that commercial quality can be
achieved / exceeded by OSS projects.”
➢ “Linux and other OSS advocates are making a
progressively more credible argument that OSS
software is at least as robust -- if not more -- than
commercial alternatives. The Internet provides an
ideal, high-visibility showcase for the OSS world.”
➢ “OSS is long-term credible”

28. “Halloween Document II” (1998)
Microsoft confidential memo:
➢ “Linux represents a best-of-breed UNIX, that is
trusted in mission critical applications, and - due to
it's open source code - has a long term credibility
which exceeds many other competitive OS's.”
➢ “Most of the primary apps that people require when
they move to Linux are already available for free.
This includes web servers, POP clients, mail
servers, text editors, etc”
➢ “Consumers Love It.”
➢ “The effect of patents and copyright in combatting
Linux remains to be investigated.”

29. “Halloween Document VII” (2002)
Microsoft confidential survey results:
➢ 81% were at least 'somewhat' familiar with OSS
➢ 78% of those had a favorable impression of OSS
➢ 77% were at least 'somewhat' familiar with Linux
➢ 86% of those had a favorable impression of Linux
➢ most compelling reasons to support OSS:
➢ 40%: “Low total cost of ownership”
➢ 34%: “Alternative to Microsoft”

30. “Halloween Document VIII” (2002)
Microsoft confidential memo:
➢ Microsoft tries to develop an emergency-
response team to cope with Linux
conversion announcements

31. “Halloween Document X” (2004)
Microsoft confidential memo:
➢ Shows how Microsoft gave money under the
table to SCO to attack Linux with copyright
claims.
➢ 2007 & 2010: court ruled that Novell, not
SCO, is the rightful owner of the copyrights
covering the Unix operating system.
➢ Novell announced "We don't believe there is
Unix in Linux"

33. Open Source browsers dominate!

34. ➢ Compatible with MS Office
➢ Cross-platform (Win, Linux, Mac, ...)
➢ Open document Format (ODF)
➢ XML based, OASIS & ISO standard
➢ PDF & Flash export
➢ Bibliographic manager

38. Drupal meeting
Antwerp 2005

39. Drupalcon DC 2009

40. Drupal
Content Management Platform
➢ Powers 2% of websites
➢ USA White House, MTV UK, Sony Music, Al Jazeera, ...
➢ 1111 themes
➢ 9732 modules
➢ 7815 developers
➢ 1M registered users on drupal.org
➢ 2M/month unique visitors on drupal.org

42. ➢ Founded 2007
➢ $23.5 million venture capital
➢ 700 enterprise customers
➢ 109 employees
➢ quarterly revenue increased 300 percent
between the first quarters of 2010 and 2011

43. My personal example
43

44. 1998: how it started
➢ In a Belgian University
➢ many people were frustrated
by the inflexible, non-free elearning systems
they had to use
➢ Prof. dr. Thomas Depraetere
➢ starts the Claroline e-learning platform
➢ publishes it as Free Software
➢ got grants for it
44

45. 2004: fork 1
original author wants to break free
➢ Growing number of users
➢ outside the university
➢ requesting professional services
➢ Prof. dr. Thomas Depraetere
➢ starts a company, Dokeos
➢ can't call it Claroline, cause university has trademark
➢ can reuse software code, as it is Free !!!
45

46. 2010: fork 2
the community wants to break free
46

47. Automated Chamilo analysis
by Ohloh.net
47

48. 48

49. Yes, there is a
huge world of FLOSS communities
49

50. Build and Manage
a Community?
Werken met portfolio's
04/10/05 | pag. 50

51. Development
Linus Torvalds' style
release early and often
delegate everything you can
be open to the point of promiscuity
Linus' Law
"given enough eyeballs,
all bugs are shallow."
51

52. Book published under
Open Publication License
19 lessons for open source
development
Commercial development
= Cathedral style
Open Source development
= Bazaar style
52

53. 53

54. 54

55. The Cathedral and the Bazaar
about developers
1. Every good work of software
starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write.
Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
55

56. The Cathedral and the Bazaar
about users
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle
route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base,
almost every problem will be characterized quickly
and the fix obvious to someone.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is
recognizing good ideas from your users.
Sometimes the latter is better.
56

57. The Cathedral and the Bazaar
about development
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret.
Beware of pseudo-secrets.
18. To solve an interesting problem,
start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
19. Provided the development coordinator
has a medium at least as good as the Internet,
and knows how to lead without coercion,
many heads are inevitably better than one.
57

58. FLOSS characteristics
User friendly ← written by users for users
Cross-platform ← recompile source code
High development pace ← reuse of best modules
High quality ← peer review, reuse = survival of the fittest
High security ← peer review, Unix origin, modular, encryption
Copyleft Frederik Questier, Vrije Universiteit Brussel 58

59. 59

60. 60

61. Business ?

62. Gartner:
“24% of software market”

63. Study on Economic impact
Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation
and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, 2006, R.A. Ghosh, UNU-MERIT, NL.
et al., 287 pp.
➢
FLOSS applications are 1st, 2nd, 3rd in many markets
➢ High market penetration
➢ 65% written by individuals, 15% companies, 20% other
institutions
➢ FLOSS code base = $12B
➢ FLOSS code base = 131000 programmers years
➢ FLOSS code base doubles every 18-24 months
➢ Proprietary software firms only responsible for 10% of
total software developers, so no cannibalisation fear
➢ FLOSS can save companies 36% on R&D costs
➢ Unique (European) opportunities to create new software
businesses
Werken met portfolio's
04/10/05 | pag. 63

64. Study on Economic impact
Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation
and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, 2006, R.A. Ghosh, UNU-MERIT, NL.
et al., 287 pp.
Werken met portfolio's
04/10/05 | pag. 64

65. Study on Economic impact
Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation
and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, 2006, R.A. Ghosh, UNU-MERIT, NL.
et al., 287 pp.
Werken met portfolio's
04/10/05 | pag. 65

66. "Open Source: Why Freedom
Makes a Better Business Model"
Mårten Mickos, CEO MySQL, 2009
➢ FLOSS
➢ is
➢ not against ownership
➢ not anti-commercial
➢ not a business model
➢ but is
➢ a smarter way to produce the goods
➢ a smarter way to distribute the goods
➢ Differentiation!
Werken met portfolio's
04/10/05 | pag. 66

67. Success in FLOSS requires you to serve
➢ those who spend time to save money
➢ those who spend money to save time
-- Mårten Mickos, CEO MySQL
67

68. "Open Source: Why Freedom
Makes a Better Business Model"
Mårten Mickos, CEO MySQL, 2009
➢ Software freedom allows you to tap
into innovation power and network effects
otherwise not available
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69. Creating wealth by sharing
"Seven open source business strategies for competitive advantage”
John Koenig, IT Manager's Journal, 2004
“Companies continue to
waste their development
dollars on software
functionality that is
otherwise free and
available through Open
Source. They persist in
buying third-party
proprietary platforms or
creating their own
proprietary development
platforms that deliver
marginal product
differentiation and limited
value to customers”
Picture reproduced with permission
69

70. business models
www.flossmetrics.org 2009
Werken met portfolio's
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71. Werken met portfolio's
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72. Android

75. Possible effects on society and economy
Example: extremadura
➢ poorly developed region → economic revival
➢ based on FLOSS (customized GNU/LinEx)
➢ computer access for every student
➢ saved >18M € on initial 80,000 school computers
➢ total software cost: 1.08 Euro/PC/year
➢ bigger project
➢ stimuli for companies, centres for citizens
➢ economic revival -> European regional innovation award

76. Issues and criticism
about FLOSS
➢ Plethora of choice. Not easy to select best
➢ Compatibility issues, mainly with software that keeps formats secret
➢ Limited out of the box support in free downloads for:
➢ DRM'ed media
➢ Encrypted media (decryption of DVD needs a paid license)
➢ Patented multimedia codecs
➢ Sometimes limited support for exotic hardware
➢ Less games available
➢ “Copyleft licenses are viral” (Steve Balmer)
➢ “Linux is a cancer” (Steve Balmer)

77. Where to find more
FLOSS?
➢ Use your software package manager
➢ if your are using a Free and Open Operating System!
➢ Sourceforge.net
➢ Hosting and tools for >240K Open Source projects
➢ >2M registered users (contributors)
➢ Freshmeat.net
➢ >40.000 projects, mostly Free Software
➢ Google: x AND GPL OR “open source”
➢ Osalt.com : Open Source alternatives
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78. Where to find more
FLOSS?
➢ http://livecdlist.com/
➢ If you want to test software without installing
➢ http://www.theopendisc.com/
➢ High Quality OSS for Windows: Firefox, Openoffice,
Inkscape, Scribus, Clamwin, GIMP, Audacity, Filezilla, 7-
zip, PDFCreator, Freemind, ...
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79. Reflect about these questions
➢ Why would you use FLOSS
as an individual?
➢ Why would you use FLOSS internally
as an organisation?
➢ Why would you use FLOSS in your products
or contribute to FLOSS
as an organisation?

80. Why would you use FLOSS
as an individual?
➢ Freedom
➢ Quality
➢ Made by users for users
➢ Robustness
➢ Security & trust
➢ Fun - learn skills
➢ Use on old / many machines
➢ No costs
➢ Avoid piracy

81. Why would you use FLOSS
internally as an organisation?
➢ Less dependencies
➢ No data lock-in
➢ No vendor lock-in
➢ Many companies can give support
➢ Eternal license
➢ Platform independency (code can be recompiled)
➢ No license costs, low TCO
➢ No license management burden
➢ Security audits possible

82. Why would you use FLOSS in your
products or contribute to/as FLOSS?
➢ If selling licenses is not core of business model
➢ Non-paying users can be useful in different ways
(market share, feedback, contributions, ...)
➢ No need for anti-piracy and sales efforts
➢ Less development costs by reuse
➢ Join bigger networks, collaboration
➢ Foster external innovation
➢ Reputation
➢ No exclusion when clients require FLOSS

83. Joachim
Henkel,
2004

84. Open Society?
➢ "How open is the future?
Future Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios
based on Free & Open Source Software"
Book: Eds. M. Wynants & J. Cornelis (Crosstalks)
Open Courseware and
Open Scientific Publications
Chapter: F. Questier, W. Schreurs
Openly published under CCPL
See questier.com, crosstalks.vub.ac.be
Werken met portfolio's
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85. DARE
TO SHARE
Copyleft Frederik Questier, Vrije Universiteit Brussel 85

86. Qu
est
Th ion
ank s?
s!

87. This presentation was made
with 100% Free Software
No animals were harmed
@fquestie – http://questier.com

88. Copyright acknowledgements
➢ Screenshot http://www.chamilo.org/
➢ http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7546509093.html
➢ L’associazione studentesca S.P.R.I.Te. http://www.geektees.com/funny-shirts/software-is-like-sex-its-better-when-its-free-t-shirt/
➢ Cartoon Open Source Fish by openssoft
➢ Question mark CC-by by Stefan Baudy
➢ Photo Gears: Ralphbijker @ Flickr (CC-by)
➢ T-Shirt “Best things in life are free” by http://zazzle.com
➢ Photo Linus Torvalds: GFDL. Permission of Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, LINUXMAG.com
➢ The Cathedral & The Bazaar from http://diyda.org
➢ The Cathedral & The Bazaar [visual notes] #oped12, CC-by-nc-sa by giulia.forsythe
➢ Picture (open source business strategies) from IT Manager's Journal, may 2004, with personal permission from John Koenig
➢ Drupalcon DC 2009 copyright by “Chris” (Flickr)
➢ Screenshot Acquia
➢ Screenshot http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/
➢ Screenshot https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/
➢ Screenshot ohloh.net
➢ Screenshot Google
➢ http://www.graphs.net/201208/byod-in-schools-and-companies.html
➢ GNU Head Joseph W. Reiss Free Art License or the GNU GPLv2
➢ Share matches CC-by-nc-nd by Josh Harper