OSS and Innovation

F/L/OSS is Central
to ICT Innovation
F. LETELLIER
fOSSa
Free/OSS & Academia Conference
Grenoble, 2009

François LETELLIER www.flet.fr

Who am I ?

In the software industry for 20 years
In F/L/OSS since mid-90's
One of the first individual members in
ObjectWeb
INRIA 2003-2007, ObjectWeb E.D.
OW2 board member, ELC member, fOSSa
SC
Freelance consultant on F/L/OSS strategy


Source Forge
500 top projects New technology N. for a platform Existing techno.

New market Radical innovation 1% <1%

Existing market <1% 10% No innov. 87%

Source: Innovativeness of open source software projects, K. Klincewicz 2005


About 10%-15% F/L/OSS
projects are innovative

The % is comparable in the
proprietary software industry


Patents and the Regress of Usefull Arts, A. W. Torrance & B. Tomlinson,
The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, Volume X, 2009


“Innovation is a driver of economic growth,
productivity, job creation and rising living
standards.
Innovation also promotes ICT competitiveness;
in turn, competition leads to better products,
improved consumer choice and, ideally, greater
ICT uptake.”
Source: European Task-Force on ICT Sector competitiveness & ICT uptake,
WG on innovation in R&D, manufacturing and services
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/taskforce/wg/wg3_report. pdf


structure

input output

R&D expenditure # researchers # patents filed
# start-ups # publications
Licensing


Source: European Commission, “Towards a European Research Area, Key Figures 2001 –
Special edition: Indicators for benchmarking of national research policies”


F/L/OSS =
Software Innovation Dark Matter ?

Hobbyists, part-time contributors
Volunteers or transparent efforts
Anonymous (collective)
Incremental
Free (gratis), Free (open)


The finger
pointing to
the Moon
is not the
Moon

FLOSS potentially saves the
industry 36%+ in software R&D
investment that can result in
increased profits or be more usefully
spent in further innovation

Study on the economic impact of OSS on innovation and the competitiveness os the information and
communication technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, 2006, UNU-MERIT, NL


0 03 0 06
2 2

2004

TELOCIM

TELOSYS AJAX FRAMEWORK
1994

ASK Corp. 1990
<1980 Relational Technology Inc. /
Ingres Corp. 1980


Make firm boundaries more
permeable to innovation

Innovation intermediaries

Partnerships between the
scientific community and
firms


Uses at home/soho
Builds on other works Sell substitutes Contributes as a hobby
Company
Research XYZ
Lab
Transfers
research results

Worldwide F/L/OSS Code Base
Shares R&D on Develops with
non core-business taxpayers money
Company Company Public
XYZ XYZ Administration

Uses in production process
Sell hw/sw complements Offers services
“publish”
According to a protocol: the license
“subscribe”


Geeky talk...

F/L/OSS is an
innovation “bus”
for our Information
Society

The existing base of quality FLOSS
applications would cost firms about
12 Billion Euros to reproduce
internally

This code base has been doubling every
18-24 over the past 8 years and this
growth is projected to continue for
several more years

Study on the economic impact of OSS on innovation and the competitiveness os the information and
communication technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, 2006, UNU-MERIT, NL


“The Power of Collaborative
Innovation is the answer to all the
big global challenges we are facing”

Tony Blair
World Economic Forum
Davos, January 2008


A Few OW Java Projects
Lomboz

(BPM / Orchestrat.)
(Java / XML APS)

Bonita, Shark
eXo Platform
(portal & CMS)
J2EE dev.

(mobile sync.)

intelligence)

Orchestra
(wiki, blogs)
SpagoBI

(workflow)
Enhydra

(business
Sync4j

XWiki
Eclipse Eclipse
Web TP SOA TP

JOnAS / PKUAS Celtix / Petals XService
(J2EE appserv) (ESB, JBI) (SOA / WS)

EasyBea
Tribe JAC JOTM / Speedo
ProActiv C-JDBC ns
(group
(AOP) ISTx (JDO
(RDBMS (EJB
comm.) e (transaction persist.)
clust.) Container)
(Grid) s)
Fractal ASM XQuare Telosys
(component (codebyte JORAM (XML OPS
Octopus (JMS, (XML / (AJAX)
mod) (ETL) man.) rewriting)
MOM) AJAX)

A Business Ecosystem Platform
The OW2 Value Proposal

Software
Technical Services Academi
a
Vendors
Systems
Forge Companie Integrators
Mailing lists, Wiki, etc. s Government
Individual
s
Community Services
Governance framework Produce
Users
Activities rs
Re-use Use / Integrate

Marketing Services Contribute Feed-back

Projects promotion
Brand and awareness

© OW 2 Consor t ium 2 0 0 8 www.ow2.org 22

« Open source projects involve
norms of proprietariness that create
conditions for innovation
-
they are institutions that facilitate
innovation, just as the guilds were »
Source: « From Medieval Guilds to Open Source Software: Informal Norms,
Appropriability Institutions, and Innovation, »

Pr. Robert P. Merges, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Nov 13, 2004


Associations
of Companies

Associations
of Individuals

Individuals


“There's no
business model
for F/L/OSS!”

Buy Get Build Sell
Contribute
F/L/OSS Bespoke
development
Use
Migrate
Lead
Patronize
Mutualize

Dual license
Hardware
Complement Subscription
Legacy In-house Service
Open Core
Software
Refactoring
Substitute Proprietary Freeware
Customize
publishing
SaaS
Externally
Superset Outsourcing funded
venture
Integration
Embedded
VAR


By 2012...
80% of all commercial
software will include
OSS elements
Source: Gartner Key Predictions for IT Organisations and Users in 2008 and Beyond,
January 2008


2010
Mainstream IT shops will
consider open source for 80% of
their infrastructure software
needs
Mainstream IT shops will
consider open source for 25% of
their business software needs

Source: Mark Driver, Gartner Research VP, The Gartner Application Development Summi


Innovation &Technology
from Academia & Gov’t

Share R&D Efforts
Faster technology transfer
Gather real world needs
Complement of activity in standardization bodies
Place of Research in the Innovation Ecosystem
Trust and professionalism ActiveXML
Virtuous cycle between fundamental research and industrial applications Carol
Global outreach C-JDBC
EC & France Funded R&D Projects
CLIF
RNRT Corsica, ITEA Pepita, RNRT Parol, RNTL Impact,
ITEA Osmose, IST Mocca, Asia ITC COSGov, ITEA S4All JORAM

Fractal

Rubis

ProActive
…

F/L/OSS & Academia
Promote FLOSS code production &
community growth as performance
metrics in your lab

Participate in public funded projects with
FLOSS dissemination strategies

Set up partnerships with FLOSS savvy
industrial players


The history of F/OSS can be traced back to academic
origins: distributing source code under a permissive
license was the de facto rule in academia in the 70's.
Since then, F/OSS became a wide spread paradigm
throughout the software industry, and its alignment
with academic goals tended to be forgotten.
According to fOSSa steering committee members,
software innovation is a value creation process that
needs a new joint collaboration of industries,
academia and F/OSS experts.


Take aways...

Innovation happens in and on F/L/OSS
F/L/OSS communities are innovation
intermediaries
Companies fund and leverage F/L/OSS
based innovations

F/L/OSS brings new degrees of liberty in
public and private funding for ICT R&D


Thank you for your attention!

FLOSS Strategy - www.flet.fr

OW2 - www.ow2.org

Green IT - www.greenit.fr

And make sure
to enjoy
sunny Grenoble!

OSS and Innovation

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