Open Nordic 2008 NTNU

Software Engineering group Norwegian University of Science and Technology Reidar Conradi, Øyvind Hauge, Letizia Jaccheri, Eskil Sund www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/su / www.research.idi.ntnu.no/oss Open Source Research at NTNU

Why is this interesting for you?

Experience from industry related research

What should we focus on in future research?

Experience from education

What should students know about Open source?

multi-faceted OS research … political social sciences software engineering … learning psychology juridical & economical …

research activities Focus on company based software engineering, reuse, and OTS ITEA COSI project Case Gentoo Education Open source and Art Case Open standards (ARM) Open source survey OTS surveys

Open Source Software (OSS): origin and now

1650?: free flow of ideas begins in scientific community.
1967-1977: DoD/DARPA’s development of Arpanet / Internet TCP/IP protocols -- open and distributed development, anti-authoritarian “ counter culture” .
1978-85: Openness spread through Berkeley’s adaptation of Unix, with built-in Internet protocols and generous BSD licenses with all source provided.
1985: Free / Open software: int’l movements (Stallman).
2000: Social computing and creative commons for knowledge work – standardized formats for “zero-cost”, digital information: Wikipedia, the world is ”flat”, ...
2008: 1,5 billion Internet users, 3 billion w/ mobile phones.

OSS issues

200.000 OSS “projects”, each w/ net community lead by original provider, co-developers, code integrators, users, ...

eZ has had 2.3 mill. downloads, Adobe Acrobat 500 mill.

COTS and OSS: many similarities.
Over 30 portals with domain-specific COTS/OSS software.
New way of making open ICT standards : rough consensus and (two implementations of) running code.
Over 50 licensing schemes.
Business model: open and shared source supported by a cooperative foundation; separate payable services. Ex. Apache web server.
Success criteria: for provider, for code integrator

OSS roles

OSS (component) provider: Leads a “gone-open” software project, ex. Linus Thorvald & Linux
OSS participant: assists the provider in more technical work – the OSS “idea” of joint, altruistic work
OSS integrator: makes new software system by re-using OSS software/components
OSS user: may download “free” (not open) binary software on a private computer, e.g. Acrobat
OSS customer: specifies and finances new software, later as OSS?

OSS skills: technical, commercial, organizational, creative

Software reuse, components, OTS = Off-The-Shelf (COTS, OSS)

Software reuse: by code libraries in repositories
Develop for reuse: make assets / components
Develop with reuse: CBSE using these assets
Advantages of CBSE, own or OTS components:

Cheaper, earlier & better software
Spread novel work practices & software architectures
Re-user communities for experience mgmt/support

Non-technical obstacles: price/licensing, ROI, (re)negotiate rqmnts, less “control”, too “radical”

NTNU: CBSE and OTS studies

1990-98: EU projects (e.g. REBOOT) on internal software reuse ; hard!
2000-: New global “bazaar” of COTS/OSS
2003-08: Industrial surveys on OTS reuse Norway, Germany, Italia, China Developer panels and follow-up interviews with qualitative data to give insight
Research instruments and raw data: “gone open” – please repeat our studies!!

NTNU: Roles in OTS-based reuse

From forthcoming paper by Jingyue Li et al., IEEE Software 2008

NTNU: learnings on OTS reuse

1a. Ask colleagues to find “right” component;

1b. Otherwise search the net, download 3-6 candidates for evaluation and selection

Summary: no formal selection method, selection can be hosted by most lifecycle processes, need component “uncle” for maintenance, “quality“ not a problem
Problems: effort estimation, integration, debugging, customer non-participation, licensing, company policies, how to classify components (ontologies)

Action Research on Gentoo OSS

PhD by Thomas Østerlie
Gentoo: OSS release management tool, scripts, 300 co-developers in 40 countries
Worked as co-developer for two years; distributed, participative, “in-process” field study
Remote debugging: mutual guesswork, as “sense-making”, informal processes
Data: diaries, emails, IRC/version logs

ITEA COSI project

Industry and academia

Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden

2006-2008
Understand and benefit from Open source software and development practices

Shared internal development

Norwegian COSI

ICT Norway

eZ Systems, Keymind, Linpro, NTNU

Budget about 18 MNOK

Sponsored by NFR: about 8 MNOK

Adoption of OSS in the Software Industry

About 50% reuse and integrate OSS components

Into all kinds of products
To all kinds of customers
Large companies more often than small
Consultancy companies more often than software houses

15-20% participate in OSS development

About 5% provide their own OSS products

Motivations for adoption of OSS

Simplify developer’s job

High availability of information, components and their source code
Simple procurement

Reusable software assets

Increase productivity
Increase quality

Reduced costs

Reduced development effort
No licenses fees

Identification, Evaluation and Selection of OSS

Evaluation until something ”good enough” is found
Tested further through test integration and prototyping

Informal knowledge driven process based on:

Previous experience
Recommendations
Informal searches
“ Surveillance” of the OSS community

Open standards and ARM

Cooperation between ARM Norway and NTNU (half dozen master’s since 2002)

A master’s project (single person one year)

development of a multi-platform graphics application.
Used ARM’s platform for embedded graphics.

Open standards and ARM

Open Vector Graphics (OpenVG)

OpenVG is a standard for embedded systems
Targets: Map applications, scalable user interfaces, e-book readers, games and SVG viewers

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Open format for describing vector graphics in XML which provides uniform representation of 2D graphics.
SVG Tiny – A mobile profile targeting light weight mobile devices

Open standards and the application SVG Tiny application Application size ~20.000 LOC Open Standards PNG JPEG XML11 SMIL XLINK DOM3 Other W3C standards... PC platform ARM platform

Results from application development and porting

Ease of adoption

OpenVG is an open standard, thus royalty-free.
Specification and reference implementation publicly available. No project expenses.

Performance

OpenVG allows for efficient and creative implementations.
Efficient SVG Tiny viewer achievable on a regular PC and ARM platform.

Conformance

OpenVG conformance tests assure correct implementations.
Consistent and correct behaviour of application on PC and ARM platform.

Portability

OpenVG API abstracts and de-couples application from hardware .
High degree of application portability. Less effort

Cases: Art and open source software

Main objective SArt

to propose, and assess, and improve methods, models, and tools for software development in art context

Cases (sourceforge)

The Open Digital Canvas Project
Sonic Onyx Project (mobile phones)
The Flyndre Project

SArt: art and open source software

Premiered art competition The Open Wall Open Contest

http:// mediawiki.idi.ntnu.no/wiki/sart /

Deadline 15th September
The prize award will take place at this year’s festival for art and technology in Trondheim, Trondheim Matchmaking, the 16th - 18th of October.
1st prize 2000 €, 2nd prize 1500 €, 3rd prize 1000 €

NTNU Resources