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Slide 1: G O O P E N O 8 F L O S S : H A T & W H Y ? W - 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.

Slide 2: 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

Slide 3: Adoption of Open Source in the Software 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 commercially viable form? We http://zak.greant.com/go-openthe adoption of have performed a survey to investigate OSS 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 OSS - Reidar sent me a copy of the paper. - I expected yet another survey of how my companies were using free softwaresectors. Intheir components into vertical solutions serving all major business as a part of infrastructure --more than 30% the the companies using OSS components have addition, and didn't look at of paper for a few weeks. - Surveys on adoption are interesting, but free software is now so widely distributed that these over 40% of their income from OSS related services or software. The kinds of surveys are becoming less relevant in many areas. adoption of OSS in the software industry may be a precursor of the - An amusing (and old) point in case is this: OSS adoption in other business sectors.

Slide 4: c:> c:> strings.exe c:WINDOWSsystem32 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

Slide 5: 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.

Slide 6: Integration

Slide 7: 46.9% of the 569 surveyed software development organizations deliver solutions that integrate Free Software components. … 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."

Slide 8: 89% of those distributing Free Software-based solutions earned revenue from this. Let me slice the data a different way ...

Slide 9: 12% earned 100% of their revenue from Free Software-based offerings. Of this group …

Slide 10: Thanks http://flickr.com/lilbear! - 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/

Slide 11: 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.

Slide 12: ® • The Firefox web browser • half a billion downloads

Slide 13: ® • The Linux operating system, running roughly 50% of the servers on the Web.

Slide 14: Free Software • The first part of Free software is more difficult to understand.

Slide 15: • People often assume that it means free as in a free lunch. • Photo from http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/resource/27soup.htm

Slide 16: 1. Run 2. Study 3. Modify 4. 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

Slide 17: 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

Slide 18: Open Source Isn'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

Slide 19: 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

Slide 20: 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.

Slide 21: * 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

Slide 22: Thanks http://opte.org! The Internet changes all of this Image from http://www.opte.org/maps/

Slide 23: 1/10 000 NOK/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

Slide 24: - Cheapest broadcast media - The radio is still 10 - 100x more expensive and doesn't allow sharing at the same rate

Slide 25: 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. 5000 4500 4000 3500 Total Number of Projects 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 Nov-93 Aug-96 May-99 Feb-02 Nov-04 Aug-07 Tim e Figure 5: Graph of total number of open FLOSSprojects Release dates for a sample of 5000 source 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/

Slide 26: 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:

Slide 27: Reduced TCO - Licensing - Support - Ability to choose an appropriate scale of support - self-support - local - … - IBM - 80% TCO French Tax Ofice

Slide 28: Market Requirements Build for MySQL

Slide 29: Risk Management Fewer vendor dependencies

Slide 30: Competition - Disruptive or competive competition - MySQL - LAMP

Slide 31: Market Failure - PHP - Nynosk + Saami OpenOfice.org

Slide 32: Distributes Control

Slide 34: Availability Current Future Finding Collection Indexing Storage

Slide 35: Relationships Social Meaning Brand Security Trust Patronage

Slide 36: Personalization

Slide 37: Material Copies

Slide 38: Expertise

Slide 39: Better Than Free Essay by Kevin Kelly

Slide 40: 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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