Power of open source, Business perspective
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Data should be open and available for everybody and Open source software should be a part of the declaration of human rights. Europe is an ideal test-bed to start practising. Diverse initiatives are already going on.
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Power of open source, Business perspective
- 1. 13 December 2016 Danube Hack 2.0 1 ir. Dirk Frigne CEO Geosparc, invited by Power of open source, Business perception
- 2. 13 Dec 2016 5Danube Hack 2.0 Changing opportunities
- 3. 13 Dec 2016 6Danube Hack 2.0 Geomajas - Platform OSGeo project to facilitate the build of Spatial Data Infrastructure’s Started in 2006 Kul – DFC Software Engineering – Flemish environmental department JAVA based
- 4. 13 Dec 2016 7Danube Hack 2.0 Modern data acquisition ● Today abundance of Data Internet of ThingsPeople as Sensors
- 5. 13 Dec 2016 8Danube Hack 2.0 Big Data Challenge
- 6. 13 Dec 2016 9Danube Hack 2.0 Statement 1: Data should be open and accessible to everybody
- 7. Open Data Interoperability Open Source Open Standards (Open API)
- 8. 13 Dec 2016 11Danube Hack 2.0 Software becomes is a corner stone of our society
- 9. 13 Dec 2016 12Danube Hack 2.0 The speed of software adoption
- 10. 13 Dec 2016 13Danube Hack 2.0 Increasing dependency on data and software systems
- 11. 13 Dec 2016 14Danube Hack 2.0 Software Industry and Open Source
- 12. 13 Dec 2016 15Danube Hack 2.0
- 13. 13 Dec 2016 16Danube Hack 2.0 Statement 2: Open Source Software should become a human right
- 14. 13 Dec 2016 17Danube Hack 2.0 Governments and Open Source Why should Europe Bother?
- 15. Observations Open Source software is already used by a lot of almost all companies and organisations Open source & proprietary
- 16. OSS - Webserver (Apache, Tomcat, ...) - Android phone - Apple computer - Geoserver - Qgis Today, Open source is used everywhere
- 17. OSS
- 18. Observations: OSS used by many
- 20. Real entrepreneurs ● Definition of real entrepreneurs (personal definition): ● fools who think they can change the world ● and they really do!
- 21. Example of a Real entrepreneurs ● Mission to Mars of Elon Musk
- 22. Example of a Real entrepreneurs
- 23. Observations: new economy ● The world is changing ● Environmental challenges ● Migration challenges ● Evolutionary challenges ● Software is becoming extremely important ● More and more of the industry is based on software ● Data (and predicting the future) are the next big evolutions where software becomes involved ● Free access to (software and data) resources becomes a must have
- 24. 13 Dec 2016 27Danube Hack 2.0 99% USA: 261 B$ (2007)[1] USA is world leader in Software Industry open source generates value[2] [1] BSA [2] http://pt.slideshare.net/cdaffara/economic-value-of-open-source-14861646 Carlo Daffara
- 25. Open source software generates value ● But … ● Already a good and interesting trend, but still 13% of the total budget flows to US licenses So ... ● Europe should have the ambition to become also a major player in this industry
- 26. Europe SME Open source Industry
- 27. 13 Dec 2016 30Danube Hack 2.0 Some challenges ● New features – This is the nature of FOSS, no problem to find a sponsor to pay for the feature – Often a problem ● to pay for committing back to the project ● to find funding for the maintenance of the project ● Libraries used by a lot of other projects – FOSS used by FOSS projects, commit culture – Respect for the work of others
- 28. 13 Dec 2016 31Danube Hack 2.0 The economics of a community● A community can’t be managed => A community should be INSPIRE’d :-) => Based on volunteers ● There are several ‘leaders’ helping growing the community => not a single individual => often people with a lot of experience in their field => being respected for their input (my2c) ● Within OSGeo we promote a do-ocraty – This doesn’t mean you don’t need a platform to succeed – This doesn’t mean principles of democratic handling are not important – Makes it difficult to manage – Makes it ‘fun’ to participate
- 29. 13 Dec 2016 32Danube Hack 2.0 Respect for diversity
- 30. 13 Dec 2016 33Danube Hack 2.0 Respect for diversity ● Community Officer – wants to solve his problem for a zero license cost – Incentive to contribute: provide software that makes his live easier – Payed by tax payer ● Academic researcher – wants free access to the software – Incentive: to use in his academic research, or for his academic research – Payed by tax payer
- 31. 13 Dec 2016 34Danube Hack 2.0 Respect for diversity ● Coworker in commercial company – wants complete freedom to use software to solve his problem without worrying usage obstacles – Inventive to contribute: use software that makes his live easier / commit back because it returns respect and is fun – Payed by the commercial company / users of the services - products ● Entrepreneur (startup) – wants to have access to free resources to build a business – Incentive: with the option to scale and earn a lot of money – Risks his own time and money + shareholders money
- 32. Conclusions Statement 1: Data should be open and accessible to everybody Statement 2: Open Source Software should become a human right ● We should have the ambition in Europe to create a strong software eco-system, based on FOSS. ● INSPIRE is an interesting scale to test this for the whole industry. ● Work is already in progress to evolve in this direction (SMESpire initiative, AR3NA initiative, OSGeo consortia …) ● Political awareness should be raised that open source could be an important leverage to catalyze this software industry
- 33. Thank you for your attention
Editor's Notes
- Thank you JRC, for the invitation, to give me the opportunity to share my vision about the power of open source from a business perspective. Before I start with the topic, I think it is important to give some context about myself, as it will explain the motivation and the drive of the message. So let me quickly introduce Geosparc (http://www.geosparc.com), which is the company that pays me for the things I do. The reason of existence for Geosparc is to provide organisations with the best products to build Web and cloud based GIS Solutions. We exist since 2008. The founder is me, which leads me to the next introduction: who am I.
- Actually, I am an electronic engineer. The function of an electronic engineer is to design and create functional systems where electricity is used as a basic carrier to handle communication, messages, sound, graphics and automation. From the very start I was passionated by software and computer hardware, so I focused on Software Engineering. As the world is growing very fast in that direction it seemed to be a good choice and still is.
- I always had a passion to observe a real world problem and try to describe it in some models. Programming languages where just fantastic instruments for this purpose. Methods improved, software engineering became more and more mature.
- So I worked on several solutions, founded a couple of companies, and was lucky to be respected for the work we did resulting in some recognitions along the road.
- Now, switch to the topic of this presentation, about open source (for the geospatial domain), more specific the business perspective of it. Consider the changes occurring in the word of mapping the last 50 years. There is a need to integrate all these digital layers into nice looking maps, giving the ability to the users to act on the represented objects and focus on the tasks they are supposed to execute.
- This brings us to the Geomajas platform (http:www.geomajas.org). Probably one of the reasons I was called a Geo-IT expert is because I am the spiritual father of Geomajas, which is an important result of all the hard work we've done to make it easier to create SDI nodes that can support eGovernment operations. Geomajas is an OSGeo project since 2010 and was used in several >1M EUR software projects
- Back to the world of creating maps. Maps are the representation of data, a lot of data. And modern techniques of acquiring data are coming every day: From drones over satellite, capturing areal images over cars shooting a mass of photo's. But it doesn't stop here. Actually, every car is acting as a sensor capturing data about the density of traffic, directions of traffic flow. Actually, all the sensors involves in the Internet of things (IOT) act as data sources that deliver information we want to map. Today every individual acts as a living sensor, sending his profile data massively to the Internet, providing a big amount of data ready to be explored, to improve our current processes and predict the near future and behavior of the people.
- All of the above leads to a big data challenge, where we are overwhelmed with data, and intelligence is needed to distill out of all this date the right information you need to know. So Data becomes more and more important as a (public) source of information to predict and support actions in our society. So Data should be a common good that everybody should access to. And this is why data should be open and accessible to anybody, not just to some big companies who managed to create big applications to get all this data. Which brings us to software
- Statement 1: Data should be open and accessible to anybody, so the society can use it to organise and improve itself. The accessibility and free availability of data should become a human right, so that every human can develop himself based on the common know-how available in all the online data rescources.
- When we talk about (open) data, we often talk about interoperability. Open data is a requirement for interoperability between different systems, but it is not sufficient. We also need open standards, so systems are able to talk to each other. Governments explain that also open API’s are necessary, but I don’t agree. What you really need is the third pillar and it’s called open source.
- Software has become an important building block of our society. Human beings and human society is becoming more and more depended on software.
- Software is growing rapidly to be embedded in every object (the internet of things as we call it – or IOT) This is a graph of the number of new open source projects in time. The vertical axis represents the number of new open source packages, the horizontal axis is the time. This is the most recent graph I found, but I am interested in more recent data – please send me the url if you find one.
- So let’s talk now about the software industry and open source.
- Many lives depend on the execution of software, think about medical devices, but also navigation systems and automatic cars and robots. In this example, I don’t want to be in this car if the software is not reliable. The failed landing of the last Mars mission from ESA https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/20/mars-lander-lost-signal-one-minute-before-landing-esa-confirms Proves that software sometimes failes. And the Volkswagen emmision Scandal proves that fraude can be embedded in software (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal). This brings us to my important second statement:
- Statement 2: Open Source Software should become a human right. Certainly in the case where software is used to support the public services in a country, or supports the decisions of the government: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ Article 21. (1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. (2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country. (3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
- This is a strong statement, and to make it work, we need political action. So let’s talk about why a government should bother to take action. Let’s consider Europe, because this is our local laboratorium, but it applies to all the governements
- Let’s start with the observation that open source software today is used by (almost) all organisations and companies. Even the companies who uses closed source software to protect their IPR.
- Just a couple of examples to make it obvious: Everybody who uses a webserver: a lot of chance you use Apache or Tomcat Or if you are using a smartphone (Android phone) Even the Apple operating system is based on open source (Mac OS X based on Berkley unix kernel) And in the domain we are active: Geoserver, Qgis,
- This is a slide of only the OSGeo open source projects.
- But in reality, all companies are using open source software.
- Just start a thought experiment: I present you some logo’s of companies that are strongly depended on software: Can you name me a couple of European companies? Observation: Almost no big software companies in Europe Although industry is large, also in Europe Many examples of US based companies No big players in Europe (SAP, Nokia and TomTom being the bigger players) Although: a lot of SME's producing software How can we change this?
- We need to change our attitude, we need to accept our diversity and the typical culture with all here advantages: Definition of real entrepreneurs I have a definition for a real enterpreneur: (personal definition): fools who think they can change the world and they really do! And I will give you an example of a real enterpreneur:
- Elan Musk has a vision, and the ability to moilise people to execute the vision.
- In Europe we need this to, this is a modes example on a much lower scale, but it is by having these initiatives we will learn also to become great! Think global, act local.
- Some facts: In Europe: 99% off all the industries are small and medium businesses. The software revenue is a market of 261B$ in 2007 (BSA report) It is a fact that open source generates value. Based on these elements we should be able to create a big software industry in Europe. Based on open source. Europe should consider this as an opportunity to become strong in this domain. Making open source a human right will help the citizens of Europe and the European software industry.
- The responsibility of the enterpreneurs is to learn to work together and form a strong consortium. Just like the small fish defeat the shark in the film finding nemo
- Of course there are still a lot of challenges
- But with all the experience we have based on all these vibrant communities (such as OSGeo http:www.osgeo.org) we have a big advantage and starting point. A community just acts as a small government, focus on one specific item that hold together every member of the community: the interest in making all the geo spatial software open and available.
- In such a community, everybody is respected for his contribution. Nobody is on the top and is the leader of the community. Everybody is depended on everybody else, on an equal basis. Everybody has his role to play.
- Everybody has his own agenda, and his own interests to contribute, and everybody get’s out what is important for him/her. But what is important: most of the time there is an enormous energy going on, and everybody has the experience that it is actually really fun.
- So as a conclusion: data should be open and available for anybody, and open source software should become a human right. Europe is the right size to experiment with these concepts and support the open government, but also create a strong economy based on co-creation and open principles. Several experiments are already going on, and we should work further on them to improve our lessons learned. Thank you for your attention!
- Any questions?