1. Perspectives on “Open”
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media
Open Courseware Consortium
May 4, 2011

2. I started out as a computer book publisher

6. What We Really Do At O'Reilly
 Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge
 Amplify their effectiveness by spreading the
information needed for others to follow them.
 Our goal: “Changing the world by spreading the
knowledge of innovators.”

7. Some Examples
 Created our first ebook - 1987
 First books on Linux and Perl - 1991
 First book on the internet - 1992
 Wrote about WWW when there were only 200
web sites - 1992
 Launched first commercial web site, 1993
 First conference talk on web services - 1997
 Organized meeting where term “open
source” was adopted - 1998
 Coined the term “Web 2.0” in 2004 to help
restart enthusiasm in the computer industry
 Launched Make: magazine in 2005 to
celebrate the new frontier in physical
computing

8. “The future is here. It’s
just not evenly
distributed yet.”
- William Gibson

9. Watch the Alpha Geeks
•New technologies first exploited by hackers, then
entrepreneurs, then platform players
•Three examples
–Screen scraping predicts
web services
–Wireless community networks
predict universal Wi-Fi
–Open source software
predicts other forms of
collaborative development, and
prefigures the “participation age”
of Web 2.0 and social networking
Rob Flickenger and his potato chip can antenna

10. Pattern Recognition
 We all have mental models of the world that serve as
maps that guide what we see and do
 These maps can be more or less correct

11. Alfred Korzybski: General Semantics

12. “The map is not the territory.”

13. Free Software - the key issue is one of rights and licenses
Free software is a matter of the users'
freedom to run, copy, distribute, study,
change and improve the software. More
precisely, it means that the program's
users have the four essential freedoms:
■ The freedom to run the program, for any
purpose (freedom 0).
■ The freedom to study how the program
works, and change it to make it do what you
wish (freedom 1). Access to the source
code is a precondition for this.
■ The freedom to redistribute copies so you
can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
■ The freedom to distribute copies of your
modified versions to others (freedom 3). By
doing this you can give the whole
community a chance to benefit from your
changes. Access to the source code is a
precondition for this.

14. Open source - the key is development methodology
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an essay by
Eric S. Raymond on software engineering
methods, based on his observations of the Linux
kernel development process and his experiences
managing an open source project, fetchmail. It
examines the struggle between top-down and
bottom-up design. It was first presented by the
author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in
Würzburg and was published as part of a book of
the same name in 1999.”

15. Unix and the Internet - an architecture of participation
“The book is perhaps most valuable for
its exposition of the Unix philosophy of
small cooperating tools with
standardized inputs and outputs, a
philosophy that also shaped the end-to-
end philosophy of the Internet. It is this
philosophy, and the architecture based
on it, that has allowed open source
projects to be assembled into larger
systems such as Linux, without explicit
coordination between developers.”

16. The Architecture of Participation
"I couldn't have written a new kernel for
Windows even if I had the source code. The
architecture just doesn't support that kind of
thing."
(paraphrasing Linus Torvalds)

17. “The skill of writing is to
create a context in which
other people can think.”
-Edwin Schlossberg

18. http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/05/book_ch01_meme.html

19. http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/05/book_ch01_meme.html

20. “I’m an inventor.
I became interested in
long term trends because
an invention has to make
sense in the world in
which it is finished, not
the world in which it is
started.”
-Ray Kurzweil

21. The PC Revolution
 1981: IBM PC built of commodity components
 Market expands a million-fold, breaking IBM’s industry
dominance
 Intel becomes the key component supplier: Intel Inside
 Dell becomes #1 vendor by embracing commodity
economics; IBM eventually abandons market
 Value moves up the stack from hardware to software: IBM
signs away future to Microsoft

22. The Open Source Revolution
 1991: Linux operating system built out of commodity
components
 Market expands a million-fold, breaking Microsoft
industry dominance?
 Key questions:
– What does it mean to embrace the commodity economics
of open source?
– What is “up the stack” from software?
– Who becomes the “Intel Inside” of open source?

23. Desktop Application Stack
Proprietary Software
(Control by API)
System Assembled from
Standardized
Commodity Components
Some Hardware Components
From a Single-Source Supplier

24. Free and Open Source Software
Cheap Commodity PCs
Intel Inside

25. Internet Application Stack
Proprietary
Software As a Service
Integration of Commodity
Components
Apache
Subsystem-Level Lock In

26. The "Killer Apps” of the New Millenium

27. The Open Source Application Platform
 Commodity Intel hardware
 The Internet protocol stack and utilities like BIND
 LAMP
–Linux (or FreeBSD)
–Apache
–MySQL
–PHP (or Perl, or Python)
 Platform-agnostic client front ends

28. Another Paradigm Failure?
 These LAMP applications are being created
by open source developers and run on an
open source platform, but…
– Source code is not distributed (and it wouldn't
be useful to many developers if it were)
– Licenses triggered by binary software
distribution have no effect
– The value in these applications is in their data
and their customer interactions more than in
their software
– Most are fiercely proprietary

29. "The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits"
"When attractive profits disappear at one
stage in the value chain because a product
becomes modular and commoditized, the
opportunity to earn attractive profits with
proprietary products will usually emerge at an
adjacent stage."
-- Clayton Christensen
Author of The Innovator's Solution
In Harvard Business Review, February 2004

30. Beyond Licensing: the Three C’s
The three deep trends:
1. Commoditization of software
2. User-Customizable systems and architectures
3. Network-enabled Collaboration

32. So What Do We Need to Do?
 Use commodity software components to
drive down prices for users
 Give customers increased opportunity for
customization
– Plug-replaceable standards-compliant
components
– Extensible architectures
– Scripting support
 Provide open data web services
 Leverage collaborative development
processes and participatory interfaces

33. Key Lessons from Open Source
 An architecture of participation means that
your users help to extend your platform
 Low barriers to experimentation mean that
the system is "hacker friendly" for
maximum innovation
 Interoperability means that one component
or service can be swapped out if a better
one comes along
 "Lock-in" comes because others depend
on the benefit from your services, not
because you're completely in control

34. So how might all this apply to open courseware?

35. First off, think deeply about what it is you really do

36. Smaller pieces, modular design

43. Develop in public

49. Provide affordances for community
(think social)

51. An architecture of participation
 Don’t just measure how many people download or
view your courses, measure how many people
contribute to them
 Design them to be extensible
 “Small pieces loosely joined” is magic

52. Create more value than you capture!

53. In a gift culture, status comes
not from what we have or get
but from what we give away

54. For more information
 My twitter feed @timoreilly
 My personal archive: http://tim.oreilly.com
 My blog: http://radar.oreilly.com