Posts Tagged OSS adoption
OSS 4.0 and licenses: not a clear-cut choice
Posted by cdaffara in OSS business models on August 25th, 2010
The (always great) Matthew Aslett posted today on some of his most recent results on the future of OSS licensing, in what he calls “Open Source 4.0″, characterized by corporate-dominated development communities. This form of evolution was one of the prediction in my previous posts – not for ethical,or community reasons, but for entirely practical and economic reasons: collaborative development is one of the strongest model in all the 11 basic components that we have identified in the FLOSSMETRICS group. In fact, I wrote in the past something like
“Many researchers are trying to identify whether there is a more “efficient” model among all those surveyed; what we found is that the most probable future outcome will be a continuous shift across model, with a long-term consolidation of development consortia (like Symbian and Eclipse) that provide strong legal infrastructure and development advantages, and product specialists that provide vertical offerings for specific markets“
which, I believe, matches quite well Matthew’s idea about OSS4.0. One area where I am (slightly) in disagreement with Matthew is related to licensing; I am not totally sure about the increased success of non-copyleft licenses in this next evolution of the open source market. Not because I believe that he is wrong (I would never do that – he is too nice 
) but because I believe that there are additional aspects that may introduce some differences.
The choice of an open source license for a project code release is not clear-cut, and depends on several factors; in general, when reusing code that comes from external projects, license compatibility is the first, major driver in license selection. Licenses do have an impact on development activity, depending on the kind of project and who controls the project evolution. Previous studies that shown that restrictive, copyleft licenses do have a negative impact on contribution (for example in Fershman and Gandal, “Open source software: motivation and restrictive licensing”) has been refuted by other researchers (Stewart, Ammeter, Maruping, “Impacts of License Choice and Organizational Sponsorship on User Interest and Development Activity in Open Source Software Projects”). An interesting result of that research is the following graph:
What we found is that for non-market sponsors and new code, there is an higher development activity from outside partners for code that is released under a non-copyleft license. But this implies that the code is new and not encumbered with previous license obligations, like for example the reuse of an existing, copyleft-licensed project. The graph shows the impact on development activity in open source projects, depending on license restrictiveness and the kind of “sponsor”, that is the entity that manages a project. “No sponsor” is the kind of project managed by a non-coordinated community, for example by volunteers; “market sponsor” are projects coordinated by a company, while “nonmarket sponsor” are project managed by a structured organization that is not inherently for-profit, like a development consortia (an example is the Eclipse Foundation). The research data identified a clear effect of how the project is coordinated and the kind of license; the license restrictiveness has been found to be correlated with decreased contributions for nonmarket sponsors, like OSS foundations, and is in general related to the higher percentage of “infrastructural” projects (like libraries, development tools, enabling technologies) of such foundations.
In general,the license selection follows from the main licensing and business model constraints:
- When the project is derived from an external FLOSS project, then the main constraint is the original license. In this case, the basic approach is to find a suitable license from those compatible with the original license, and select among the possible business models the one that is consistent with the selected exploitation strategy.
- When one of the partners has an Intellectual Property Rights licensing policy that is in conflict with a FLOSS license, the project can select a MIT or BSD license (if compatible with an eventual upstream release) or use an intermediate releaser; in the latter case there are no constraints on license selection. If a MIT or BSD license is selected, some models are of difficult application: for example, Open Core and Dual Licensing are difficult to implement because the license lack the reciprocity of copyleft.
- When there are no external licensing constraints, and external contributions are important, license can be more or less freely selected; for nonmarket entities, a non-copylefted license gives a greater probability of contribution.
So, if you are creating a nonmarket entity, and you are free to choose: choose non-copyleft licenses. In the other situations, it is not so simple, and it may even be difficult to avoid previous licensing requirements.
The point on intermediate releasers require some additional consideration. An especially important point of OSS licenses is related to “embedded IPR”, that is the relationship of the code released with software patents that may be held by the releasing authority. While the debate on software patents is still not entirely settled, with most OSS companies vigorously fighting the process of patenting software-based innovations, while on the other hand large software companies defending the practice (for example SAP) most open source licenses explicitly mention the fact that software patents held by the releasing authority are implicitly licensed for use with the code. This means that business practices that rely on separate patent licensing may be incompatible with some specific OSS licenses, in particular the Apache License and the GPL family of licenses. The Eclipse Public License gives patent grants to the original work and to enhanced versions based on the original work but not to code not directly derived from the release, while permissive licenses like BSD and MIT give no patent rights at all.
If, for compatibility or derivation, a license that gives explicitly IPR rights must be selected, and the company or research organization wants to maintain the rights to use IPR in a license-incompatible way a possible solution may be the use of an intermediate releaser; that is, an entity that has no IPR on its own, to which the releasing organization gives a copy of the source code for further publication. Since the intermediate release has no IPR, the license clauses that require patent grants are not activated, while the code is published with the required license; this approach has been used for example by Microsoft for some of its contributions to the Apache POI project.
This may become an important point of attention for companies that are interested in releasing source code under an OSS license; most software houses are still interested in maintaining their portfolio of patents, and are not willing to risk invalidation through “accidental licensing” of IPR embedded in source code (one of the reasons why Microsoft will never sell a Linux based system).
As I wrote in the beginning, there is for a large number of consortia a clear preference for non-copyleft licenses; but it is not possible to generalize: the panorama of OSS is so complex, right now, that even doing predictions is difficult.
EveryDesk beta3 released – now available as a VirtualBox image!
I am quite happy to announce the release of the third beta of our EveryDesk flash-based desktop, now available in VirtualBox format as well – so you can try it out without the need of a USB key. EveryDesk is a reinterpretation of the Linux desktop. It executes from a 4Gb USB Key, and allows the user to run a modern and efficient Linux Desktop on most PCs without the need of changing or removing the native operating system such as Windows. Designed to be used in Public Administrations or as an enterprise desktop, EveryDesk is a real OS on a USB key, not a live CD, and as such allows for extensive customization and adaptation to each Public Administration need. It is the result of the open sourcing of parts of the Conecta HealthDesk system, designed using the result of our past European projects COSPA (a large migration experiment for European Public Administrations), SPIRIT (open source health care), OpenTTT (OSS technology transfer) and CALIBRE (open source for industrial environments).
There are more than 120 changes from the previous edition; among them, all the medical applications are integrated in the same image – so there is no need to have a separate edition for Health Care applications. Among the updates:
- Latest edition of the DICOM browser for hospitals and medical applications; now supports per-user monitor calibration.
- Integrated medical dictionary in OpenOffice.org
- Integrated the After the Deadline OpenOffice grammar checker
- LikeWise 6 Active directory integration tool
- A fast, efficient and very capable RDP, NX and VNC connection manager: Remmina based on FreeRDP
- The latest VirtualBox
- Several ancillary additions, like a large complement of fonts
To facilitate the final bug fixing, we made the boot process visible – that will be reverted to silent boot as soon as the final testing is completed. As usual, you will find the images at our sourceforge page.
The basis of OSS business models: property and efficiency
Posted by cdaffara in OSS business models on July 26th, 2010
It is now time to write the closing part of our long multi-part look at open source business models. After all the discussion on how to look at the various parts of a model and how to improve it, I will try to summarize a bit on how to look at an OSS business model, and what implications can be made from a specific choice (for once, without mentioning open core).
The basic idea behind business models is quite simple: I have something or can do something – the “value proposition” – and it is more economical to pay me to do or get this “something” instead of doing it yourself (sometimes it may even be impossible to find alternatives, as in natural or man-made monopolies, so the idea of doing it myself may not be applicable)
There are two possible sources for the value: a property (something that can be transferred) and efficiency (something that is inherent in what the company do, and how they do it). With Open Source, usually “property” is non-exclusive (with the exception of Open Core, where part of the code is not open at all). Other examples of property are trademarks, patents, licenses… anything that may be transferred to another entity through a contract or legal transaction.
Efficiency is the ability to perform an action with a lower cost (both tangible and intangible), and is something that follows the specialization in a work area or appears thanks to a new technology. Examples of the first are simply the decrease in time necessary to perform an action when you increase your expertise in it; the first time you install a complex system may require lots of effort, and this effort is reduced the more you experience the tasks necessary to perform the installation itself.
Examples of the second may be the introduction of a tool that simplifies the process (for example, through image cloning) and it introduces a huge discontinuity, a “jump” in the graph of efficiency versus time.
These two aspects are the basis of all the business models that we have analysed in the past; it is possible to show that all of them fall in a continuum between properties and efficiency:
Among the results of our past research project, one thing that we found is that property-based projects tend to have lower contributions from the outside, because it requires a legal transaction to become part of the company’s properties; think for example at dual licensing: to become part of the product source code, an external contributor needs to sign off his rights to the code, to allow the company to sell the enterprise version alongside the open one.
On the other hand, right-handed models based purely on efficiency tends to have higher contributions and visibility, but lower monetization rates. As I wrote many times, there is no ideal business model, but a spectrum of possible models, and companies should adapt themselves to changing market conditions and adapt their model as well. Some companies start as pure efficiency based, and build an internal property with time; some others may start as property based, and move to the other side to increase contributions and reducing the engineering effort (or enlarging the user base, to create alternative ways of monetizing users).
This is the last post in our little mini-serie on OSS business models; I hope that my archetypal three readers will have enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing them. Of course, I will be happy to read and respond to any comment – even negative ones.
The relationship between Open Core, dual licensing and contributions
Posted by cdaffara in OSS adoption, OSS business models on July 21st, 2010
Open Core continues to receive substantial bashing, both after the announcement of the new SugarCRM 6 and after the recent OpenStack intitiative. Sugar introduces a new interface that is not available in the open source edition (they are not the first in this: actually, Open-Xchange did it before them, making the javascript code for the new AJAX interface not usable for commercial activities), but despite this they claim “We are an open source company” In the OpenStack announcement, The Register reports that it was not possible for NASA to introduce the changes to Eucalyptus because that would have undermined the capability of the company to make users pay for the enterprise edition. I already wrote in the past that Open Core is not evil per se, but that it does introduce difficulties in encouraging external participation; both because there is a very thin line in feature selection between the community and enterprise edition, and because open core naturally hampers participation. I had some readers asking me why, and I will respond with a subset of my LinuxTag slides:
Open core is usually built by a set of internal open source components held together by a dual-licensed wrapper, plus proprietary modules on the outside. One of the best examples of this is Zimbra (an excellent product on its own) but MySQL in recent editions can be included in the same group. As discussed in previous posts, dual licensing hampers contributions because it requires an explicit agreement on ceding rights to the company that employs it, in order to be able to relicense it for the proprietary edition. This means that Open Core companies, in itself, will have an easier time in monetizing their software, but will receive much less contributions in exchange. As I wrote before, it is simply not possible to get something like Linux or Apache with Open Core.
Again: open core is not bad per se (but I would have been more cautious in calling Sugar “an open source company”, for whatever definition you have of that). But it is a tradeoff: monetization versus contributions. And, my bets are on contributions, as OpenStack demonstrates – you need leverage and external resources to go beyond what a single company can do.
The new EveryDesk and EveryDesk/MED health care desktops
We have finally released the new version of the linux-on-USB EveryDesk system, both in the plain version and the Medical release, that includes an IHE certified DICOM medical image browser, a complete R-based statistical environment and OpenOffice enhanced with a complete medical dictionary. The new version is faster, should be more compatible with older hardware, and in general was found by our beta testers to be fairly complete.
Its main appeal is that it can be tested without any installation: just download the image, copy it on the key and try. It boots fast, it is totally modifiable, provides local applications, Prism for web-apps, Chromium and several remote computing applications like the VMware View client, clients for IBM mini and mainframes, a full Java environment for Citrix, and much more.
The medical version still misses the final DICOM certification (you will see in the startup splash screen that it does have no CE marking), we are working towards the final release that will be certified and significantly improved. The R environment is also missing some modules specific to bioengineering, that were not ready in time for release; we expect to have a beta-2 version ready for the mid of august.
We have also a completely new website: http://www.everydesk.org where we added a substantial amount of material, and will be used to publish the training videos that we are preparing to help companies in adopting the desktop for their own internal use.
We have introduced a new policy: we offer unlimited and free support and helpdesk services for all users, commercial or not. To receive private answers we only as for an introductory email that provides details of the institution, contact points and the actual or expected number of EveryDesk installations. We will provide a separate customer ID, and it will be used for issue tracking. Large scale customers can request a private portal, with issue and bug tracking, device management and group update as a separate commercial option.
We are welcoming health care institutions that are interested in trying EveryDesk/MED, especially from developing countries; let us know what additional application may be of interest to be added to the default platform.
For more information: http://www.everydesk.org
Some EveryDesk Use Cases
Now that our EveryDesk is out in the wild, I would like to provide a little background on what choices were made in creating it; especially outlining some differences with previous approaches. EveryDesk starts with a set of assumptions: first of all, that every single barrier reduces by an order of magnitude the probability of adoption, and that it is extremely difficult to displace “what works”, but there are lots of environments where current OSS and commercial offerings are not perfectly suited for their intended target.
I have previously addressed the use of the UTAUT model to study for example Google’s ChromiumOS offering; we applied the same model for our own desktop offering, modelled after the end of the COSPA project (one of the largest controlled experiments in the introduction of OSS in European Public Administration desktops). We have focused our initial efforts on the Health Care sector, thanks to our contract work with the regional health care agency of the Friuli region, but later generalized the approach for a wide range of activities using the same basic infrastructure.
First of all, what’s the problem of the current commercial offering?
- Hardware obsolescence: PC refresh cycles are already widely stretched thanks to the economic crisis, forcing users to adapt to less-than-modern IT infrastructures, both server and client side;
- Security: the basic security of most commercial offerings is barely adequate; to provide sufficient protection, several layers of added security software needs to be added to the basic OS, increasing resource consumption and aggravating the situation for less than modern hardware;
- Management: unless you are the lucky recipient of a fully managed (and costly) infrastructure, you will have to perform or have performed several management activities like patch and software management, backups and lots more.
Thin clients reduce management, but require substantial infrastructural investments, some applications are hard to port to Terminal Services or require substantial remotization bandwidth (or lots of additional software: think about video-conferencing in a TS environment, with all the hybrid local/remote channel enabled by tools like Citrix HDX). VDI requires even more complex systems, with an offering that is still maturing (with some stunning technical hacks, actually) and that has for many installation an unproven return on investment.
To summarize: desktop PC are flexible, adaptable, usable without connectivity, complex, fragile, difficult to manage. Thin (bitmap-based, like RDP or ICA) clients are slightly easier to manage, require little support, require substantial infrastructure investments, cannot work detached, have marginally lower management costs.
We try to strive with a middle ground solution: EveryDesk is a locally executed OS, that when configured provides the same remote management advantages of thin clients without the costly infrastructure (the only thing needed is storage, that is nowadays cheap and plentiful). The system is a real install, not a live CD, so the user/administrator can install applications or customize it in depth simply by using the image and then replicating it for all the people working in a company or administration. Updating it is simple: just execute the Update Manager!
While developing EveryDesk we identified a few potential use cases, and I would like to explain what advantage our hybrid model can have:
- Hospital worker: our initial use case. We designed the system so that national regulations in the handling of sensitive data could be complied to without any specific effort on the side of the user; that is, to make nearly impossible for the worker to lose or disseminate data without an explicit and voluntary breach of confidentiality, and make it possible to identify such breach immediately. By moving user data on a centrally managed server, standard logging and identity management techniques can be applied easily to prevent data loss; as no private data is on the key (including passwords), losing the key or having it stolen is not sufficient to breach the system privacy. For our health care customization we added to the basic image an excellent radiology workstation system called O3, already in use in some Italian hospitals, a medical dictionary and some ancillary tools like the ImageJ image processing system.
- Another important use case is widely found in developing countries, and is the “Internet Café”. While it is true that mobile internet access is fast becoming a fundamental infrastructure, cost and efficiency reasons still make it sensible to have a physical, shared space with PCs. EveryDesk makes it possible to provide low-maintenance PCs with no hard disks, a central low cost storage, and simply give away the USB keys to the attendees. If a key stops working, it is simply a matter of re-copying the image on top of a new one to restore everything.
- Within companies and Public Administration, providing a diskless PC with EveryDesk allows the efficient use of even old PCs (EveryDesk takes 150MB of RAM with both Firefox and OpenOffice.org open), while providing thanks to VirtualBox the set of applications that are not available within Linux. In dispersed companies, where you have multiple sites, you can use a replicating file system (like the wonderful XtreemFS developed within another EU-funded research project) that provides in a totally open source solution with differential and efficient replicas across sites. This way you can use your VirtualBox image, stop it, let the system replicate it in the other sites, move to another city, fire up EveryDesk again and have all your data and status restored without the need for local persistent storage.
The idea of a real Linux install is not new – actually, some of the ideas were explored a few years ago in a Gentoo-based system called FlashLinux, that unfortunately is not updated since 2005. We also introduced some of the ideas behind IBM SoulPad, namely the integration of virtualization within the environment, but reversed the concept (in SoulPad the virtualization layer is at the bottom, and is used to abstract the internal virtual machine from the hardware, as well as providing easy suspend/resume functionalities).
We plan to create a education-oriented edition, integrating some of the software tools already selected in projects like EduLinux; we also plan to backport some of the customizations of municipally-sponsored distributions like MAX (Madrid Linux) to try to provide a common basis for experimentation in public administrations across Europe.
And now, for something totally different: EveryDesk!
Posted by cdaffara in OSS adoption, blog on June 21st, 2010
Now that most of our work for FLOSSMETRICS is ended, I had the opportunity to try and work on something different. As you know, I worked on bringing OSS to companies and public administration for nearly 15 years now, and I had the opportunity to work in many different projects with many different and incredible people. One of the common things that I discovered is that to increase adoption it is necessary to give every user a distinct advantage in using OSS, and to make the exploratory process easy and hassle-free.
So, we collected most of the work done in past projects, and developed a custom desktop, designed to be explorable without installation, fast and designed for real world use; EveryDesk is a reinterpretation of the Linux desktop, designed to be used in public administrations or as an enterprise desktop. EveryDesk is a real OS on a USB key, not a live CD; this way the system allows for extensive customization and adaptation to each Public Administration need It is the result of the open sourcing of part of our HealthDesk system, designed using the result of our past European projects COSPA (a large migration experiment for European Public Administrations), SPIRIT (open source health care), OpenTTT (OSS technology transfer) and CALIBRE (open source for industrial environments).
EveryDesk is a binary image designed for 4GB USB keys, easy to install with a single command both on Linux and Windows, simple to replicate and adapt. It does provide a simple and pleasing user interface, with several pre-installed applications and native support for Active Directory. EveryDesk supports roaming/nomadic work through a special mode that stores all user data on a remote SMB server (both Samba and Windows are supported). This way, the user’s USB key contains no personal data, and can be used in environments that manage sensitive data, like health care or law enforcement.
The files and images can be downloaded from the SourceForge project page.
EveryDesk integrates a simple and easy to use menu, derived from Novell usability research studies, providing one-click access to individual programs, documents, places; easy installation of new software or updates, thanks to the fully functional package manager.
EveryDesk includes support for Terminal Services, VNC, VmWare View and other remote access protocols. One peculiarity we are quite happy with is the idea of simplified VDI; basically, EveryDesk integrates the open source edition of VirtualBox, and allows for mounting the disk images remotely – so the disk storage is remote, and the execution is local. This way, VDI can be implemented by adding only storage (that is cheap and easy to manage) and avoiding all the virtualization infrastructure.
The seamless virtualization mode of VirtualBox allows for a quite good integration between Windows (especially Windows 7) and the local environment. Coupled with the fact that the desktop is small and runs in less than 100MB (with both Firefox and OpenOffice.org, it takes only 150MB) it makes for a good substitute of a traditional thin client, is manageable through CIM, and is commercially supported. Among the extensions developed, we have a complete ITIL compliant management infrastructure, and digitally-signed log storage for health care and law enforcement applications.
For more information: our health care home page, main site, on twitter, facebook, and of course here!
How to analyse an OSS business model – part five
Posted by cdaffara in OSS business models on May 19th, 2010
(part five of an ongoing series. Previous parts: part one, two, three, four).
Marten Mickos (of MySQL fame) once said that “people spend time to save money, some spend money to save time“. This consideration is at the basis of one of the most important parameter for most OSS companies that use the open core or freemium model, that is the conversion rate (the percentage of people that pays for enterprise or additional functionalities, versus the total amount of users). With most OSS companies reaching less than 0.1%, and only very few capable of reaching 1%, one of the obvious goals of CEOs of said open source companies is to find a way to “convert” more users to paying for services, or to increase the monetization rate.
My goal today is to show that such effort can have only a very limited success, and may be even dangerous for the overall acceptance of the software project itself.
Let’s start with an obvious concept: everyone has a resource at his/her disposal, namely time. This resource does have some interesting properties:
- it is universal (everyone has time)
- it is inflexible (there are 24 hours in a day, and anything you can do will not change it)
- efficiency (work done in the unit of time) does have a lower bound of zero, and an higher bound that depends on many factors; efficiency can vary by one order of magnitude or more.
Another important parameter is the price per hour for having something done. At this point, there is a common mistake, that is assuming that there is a fixed hourly rate, or at least a lower bound on hourly rate. This is clearly wrong, because the price per hour is the simple ratio between what someone is paying you to do the work and the amount of time required for that action; so if no-one pays you, that ratio is zero. So, let’s imagine someone working for a web company, and one of the activities requires a database. Our intrepid administrator will start learning something about MySQL, will work diligently and install it (ok, nowadays it’s nearly point-and-click. Imagine it done a few years ago, with compiles and all that stuff).
This system administrator will never pay for MySQL enterprise, or whatever, because its pay is fixed, and there is no allocated budget for him to divert money to external entities. So, whatever is done by MySQL to monetize the enterprise version, there will be simply no way to obtain money from the people that is investing time, unless you sabotage the open source edition so that you are forced to pay for the enterprise one. But what will happen then? People will be forced to look at alternatives, because in any case time is the only resource available to them.
This basic concept is valid even when companies do have budget available. Consider the fact that the average percentage of revenues invested in ICT (information and communication technology) by companies is on average around 5%, with some sectors investing slightly less (4%) up to high-tech companies investing up to 7%. This percentage is nearly fixed, valid for small to large companies and across countries and sectors; this means that the commercial OSS company is competing for small slices of budget, and its capability to win is related mainly to the perceived advantages of going “enterprise” versus investing personnel time.
Does it means that trying to increase conversion rate is useless? Not exactly. The point is that you cannot address those users that have no budget available, as those will never be able to pay for your enhanced offering; you have two different possible channels: those that are using your product and may have the potential to pay, or address the group of non-users with the same demographics. So, the reality is that mining current users is potentially counterproductive, and it is more sensible to focus on two interlocking efforts:
- increase the number of adopters, and
- make sure that people knows about the commercial offering.
This can be performed “virally”, that is by creating an incentive for people to share the knowledge of your project with others, which is very fast, efficient and low-cost; however, this approach does have the disadvantage that sharing will happen within a single group of peers. In fact, viral sharing happens within only homologous group, and this means that it is less effective for reaching those users that are outside the same group – for example, the non-users that we are pointing at. This means that purely viral efforts are not capable of reaching your target – you need to complement it with more traditional marketing efforts.
Next: resource and development sharing, or how to choose your license depending on your expectations of external participation.
On open source competence centers
Posted by cdaffara in OSS adoption on April 26th, 2010
Just a few days ago, Glynn Moody posted a tweet with the message: “Italy to begin an open source competence centre”; a result of the recent EU project Qualipso, created with the purpose to identify barriers to OSS adoption, quality metrics and with the explicit target of creating a network of OSS competence centers, sharing the results of the research effort and disseminating it with the European community of companies and public administration. For this reason, the project created more than one competence center, and created a network (that you can find under this website) to cover not only Europe, but China, India and Japan as well. This is absolutely a great effort, and I am grateful to the Commission and the project participants for their work (hey, they even cited my work on business models!)
There is, however, an underlying attitude that I found puzzling – and partially troubling as well. The announcement mentioned the competence center of Italy, and was worded as there was no previous such effort in that country. If you go to the network website, you will find no mention of any other competence center there, even when you consider that the Commission already has a list of such centers (not much updated, though) and that on OSOR there is even an official group devoted to Italian OSS competence centers, among them two in Friuli (disclaimer: I am part of the technical board of CROSS, and work in the other), Tuscany, Trentino, Umbria, Emilia (as part of the PITER project), a national one and many others that I probably forgot. Then we have Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Nordic Countries and many others. What is incredible is that most of these centers… actually don’t link one with the other, and they hardly share information. The new Qualipso network of competence centers does not list any previous center, nor does it point to already prepared documentation – even by the Commission. The competence center network website does not link to OSOR as well, nor does it links to other projects – past or current.
I still believe that competence centers are important, and that they must focus on what can be done to simplify adoption – or to turn adoption into a commercially sustainable ecosystem, for example by facilitating the embracing of OSS packages by local software companies. In the past I tried to summarize this in the following set of potential activities:
- Creating software catalogs, using an integrated evaluation model (QSOS, Qualipso, FLOSSMETRICS-anything, as long as it is consistent)
- For selected projects, finds local support companies with competence in the identified solution
- Collect the needs of potential OSS users, using standardized forms (Technology Request/Technology Offer, TR/TO) to identify IT needs. Find the set of OSS projects that together satisfies the Technology Request; if there are still unsatisfied requirements, join together several interested users to ask (with a commercial offer) for a custom-made OSS extension or project
- Aggregate and restructure the information created by other actors, like IST, IDABC, individual national initiatives (OSOSS, KBST, COSS, …)
This models helps in overcoming several hurdles to OSS adoption:
- Correctly identify needs, and through analysis of already published TR can help in aggregating demand
- Helps in finding appropriate OSS solutions, even when solutions are created through combination of individual pieces
- Helps in finding actors that can provide commercial support or know-how
It does have several potential advantages over traditional mediation services:
- The center does NOT participate in the commercial exchange, and in this sense acts as a pure catalyst. This way it does not compete with existing OSS companies, but provides increased visibility and an additional dissemination channel
- It remains a simple and lean structure, reducing the management costs
- By reusing competences and information from many sources, it can become a significant learning center even for OSS companies (for example, in the field of business models for a specific OSS project)
- It is compatible with traditional IT incubators, and can reuse most of the same structures
Most of this idea revolves around the concept of sharing effort, and reusing knowledge already developed in other areas or countries. I find it strange that the most difficult idea among these competence centers is… sharing.
(update: corrected the network project name – Qualipso, not Qualoss. Thanks to Matteo for spotting it.)
2020 FLOSS Roadmap, 2009 Version published
Posted by cdaffara in OSS adoption, blog on October 13th, 2009
Having contributed to the new edition of the 2020 FLOSS roadmap, I am happy to forward the announcement relative to the main updates and changes of the 2020 FLOSS roadmap document. I am especially fond of the “FOSS is like a Forest” analogy, that in my opinion captures well the hidden dynamics that is created when many different projects create an effective synergy, that may be difficult to perceive for those that are not within the same “forest”.
For its first edition, Open World Forum had launched an initiative of prospective unique in the world: the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap (see 2008 version). This Roadmap is a projection of the influences that will affect FLOSS until 2020, with descriptions of all FLOSS-related trends as anticipated by an international workgroup of 40 contributors over this period of time and highlights 7 predictions and 8 recommendations. 2009 edition of Open World Forum gave place to an update of this Roadmap reflecting the evolutions noted during the last months (see OWF keynote presentation). According to Jean-Pierre Laisné, coordinator of 2020 FLOSS Roadmap and Bull Open Source Strategy: “For the first edition of the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, we had the ambition to bring to the debate a new lighting thanks to an introspective and prospective vision. This second edition demonstrates that not only this ambition is reached but that the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap is actually a guide describing the paths towards a knowledge economy and society based on intrinsic values of FLOSS.”
About 2009 version (full printable version available here)
So far, so good: Contributors to the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap estimate that their projections are still relevant. The technological trends envisioned – including the use of FLOSS for virtualization, micro-blogging and social networking – have been confirmed. Contributors consider that their predictions about Cloud Computing may have to be revised, due to accelerating adoption of the concepts by the market. The number of mature FLOSS projects addressing all technological and organizational aspects of Cloud Computing is confirming the importance of FLOSS in this area. Actually, the future of true Open Clouds will mainly depend on convergence towards a common definition of ‘openness’ and ‘open services’.
Open Cloud Tribune: Following the various discussions and controversies around the topic “FLOSS and Cloud Computing”, this opinion column aims to nourish the debates on this issue by freely publishing the various opinions and points of view. 2009’s article questions about the impact of Cloud Computing on employment in IT.
Contradictory evolutions: While significant progress was observed in line with 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, the 2009 Synthesis highlights contradictory evolutions: the penetration of FLOSS continues, but at political level there is still some blocking. In spite of recognition from ‘intellectuals’. the alliance between security and proprietary has been reinforced, and has delayed the evolution of lawful environments. In terms of public policies, progress is variable. Except in Brazil, United Kingdom and the Netherlands, who have made notable moves, no other major stimulus for FLOSS has appeared on the radar. The 2009 Synthesis is questioning why governments are still reluctant to adopt a more voluntary ‘FLOSS attitude’. Because FLOSS supports new concepts of ’society’ and supports the links between technology and solidarity, it should be taken into account in public policies.
Two new issues: Considering what has been published in 2008, two new issues have emerged, which will need to be explored in the coming months: proprietary hardware platforms, which may slow the development of FLOSS , and proprietary data, which may create critical lock-ins even when software is free.
The global economic crisis: While the global crisis may have had a negative impact on services based businesses and services vendors specializing in FLOSS, it has proved to be an opportunity for most FLOSS vendors, who have seen their business grow significantly in 2009. When it comes to Cloud-based businesses, the facts tend to show a massive migration of applications in the coming months. Impressive growth in terms of hosting is paving the way for these migrations.
Free software and financial system: this new theme of the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap makes its appearance in the version 2009 in order to take into account the role which FLOSS can hold in a system which currently is the target of many reflexions.
Sun/Oracle: The acquisition of Sun by Oracle is seen by contributors to the 2009 Synthesis as a major event, with the potential risk that it will significantly redefine the FLOSS landscape. But while the number of major IT players is decreasing, the number of small and medium-size companies focused around FLOSS is growing rapidly. This movement is structured around technology communities and business activities, with some of the business models involved being hybrid ones.
FLOSS is like forests: The 2009 Synthesis puts forward this analogy to make it easier to understand the complexity of FLOSS through the use of a simple and rich image. Like forests and their canopies – which play host to a rich bio-diversity and diverse ecosystems – FLOSS is diverse, with multiple layers and branches both in term of technology and creation of wealth. Like a forest, FLOSS provides vital oxygen to industry. Like forests, which have brought both health and wealth throughout human history, FLOSS plays an important role in the transformation of society. Having accepted this analogy, contributors to the Roadmap subsequently identified different kind of forests: ‘old-growth forests’ or ‘primary forests’, which are pure community-based FLOSS projects such as Linux; ‘cultivated forests’, which are the professional and business-oriented projects such as Jboss and MySQL; and ‘FLOSS tree nurseries’, which are communities such as Apache, OW2 and Eclipse. And finally the ‘IKEAs’ of FLOSS are companies such as Red Hat and Google.
Ego-altruism: The 2009 Synthesis insists on the need to encourage FLOSS users to contribute to FLOSS, not for altruistic reasons, but rather for egoistical ones. It literally recommends users to only help when it benefits themselves. Thanks to FLOSS, public sector bodies, NGOs, companies, citizens, etc. have full, free and fair access to technologies enabling them to communicate on a global level. To make sure that they will always have access to these powerful tools, they have to support and participate in the sustainability of FLOSS.
New Recommendation: To reinforce these ideas, the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap in its 2009 Synthesis added to the existing list of recommendations:
Acknowledge the intrinsic value of FLOSS infrastructure for essential applications as a public knowledge asset (or ‘as knowledge commons’), and consider new means to ensure its sustainable development
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