After two months and 24 posts, I would like to thank all the kind people that mentioned our FLOSSMETRICS and OpenTTT work, especially Matthew Aslett, Matt Asay, Tarus Balog, Pamela Jones and many others with which I had the pleasure to exchange views with. I received many invaluable suggestions, and one of the most common one was to have a small “summary” of the posted research, as a landing page. So, here is a synthesis of the previous research posts:

• Why use OSS in product development: a set of examples from a thesis by Erkko Anttila, “Open Source Software and Impact on Competitiveness: Case Study” from Helsinki University of Technology, that provided hard data on the different hybrid community/company approaches by Nokia and Apple, and the relative gains and advantages.
• The dynamics of OSS adoption – 1: an initial view on the different dynamics behind open source adoption, starting with diffusion processes. Some data was also presented on unconstrained monetization.
• On business models and their relevance: A follow-up post on work by Matthew Aslett, introducing my view that future OSS business models will see more industry consortia and specialists, as more and more groups start to take advantage of the collaborative model, and will need more coordination on how to contribute back.
• Transparency and dependability for external partners: Outlining the transparency advantages of most OSS projects (with two examples mentioned: Zimbra and Alfresco) and the added advantage for partners, that can synchronize their work with that of the OSS community.
• The dynamics of OSS adoptions, II – diffusion processes: A presentation of diffusion processes as one of the models in OSS adoption, and a presentation of the UTAUT model for estimating the degree of acceptance of OSS.
• From theory to practice: the personal desktop linux experiment: A (long) example on how to apply the previously discussed models in a theoretical exercise: creating an end-user, large scale linux PC for personal activities. The post was inspired by work done during the Manila workshop along with UN’s International Open Source Network for facilitating take-up of open source by south-east Asean SMEs.
• Rethinking OSS business model classifications by adding adopters’ value: A presentation of the new classification of OSS business models; I have to thank Matthew Aslett of the 451 group for the many comments, and for accepting to share his work from the CAOS report with us.
• Comparing companies effectiveness: a response to Savio Rodrigues: A post written in response to work by Savio Rodrigues, on the relative shares of R&D of OSS companies compared to traditional IT companies.
• Our definitions of OSS-based business models: A follow-up of the “rethinking..” post, it outlines the new definitions of OSS business models created for the final part of the FLOSSMETRICS project.
• Another take on the financial value of open source: Our estimates of the value of the open source software market, and a call for further research on non-code contributions.
• OSS-based business models: a revised study based on 218 companies: A post providing the summary of the extended FLOSSMETRICS study on open source companies, that increased its number from 80 to 218, with some observation on relative size and usage of the various models.
• Estimating savings from OSS code reuse, or: where does the money comes from?: One of my favourite posts, provides a long discussion of the savings obtained when using OSS inside of other products, with some additional data obtained through COCOMO modeling.
• Another data point on OSS efficiency: A short post focusing on data from the italian TEDIS research, that showed how OSS companies are on average more capable to take on larger customers when compared with benchmark IT companies of the same size.
• The new FLOSSMETRICS project liveliness parameters: Fresh from the other project researchers, I provided a list of the new “project liveness” parameters that will be used in the SME guide.
• Reliability of open source from a software engineering point of view: A post that presents some results on how open source tends to be of higher quality under specific circumstances, and a follow-up idea on how this may be due to basic software engineering facts (related to component reuse).
• Open source and certified systems: A post inspired by a recent white paper on e-voting, the post presents my views on high-integrity and life-critical open source systems.

Recently on the OSI mailing list Carlo Piana wrote a proposed license for the reference implementation of the ISO/IEC 23006 MPEG eXtensible Middleware (MXM). The license is derived from the MPL with the removal of some of the patent conditions from the text of the original license, and clearly creates a legal boundary conditions that grants patent rights only for those who compile it only for internal purposes without direct commercial exploitation. I tend to agree on Carlo’s comment: “My final conclusion is that if the BSD family is considered compliant, so shall be the MXM, as it does not condition the copyright grant to the obtaining of the patents, just as the BSD licenses don’t deal with them. And insofar an implementer is confident that the part of the code it uses if free from the patented area, or it decided to later challenge the patent in case an infringement litigation is threatened, the license works just fine.” (as a side note: I am completely and totally against software patents, and I am confident that Carlo Piana is absolutely against them as well).

Having worked in the italian ISO JTC1 chapter, I also totally agree with one point: “the sad truth is that if we did not offer a patent-agnostic license we would have made all efforts to have an open source reference implementation moot.” Unfortunately, ISO still believes that patents are something that is necessary to convince companies to participate in standard groups, despite the existence of standard groups that do work very well without this policy (my belief is that the added value of standardization in terms of cost reductions are well worth the cost of participating in the creation of complex standards like MPEG, but this is for another post).

What I would like to make clear is that the real point is not if the proposed MXM license is OSI-compliant or not: the important point is why you want it to be open source. Let’s consider the various alternatives:

• the group believes that an open source implementation may receive external effort, much like the traditional open source projects, and thus reduce maintenance and extension effort. If this is the aim, then the probability of having this kind of external support is quite low, as companies would avoid it (as the license would not allow in any case a commercial use with an associated patent license), and researchers working in the area would have been perfectly satisfied with any kind of academic or research-only license.
• the group wants to increase the adoption of the standard, and the reference implementation should be used as a basis for further work to turn it into a commercial product. This falls in the same cathegory as before; why should I look at the reference implementation, if it does not grant me any potential use? The group could have simply published the source code for the reference, and said “if you want to use it, you should pay us a license for the embedded patents”.
• the group wants to have a “golden standard” to benchmark external implementations (for example, to see that the bitstreams are compliant). Again, there is no need for having an open source license.

The reality is that there is no clear motivation behind making this under an open source license, because the clear presence of patents on the implementation makes it risky or non-free to use for any commercial exploitation. Microsoft, for example, did it much better: to avoid losing their rights to enforce their patents, they paid or supported other companies to create a patent-covered software and released it under an open source license. Since the “secondary” companies do not hold any patent, with the releasing of the code they are not relieving any threat from the original Microsoft IPR, and at the same time they use a perfectly acceptable OSI-approved license.

As the purpose of the group is twofold (increase adoption of the standards, make commercial user pay for the IPR licensing) I would propose a different alternative: since the real purpose is to get paid for the patents, or to be able to enforce them in case of commercial competitors, why don’t you dual-license it with the strongest copyleft license available (at the moment, the AGPL)? This way, any competitor would be forced to be fully AGPL (and so any improvement would have to be shared, exchanging the lost licensing revenue for the maintenance cost reduction) or to pay for the license (turning everything into the traditional IPR licensing scheme).

I know, I know – this is wishful thinking. Carlo, I understand your difficult role…

In a few days, the 14th of April, I will be attending as a panelist the first European OpenClinica meeting, in the “regulatory considerations” panel. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet all the other OpenClinica users and developers, and in general talk and share experiences. As I will stay there for the evening, I would love to invite all friends and open source enthusiasts that happen to be in Brussels that night for a chat and a Belgian beer.

As for those that are not aware of OpenClinica: it is a shining example of open source software for health care; it is a Java-based server system that allows to create secure web forms for clinical data acquisition (and much more). The OpenClinica software platform supports clinical data submission, validation, and annotation; data filtering and extraction, study auditing, de-identification of Protected Health Information (PHI) and much more. It is distributed under the LGPL, and does have some really nice features (like the design of forms using spreadsheets – extremely intuitive).

We have used it in several regional and national trials, and even trialed it as a mobile data acquisition platform.

If you can’t be in Brussels, but are interested in open source health care, check out OpenClinica.

While working on the final edition of our FLOSSMETRICS guide on OSS, I received the new automated estimation procedures from the other participants in the project and the QUALOSS people, namely Daniel Izquierdo. Santiago Dueñas and Jesus Gonzales Barahona from the Departamento de Sistemas Telemáticos y Computación (GSyC) of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. The new parameters will be included soon in the automated project page that is created in the FLOSSMETRICS database (here is an example for the Epiphany web browser); and will feature a very nice colour-coded scheme that provides an at-a-glance view of the risks or strengths of a project. A nice feature of FLOSSMETRICS is the fact that it provides information not only on code, but on ancillary metrics like mailing lists, committers participation, and so on, and all the tools, code, and databases are open source!

Now, on with the variables:

(CVSanaly, Bicho, MLS are some of the tools that extract information from the various databases that we keep for every project; so for multidimensional data we extract variables from more than one source).

The evaluation becomes quite simple: if there is any red or black metric, you are looking at a high risk project, because there is a significant part of the code managed by a single, or a very small, group of people. We will estimate the number of yellow parameters that can be associated with a medium risk project by comparing our previous QSOS estimates with the new ones; it will be published directly in the guide.

As a side note: I am really grateful for the many researchers that are sending me their works within other open-source related EU projects; after all, we are all working for opennness