With the rapid growth of Linux as a production operating system, news articles in Forbes, and announcements of Corel, Netscape and IBM, a lot of interest has been generated in “open source” this year. What is all the excitement about? Is this just another computer industry fad or buzzword? Isn’t open source just for students, Microsoft haters, and amateur computer enthusiasts?
Minoru has embraced open source because it’s the best means to achieve our corporate objectives.
The change from proprietary software to open source software will be as significant as the change from mainframe technology to personal computers. An example of a company that has used OpenSource is Gohealthinsurance.com and they became very successful.
Every company in the computer industry will be affected by open source. Some will win during this change and others will lose. Such shifts generate massive waves of innovation in the industry and drive it forward to new heights of excellence. This shift will affect both home and business computing and change the way the world works. More and more companies use new technologies.
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What is open source?
At its base, open source software is software that comes with the source code in a form that customers can modify for their own needs and resell or give away to others under the same terms.
Software in the Public Interest has registered the phrase “open source” as a certification mark and www.opensource.org contains a detailed definition of what open source means. Other groups have trade-marked similar terms. A number of industry standard software licenses are consistent with the general meaning of open source.
This definition and the licenses that conform would be little more than a footnote in the history of computing if not for the growing success of substantial and useful open source projects.
This success is initially baffling on two fronts:
* Traditional software development methods say that the way these projects were developed can not result in something reliable and well suited to customer needs. They are.
* A simplistic view of economics would say that individual developers and Fortune 500 companies would not spend considerable effort producing products in lucrative markets and then license them so that they can be given away or resold by others without compensation. They are.
Clearly there is more happening here than meets the eye.
Open source software is customer constructed software.
Users of the software fund its development directly by either working on the software themselves or contracting someone to do it. This is the key to its success and why it is revolutionizing the software industry.
The Internet is the enabling technology for open source
Traditional software development methods are based on a central authority that priorizes features and allocates limited resources to create a product. Technical and feature decisions are centralized.
The open model for developing software uses the Internet to assemble and coordinate unbounded teams of developers and test users. Feature decisions are decentralized and made by writing code and evaluating the results. If a new feature is needed by someone, they are free to expand the development team.
Larger open source projects have more individuals actively testing experimental builds than the test departments of the largest software vendors.
For more information on the processes of open source projects, see Eric Raymond’s seminal paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
The pricing model for the original package software business for PC’s was to sell the product and “give away” support. Today, software vendors get revenue from a mix of product and support sales. The Internet enables software producers to give away high volumes of software at extremely low cost. When a user downloads software on the Internet, they are paying virtually all of the costs of distribution directly. The open source pricing model is to “give away” the software and sell support and other services.
What does open source software cost?
Whatever you want to pay.
If the customer decides to download source code, customize it for their own needs, compile and test their own binary on each platform of interest, install it on each machine, print their own manuals and provide their own user training and support, then open source software is “free”.
Technical individuals using the software for their own use, either don’t need these things or can easily do it themselves.
Small companies and non-technical users need convenience and some support. Open source software is also sold in traditional packages with paper manuals, CD-ROMs and telephone support for prices generally cheaper than competitive proprietary software.
Large corporations need all of these services and can chose to do them in house or by contract. Since the source is open, they have a broad choice of contractors and resellers to chose from and complete flexibility to change anything to meet their most exacting needs. The freedom from per machine, per user, and per connection licensing costs enables rapid deployment and flexible reconfiguration without budget surprises.
What are the benefits of open source?
1. Lower software costs
2. More flexibility
3. More reliable products
4. Better standardization and long term stability
5. Not reliant on a single vendor
6. Faster pace of innovation
7. New projects can build on the existing base of open source code
8. Data is not “hidden away” in proprietary formats
9. Peer review increases security for systems exposed to public networks
What are the risks of open source?
Most open source projects will fail.
Open source methods, like all software development methods, do not guarantee success. The key technical factors for success are the skills and dedication of the core developers and interface designers on the project. Open source projects can also fail for market reasons if they do not produce results faster than competitive projects.
Although no statistics are available, the failure rate for new open source projects is probably similar to the failure rate for new proprietary development projects.
Canceled open source projects leave a legacy of source code and ideas that can be merged into more successful efforts or recycled into other projects.
Open source projects are not deadline driven.
With an open ended development team, it is impossible to reliably predict release dates. This is not a problem when deploying finished works, but can be a problem if customers become dependent on anticipated future events. Customers can manage this risk by active participation in the open source project concerned.
There are some application areas where the economics don’t make sense.
Where the number of users is small and they are in strong competition, the value of contributing to an open source project is less clear.
Open source software is not as well established as proprietary software.
Open source software has been available and growing in scope for decades, but there are still many application areas where open source solutions are not yet available in final form. There are an extremely large number of active projects working to close this gap.
Open source software is also unfamiliar to many potential users. Individuals and corporations with UNIX experience have a wide range of open source products that are familiar and available. Users habituated to other platforms have fewer open source products available without changing operating systems and face more of a learning curve.
In the past, the press and market research organizations have not evaluated open source alternatives to proprietary software. Background information on open source software is only now being written.
Open source software is unproven for non-technical applications.
Not surprisingly, the first successes of open source source software have been in areas where the users and developers are one and the same. The origins of open source have been developers with unmet problems, needs or desires who then wrote code for their own use, often in their spare time, and shared the results with other developers.
Open source is now expanding into new areas and producing products for non-technical users, but this work is in its infancy.
Why now?
Three reasons:
* the Internet,
* Linux, and
* changes in proprietary software pricing.
The Internet is a key enabler for the development and distribution of open source software. The rapid expansion of the Internet into business and the home has extended the reach of open source and more widely publicized its benefits.
Open source products have been available for years and used extensively in the UNIX world. The creation of open source operating systems such as Linux and others, have “completed the circle” enabling complete systems and networks to be deployed entirely with open source software. The popularity of Linux has generated new revenue for open source vendors that is now being used to expand development efforts.
Early microcomputer software was sold for a fixed price that included telephone support and sometimes bug fixes and updates. As microprocessors have penetrated the corporate market, pricing has moved more towards the older negotiated price agreements for products and services used in minicomputer and mainframe software. The unbundling of support from products makes the open source business model more attractive to vendors and more familiar to customers.
What are the successes of open source?
* Linux is the only operating system other than the Microsoft Windows family with a growing market share. According to press reports quoting IDC and Datapro studies, Linux is now used by more than 14% of businesses and it’s market share is expected to overtake the Mac OS before 2001.
* Netscape Navigator is now an open source product. Netscape has seen the advantages of open source.
* Apache is the number one web server in use. Apache development is partially supported by IBM.
* The Internet is founded on the use of open source software to define and refine it’s protocols.
* GNU compilers and other development tools are now the standard tools on many platforms.
* FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are the foundation of many ISP businesses and major web services such as Yahoo.
* The Perl language is the basis for much of the active content on web pages. O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. supports work on perl.
Can I trust my business to open source software?
If you do business on the Internet, you already do.
Key infrastructure of the Internet, such as domain name lookup and e-mail forwarding is done largely with open source software. Many Internet service providers and some of the most active sites on the web are hosted on open source operating systems.
Bob Young, president of RedHat software, has compared buying proprietary software to buying a car with the hood welded shut. Peer reviews and widespread testing of experimental builds during the open source development process have proven to result in final products that are more reliable than their commercial counterparts. In the event of problems, having the source available and modifiable enables the root cause to be found and fixed. With closed software, the only alternative is to reinstall the software and tinker with it’s controls until the symptoms go away or pay the vendor to fix the problem when they have time.
What role does Minoru play in open source?
Minoru Development Corporation is in the business of developing open source software. We have the technical capacity to add new code and documentation to existing open source products and manage new open source initiatives. We also advise software producers and consumers on how to benefit from open source software.
Customer constructed software is an idea whose time has come.
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