OpenLife

I am so tired of incumbent Telcos spending tons of money based on monopoly rent on advertising campaigns telling us customers how much they care about us and how they are dedicated to service, when THE FACT is that their service more than often is lousy if not non existing.

Here I am in the international departure lounge of Heathrow having an hour to spend before boarding my plane. In front of me is a big expensive plasma screen telling me that a British Telecom division/subsidiary (whatever) is offering WiFi access to Internet hungry travelers.

Filled with expectation I power up my laptop and start browser and get a screen that ask me to pay 6 GBP (!) for 1 hour of access. I accept, of course. I want to get access.

I go through the long and cumbersome process of setting up a BT OpenZone account, give up a lot of information and finally arrive at where I have to pay with my creditcard. I dutifully fill in all the required numbers. Alas, only to receive an error message “invalid credit card number” after I click on “I accept”. I try three different all valid and international creditcards to no avail. Same error message!

Then I call the BT OpenZone customer service on the mobile phone. The message is: “Oh, there are some problems with international creditcards. We apologize” What then? “You can buy a voucher at a shop in the lounge and use that”. Ok, goodbye and thank you for nothing. I go to the shop and ask for a voucher. “No, Sir, we haven’t had these vouchers for weeks. They are sold out!”

So here I am. I have spent more than half an hour trying to get access without any success. I will have to pay my own mobile company for the call to the BT OpenZone customer service. My batteries on my laptop is down at least 45 minutes. And there will be other frustrated potential customers like me, like there have probably been before me. Because BT OpenZone has bothered to give me or others any information on the sign-up or else where that some of us should not bother spending the time trying to get access. BT OpenZone sucks”

Traditional wisdom: Open source was about license. Open source means OSD-compliant licenses.

Paradigm shift. Thomas Kuhn: The structure of scientific revolution. All rules are different. Big change.

PC Paradigm shift (hardware). 1981-1982. Commodity hardware with open infrastructure. IBM released standard for IBM PC to beat Apple.

Low cost cost and pure play commodity hardware business models beat proprietary add-ons. Dell beats IBM and Compaq.

Companies that stayed in the old paradigm died. Digital, Data General and Prime

The PC Paradigm Shift (Software). Software decoupled from hardware. Lock-in move from hardware to software.

Paradigm failure at work. You all use Linux everyday because you all use google everyday. Question: There is no user-friendly applications based on Linux. Wrong answer: Yes, Gnome, OpenOffice etc. The right answer: We have Google, Amazon, eBay etc.

The Internet application platform. LAMB (Linux, Apache, MySGL, PHP) is backend. Frontend is a platform agnostic desktop browser.

Another paradigm failure. Most interesting software applications used today with GPL software is not distributed as software normally is distributed. So the GPL does not apply. Licenses triggered by binary transfer have no effect.

The value in these application lie in the data and thier customer interaction more than their software.

Licensing. GPL was not to do something new but to do something old. GPL was increasingly to become a barrier to innovation. The Apache and BSD liocense are more friendly to innovation.

“An innovation has to make sense in the world where it is finished not where it is started”, Ray Kurtzweil.

The Internet paradigm shift. Commodity software with an open architecture. Infoware - eBay, MapQuest, Amazon - is decoupled from both hardware and software.

Competitive advantage moves up from the stack of software to the service above the level of a single device.

Value is based on the data and customer relationship not on propriety software.

Intel is still inside, but so is Cisco. There is plenty of room both at the bottom and at the top of the stack.

Network-enabled collaboration. Collaboration not licensing is the mother of open source.

The adhocracy of like minded developers that can find each other and work in ever shifting groups.

Power shifts from companies to individuals. Everybody is a free agent. Linux moves with Linus Thorvalds from job to job.

Much more open source software than Linux: The commercial Internet. Rick Adams: UUCP, Usenet News, SLIP. Paul Vixie: DNS and Bind. Sendmail and e-mail routing. WWW is not just open source but in the public domain. Apache now has 67 % of the market.

The architecture of open source. O’Reilly started CollabNet to commoditize the Apache development process. Used by big companies inside the corporate firewall.

Building on top of open source, Yahoo! pays people to build their directories. Learning from open source, DMOZ/Open directory and Wikipedia use volunteers. Napster/Kazaa users build song swapping network as byproduct of their own self-interest (”Scratching their own itch”).

Open source behavior emerges in large enough development organizations such as Microsoft like ASP.net.

More people have “contributed” to Amazon than to Linux. eBay’s has a natural monopoly. Google uses peoples’ page-ranking.

Business model thoughts for commodity software. Engineering reliable systems from independently developed competent may be THE key open source business competency.

Ray Lane is general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The IT industry is at a watershed. The industry is still based on a proprietary, non modular and “not invented here” approach. This must change now. IT industry must in this sense become like the automobile industry and so on.

2004 will relatively good compared to the last 3 years. Things are getting better. But why is the software industry still so ridden by paranoia?

What is the next big thing? Why is that question always asked when the industry wants to get out of a slump. The next big thing is maybe a decade away.

Is open source or web service a big thing? It doesn’t matter. They shift us into a different meaning of innovation and use and technology that we haven’t seen before.

The IT industry has been built on tectonic events. Transistor, microprocessor, os, pc, internet.

New economy. We had a totally different language to communicate with each other a couple of years ago. We thought that the new economy meant dramatic shift in productivity. All used this vocabulary, Alan Greenspan etc.

New language: Does IT matter? Are there bigger and more important factors. questions posed by e.g. Nick Carr in Harvard Business Review.

How does the entrepreneur create a company in this shifting environment? Very difficult.

People from the sixties and seventies recognize that the current environment is the normal market to do business in. The optimism of nineties was a singular event.

Was the new economy really being destroyed? No, the new economy actually survived big time. Look at Amazon, eBay, teleworkers, proliferation of the Internet.

By the end of the decade most dot-com visions of the mid-nineties will have become truth.

Global peace has been shattered by terrorism. From the predictability of the cold war to the randomness of terrorism.

Market economics has suffered from scandals, bankruptcies. Global growth has stagnated spearheaded by Germany and Japan.

Innovation has become very difficult today? How do you innovate today?

Constraints. Volatile. The world is so unpredictability. How to plan the business with invisible, asymmetric threats from and terrorists and ever more rapidly changing markets. Businesses are transparent. “The public company in a fishbowl”. Low growth. Now you have to focus on profitability and not just growth.

Knowledge work globalization. Outsourcing and free trade. India is not a black box. Things go the way they do in India because of political will to invest in education.

US has do something not to become France where 40% of the work force work for the government!

Network based services providers. Models like salesforce.com are going to become very much more popular.

The vast spending in the nineties is not entirely lost. But you have to persuade these CIOs to invest more. Because of the investment in the nineties you can do much more and have to pay for this.

Portable computing. I can do anything on the road.

The new enterprise has to be able to spot demand. More the ability to shrink than to grow. Not invest in fixed asset like workers and assets. Invest in operational exp. instead of capital exp.

Technology has to service-centric instead of component-centric.

Scarcity. “Management” vs, “engineers”. Now we don’t need more engineers but more clever managers.

To much focus with entrepreneurs on innovation instead of on renovation. To much have been invested in IT. Now customers want to know how to use these investments better and not how to buy new technology.

Now it is all about service. What you start a new car company today or would you start a car service company?

When investing in a new company, find the competence in the business model, outsource everything else. There has to be predictable metrics. Ubiquitous access for everyone not just in Silicon Valley or in the US. Continuos updates to persuade customers to move to your service.

Service-oriented architecture. There are too many databases. The ERP systems have produced too many databases that don’t work together.

Software industry 2001 in the world. 2000 billion USD market, 70 % US share of this market, the market is 1 % of GDP. 325.000 people employed in the IT industry in the US.

Today. Open source software and Web service. Standards are very important. Enterprise adoption with respect to open source software: Lower TCO, equivalent functionality, equivalent quality [and 3 other things that I cannot remember].

Some challenges: informal support, velocity of changes, no roadmap, functional gaps, licensing caveats, ISV endorsements (waiting for ISV to jump the bandwagon)

Software industry in 2010: OSS destruction leads to growth (”Creative destruction”). US share of market less than 60 % maybe less. The same as have happened in all other maturing industries. Less of 1 % US GDP. Less than 325.000 people employed in the US in the IT industry. Lower grow than the economy in general.

Software will be delivered as services. We are moving into the golden age of the IT industry. Open source is the key factor together with with web service in this transition.

A software company has a different DNA a different mentality than a service company.

In a software company a few people are actually delivering software. The rest are delivering services.

David Ritter is VP for strategic consulting at Boston Consulting Group.

Open source is about passion. How to unleash the passion of open source in a traditional organizational setting?

IBM and viral marketing was until Linux an oxymoron.

[Story about how the Linux quickly solved a security problem found in Italy.]

More than 80.000 e-mail message a month coordinate the Linux actions.

Why are people participating in open source projects. Hacker motivation: Creativity, learning, fun, skill, freedom and need

These are people that volunteer significant amount of time, they are IT professionals, and typically generation Xers

The creative connection. Not a religious crusade to destroy Microsoft. A desire to contribute, learn, share and fulfill a need for something to be done.

Community believers 19%, hobbyist 27&, professionals 25 %, learning and stimulations (the rest)

Are there companies that have been able to achieve “open source mentalities” in other areas. Example from Toyota and the fire at he Korean plant of Aisin Seiki.

Centered around trust. Information symmetry/transparency. Individual learning. Shared mental models. Swarming. Its about the work and not about who you are. Meritocracy and not feudalism.

Take the look at the world though networks. Social networks, networks of interactions between people. How can work be done across traditional boundaries to benefit the company as a whole?

Case story: Key players become apparent in physicians referral networks. Which doctors refer most often to hospitals. Some key players really matters. The same thing takes place with respect to contributing to scientific research. Influence the key players and you influence the world.

Open source software projects in a company: Look for target problems or projects that have a clear objective, where individuals can make a difference, that will benefit from a lot of eyeballs, and that cross organizational boundaries.

A few ideas to consider for potential open source projects: Your product support knowledge base, IT or technology standards. your IT application portfolio.

Open source project check list:
- Global goal. A compelling collective vision.
- Individual goals. “It’s the work, stupid.”
- Peer leadership. Fact based, passionate, open and accountable
- Modularity
- Connectivity
- Work norms
- Work space
- “Call to arms.” Why this effort, why us, why now?

CEOs from Sleepycat, TrollTech, MySQL and JBoss.

Legally and technically you can also go from open source license to dual licensing. In open source projects where lot of contributors have copyright to their individual contribution, all these have to accept to enter into a dual licensing scheme.

LGPL is good for JBoss. Modification is contributed back to the JBoss core. Provides a stable base. But it is not viral. Software vendors would not accept the GPL because JBoss’ has a middleware product.

Quid pro quo philosophy at MySQL. GPL is best to serve that purpose. Nor perfect but the best available. GPL was added in 2000. MySQL is not middleware but a database, which makes a difference. On the GPL side mySQL saves money by having free help to produce the software. On the commercial license mySQL makes money by charging license fee.

Q public license invented by TrollTech in 2000. Shifted to GPL later because it protects and because it is widespread. LGPL is not suited for TrollTech.

Sleepycat public license. A proprietary license that is less than one page. Some licenses are better for dual licensing. The open source license should put obligations on the user that they are willing to pay to avoid. The commercial has to give warranties, updates, support and other things customers demand. An advantage of a dual-licensing scheme is that it is possible to provide clauses that makes the SCO threat irrelevant.

Sleepycat does not believe that a positive cost-benefit analysis will lead to that it is worth spending money on business that do not confirm with its commercial license. Serious businesses will pay to confirm with the licenses. Non compliant business probably wouldn’t have the money to pay for the license in the first place.

Not use the term viral license for the GPL rather “reciprocal” license. I give you something, now you have to give me something back. Copyleft or forced sharing is a key force in the relative success of Linux as opposed to Unix version the BSD license.

Is there analogy between the pharmaceutical industry and the IT industry with the respect to the development of open source. Patents for drug expires and generic drugs are introduced on the market almost on the exact date of expiration. It is an advantage that the pharmaceutical company can plan its business exactly on the premise that it knows when its monopoly will expire.

Not the same degree of predictability for IT company developing software. It know that it will get competition not from generic drugs but from open source software.

Business models for open source:

- Commercial software can run on open source software without itself being or becoming open source software (Oracle).
- Support and services tied to open source. Make distribution. Adapt to new version. Provide consulting services (Red Hat). “Let’s wait and see, if this is a sustainable business model.”
- Aggregating and enhancing. “My favorite”
- Commercializing with a dual-license (mySQL). An open source license or a closed source license.
- Enabling hardware. Providing drivers etc.
- End-of-life. I am not interested in the product anymore but I have customer that still care. Maintaining old products together with customers and competitor to save costs.
- Building an ECOsystem. Eclipse. Apache.

You might decide NOT to go open source:
- Product is control point for you. You might not want to give that up.
-Product should go obsolete.
- You want to compete against the open source community.
- Misdirection and defocusing of resource
- Just because the technology is cool. It may be better to sell it.

You want to go open source:
- when you want to promote existing standards
- pervasive technology that already exist
- you are able to refocus resources to add value.

What are you really buying when you are buying open source software? Are you just buying the right to copy?

Guidelines for using open source. Create a company policy (business and community), establish relationship with community and communicate to customers, partners and community.

Legal framwork. Which license does the company use? Who owns the code made in the spare time - the employee or the employer?

Types of open source organizations. Organizations, Projects (Linux, Eclipse, OpenSSI) and Individuals (Samba, Debian)

Panel on Detailed Analysis of the GPL and open source licensing

Copyleft. To understand the copyleft provision of the GPL you have to listen to the open source community and industry. Free Software Foundation is the author of the GPL and they own a lot of GPL code. So their opinion on the understanding of the GPL is important. But there are other owners of GPL code. Their interpretations as copyright holders and licensors are also important.

When you interpret the GPL you move away from strict lawyerly interpretation of the wording to take into consideration other things. This makes it more “risky” to work with GPL so this comes down to risk management. You have to look into the spirit of the GPL, the attitudes of the licensor and so on.

The cases necessary to give legal certainty are coming slowly, but they are coming like was the case with shrink wrap. GPL vs. LGPL. The spirit of the GPL and LGPL or “the purpose”.

The GPL cannot be negotiated. Proprietary can be negotiate. period etc.

Is the GPL based on statutory right or contracts?

Is easier to assert infringement of software patents with respect to open source software because the source code is accessible. But there are also more people involved in open source project to contest the patent [I didn't really get the point here].

How do you deal with different interpretations of the GPL by different contributors to Linux. Different opinions of the scope of copylefts. Can you under the GPL force contributors to assign the copyright to the contribution to a third party?

As ALWAYS an extremely professional and engaging presentation by prof. Lessig. He got a huge well-deserved applause from the audience!

The notes are very fragmented, as it is difficult to concentrate on taking notes, when he is doing his presentation.

Did Kodak need permission to capture image? No, luckily not. Imagine the lack of growth that would have followed, if something like the Dequerre Machine Control Act (DMCA) had been passed by the American Congress at that time.

Extraordinary opportunity cost will be imposed on the market because of restrictive legislation. Legislation that prevents innovators to use information.

Until 1976 the US had a conditional copyright regime. Tiny proportion of work was actually covered by copyright before 1976. After 1976 everything is presumably controlled. First permission then use and innovation.

What is “piracy”?. Video presentation of the Bush/Blair duet of “endless love”.

CPTech proposes a meeting a couple of years ago at WIPO to discuss secure open collaborative efforts such as F/OSS. MSFT prevented that meeting.

IP McCarthyism. War on Terrorism. The terrorist are the people who wants to balance intellectual property rights.

We - the technologist - have produces “bit-heads”. You are either for or against property rights (binary).

A primer on Open Source licensing, or: How to ride the penguin (without hitting the icebergs)

Presentation by Heather J. Meeker of Greenberg Traurig.

Two broad categories of licenses: Free and open licenses. Viral and non-viral licenses in lawyer speak.

Public domain (copyrights are relinquished) and “proprietary” code. Both open source and closed are proprietary code, so the term “proprietary” as opposed to open source code does not make sense.

BSD license. A very short license. “Redistribution and use in source and binary, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met”.

The disclaimer means “I am giving you this stuff to use, but you are responsible for your own use”.

Lesson no. 1. It is easy to get mixed up in trying to understand with does the text of the GPL really mean. In the open source community text is interpreted broadly or widely. It is important to know how is the text perceived in the industry as well of how a lawyers is interpreting it.

GNU GPL. This particular license gives lawyers a lot of headaches. A very interesting document. More a political statement that is very different from other licenses,

The GNU GPL is viral agreement. If you get GPL covered work and you make derivative code you have to relicense this code under the GPL.

Derivative work is a copyright term. The GPL seeks to defined what is derivative work and what is not derivative work. The problem is that the GPL has multiple definitions of same variables.

The open source community has many opinions about what the GPL says on derivative work, but the lawyers have to know about this.

You need to know the concerns and “feeling” how the Free Software Foundation because they will always be involved in the enforcement of the GPL. You have to comply with the “spirit” of the GPL.

Derivative work can be difficult to pin down. It is not obvoius that a piece of code written from scratch and dynamically linked to GPL code.

Copyleft is really a trade secret scheme not a copy right issue.

Take the example of OEM type software distribution agreement as oppose to the GPL. OEM means that the licensor finds a licensee that has a compatible product and that the licensee gets the right to license the licensor’s code to use with the compatible product.

Distribution in object code as opposed to distribution in source code.

The source code is a trade secret in the typically OEM agreement.

Use of open source does not require you to lay open source code. Provenance of the code: Where did the code that you use really coming from - SCO vs. IBM.

Creating an open source project. Did you develop the software? Have you the copyright to issue the software under a open source license? Who has contributed? Have the contributors assigned the rights to you? The enforcement of an open source license is easier, if you hold the full copyrights.

Are you willing to open the barn door irrevocably.

Using the open source code in your products. GPL compliance. What are the issue of embedding open source code in your products.

Compliance with open not free license are much easier.

Keeping track of inbound licenses. Need to keep track of the open source code that is included in the product. Important to trach changes in open source licenses.

Due diligence. Make an audit on what open source code is in the target’s products. Necessary to compare this to buyers’ need for warranties. Make sure that you have documentation.

As an open source project initiator don’t forget your exit option. You may want to turn your hobby into a business. You may want to contribute code to a business.

Contributors to open source development. Make sure that you are allowed in the employment contract to participate as matter of using time. Make sure that you don’t contribute that you employer has the copyright for or that there are trade secret issues.

Contamination by code owned by others or by trade secret cannot only be handled by professional management of the open source project. Trade secret can be difficult to enforce because the open source project lays open the secret, and the more it is used the more it becomes less a secret. Not so different from (or inherently different) a proprietary code project but the due diligence process can be typically much more cumbersome because of the amount of external contributors to the project.

Linux will do for applications what the Internet did for networks. When the Internet came about there where many other networks. After the Internet, all the networks merged into one network.

IBM initially approached Linux by investigating throroughly the strengths and weaknesses of Linux. Long white-paper on the issue. Multiyear roadmap on how to handle the problems.

Presently IBM has 600 people in the Linux Technology Center. 43 locations. 150 open source projects. 600 people on IBM payroll to make Linux and other open source software better.

Why is open source important? A major source of innovation. Great community approach with lot of eyeballs to solve problems. There are many problems that call for all people to participate in the solutions. Good approach to developing emerging standards. Enterprise customers like open source because of the flexibility.

Lesson learned. Open sourcing of the J2EE XML parser was necessary to accelerate the adoption of an open standard.

Establishment of the IBM Open Source Steering Committee to coordinate IBM efforts in the field. Guidance and rejection of certain internal projects. Competition for good projects.

Key focus is Linux. IBM is ecognized a major contributor to the kernel. Not IBM but IBM employees. Other projects: HTTP server, Xerces XML server, Xalan XSLT stylesheet, Axis SOAP, Web services Invocation Framework, Web Services Inspection Language.

Eclipse is a cross platform for developing tools for open source project. Promoting growing skills in programming.

Globus and grid technology. Strong IBM involvment. An emerging thing. Not adopted as a standard yet.

Open source project in a capitalistic system needs support from at least one vendor or customer. You need at least one cheerleader.

Linux enables on demand business. Business should be able to adapt to changes in the market also with respect to the use of IT.

Linux helps to simplify the IT environment for businesses. IT infrastructure - Firewall, Print/File, web, server, e-mail - can be structured around Linux.

At the application layer Linux can also help to consolidate servers.

Linux are used to base enterprise applications on. SAP etc.

Linux on the desktop is not that mature yet. But real cost saving in certain cases by using industry specific applications and browser based clients.

Not that large TCO savings on using openoffice on the desktop when used as a compliment to MS office suite. The problem is that you are not substituting but complimenting and thus have to maintain to desktop environment.

3-10 years transition period before we will see the large impact of open source software on the desktop.

IBM Linux strategy: Darwin quote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent but the one most responsive to change”

In order to be successful in open source business: Focus on customers not on code.