Future of Software-Challenges and Opportunities for Open-Standards and Open-Source? Kuldeep Nagi Fulbright Fellow-2006 Lecturer-ICT College of Internet Distance Education Assumption University, Bangkok, Thailand
[email protected] Abstract “Hello my friends on the 9th floor of CIDE, here is the URL I used, please download this exciting software from download.com, it’s free.” Did you ever hear something like this in your work place? In fact, these days it is quite common to hear this from your peers using a PC or a laptop. The current software field is showing frantic growth in the usage of open- source and free software. The success of sites such as C-NET is a testimony to open- source revolution. There is an ongoing discussion in the open-standard sand open- source community about the best way to provide commercial development. For example, a company such as Red Hat, which distributes Linux, is firmly committed to the GNU Public License, even for their value-added extensions. Their argument is that packaging, brand, and channels of distribution are sufficient to protect their market and give them an acceptable return on their investment. The advent of technologies such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, XML and host of others including Web 2.0 technologies have given hope to minimize integration pains, thereby enabling successful “open standards” for global commerce by breaking the geographical, cultural, language and other barriers.
The beginning of the 21st century has created new global opportunities and challenges for software development, its distribution and usage. The frantic growth of Internet and Web 2.0 technologies is also creating new challenges for software developer communities around the world. This paper will address some of these issues in a global context. Keywords: F/OSS, FSF, Global, Internet, Open source, Open standards, Web 2.0
1. Introduction Open source is a term that has recently gained currency as a way to describe the tradition of open standards, shared source code, and collaborative development behind software products such as the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, the Apache Web Server, the Perl and Python languages, and much of the Internet infrastructure, including BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon Servers that run the Domain Name System), the Sendmail mail server, and host of other programs that are downloaded free all over the world [1]. However, I should mention that Microsoft have changed BIND into a more effective solution as DNS (Domain Name Services). The Open Source campaign became international news in 1998 when Netscape decided to make the next version of its Web browser (Mozilla) an open-source product, and when IBM adopted the Apache Web Server as the core of its
WebSphere product line. Similar efforts are being made by Google, Apple and other big companies to allow more user participation in their product development process.
differences in the ways the two kinds of software may be used and distributed and reflect differences in the philosophy behind them.
1.1 Differences between Open Source and Free Software
In the last few years a number of papers have been published based on the topics such as economic status of a country, government policies, software development industry, academic environment, the benefits of “open model” versus the “closed model” and business strategies of using “open” model, but very few papers have been written about the changing global trends in the transformation of open-source turning into commercial software products and services.
There are lots of controversies about the licensing issues in open source arena. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has related but distinct criteria for evaluating whether or not a license qualifies a program as free software. All licenses qualified as free software are also considered open source licenses. There are also shared source licenses which have some similarities with open source, such as the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL), but are not compatible with the open source definitions. Free and Open Source Software, also called F/OSS, FOSS, or FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) is software which is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to study, change, and improve its design by making available the source code. This approach has gained both momentum and acceptance as the potential benefits have been increasingly recognized by both individuals and corporate players. F/OSS is an inclusive term generally synonymous with both free software and open source software which describe similar development models, but with differing cultures and philosophies. 'Free software' focuses on the philosophical freedoms it gives to users and 'open source' focuses on the perceived strengths of its peer-to-peer development model. Many people relate to both aspects and so 'F/OSS' is a term that can be used without particular bias towards either camp. Free software licenses and Open-source licenses are used by many software packages. The licenses have important differences, which mirror the
The second aim of this paper is to take a closer look at software development trends in 21st century including social and ethical dilemmas, and what those dilemmas might be, especially in ASEAN region where the costly commercial software is available almost free. The piracy of commercial software products is so rampant that one almost forgets the distinction between opensource, free and commercial software. However, the myths and realities of openstandards and open- source are as interesting as the businesses and users who use them. A small fraction of research for this paper is done using the traditional print based media. The majority of material for this paper has been obtained through Google and other internet sources. All in all, everything I could find as useful information has been carefully examined and included in this paper. The over all aim of this paper is to shed some light on the current state of openstandards and open-source and its growing influence in shaping the future of businesses, internet and its users world-wide.
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2. Changing Development.
Context
of
Software
2.3 Market fragmentation
The frantic growth in Internet has changed the context of software development. We can relate these contextual changes in software industry to the following indicators. This new context is derived from the growth and expansion of both public and private sector companies and organizations, including the open-source community efforts across the globe.
Globalization has massively increased the range of markets and segments so that they are widely dispersed and locally variedputting pressure on software development companies to cover more territory, often far from traditional experiences, such as the “bottom of the pyramid” conditions that prevail in many emerging markets [2]. These trends are very clear in Asian-Pacific countries.
2.1 Acceleration of knowledge production
2.4 Market virtualization
It is estimated that more than $1 trillion is being spent every year in public and private sector in creating new knowledge, hence extending the frontiers along which “breakthrough” software development may occur. Both the private companies and opensource efforts are focused on their market potential. Productions of new enterprise software solution have turned India, China, Russia and Brazil into major knowledge producing as well as knowledge consumer societies.
Increasing use of Internet as a marketing channel means different approaches for software development. At the same time emergence of large scale social networks in cyberspace poses new challenges in software development and research- for example, My Space currently has over 120 million subscribers, making it 11th largest country in the world with population greater than Mexico and only slightly lower than Japan! Similarly Second Life has now over 6 million “residents.” These new and emerging virtual worlds provide new opportunities for private and public software development efforts.
2.2 Global production
distribution
of
software
Global production of software is increasing involving new player, especially in the emerging markets of developing countries such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. Hence there is growing need to search for innovative opportunities for software development across wider space as well larger profits from the broader global market. Rise of India as hub for software development and services is a clear sign of how the software development is moving from the Western world to other regions of the world.
On the other hand new Web 2.0 technologies are enabling sharing, collaboration, online courseware, training and services. It is also about mobility, open content, open standards and, of course, open source. However, much of the efforts to use these technologies have been concentrated in the Western countries. Sun Microsystems a leading software company located in California, USA has taken first step towards building their own platform from the ground up and it is an open source project. Darkstar is the name of the engine used to build massively scalable online virtual worlds. Wonderland is one virtual world built on the Darkstar engine. MPK 20 is Sun
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Microsystems' latest office building in this new Wonderland. 2.5 Rise of active users Although the users have been recognized as the main consumer of software products and services there is acceleration in the way the user are now engaged in improving these products and services. As an example we can marvel at the involvement of software development community and users in the evolution of Linux. In sectors like media the lines between the creators of content and user is also getting blurred- for example, You Tube has around 100 million videos viewed each day but also has 70,000 new videos uploaded every day from its users [3]. Same is true of Wikepedia, My Space and other services which are expanding in everyway because of the close involvement of its users. Also the increasing linkage enabled by exponential growth in ICT around internet and broadband have enabled and reinforced alternative social networking possibilities. At the same time increasing availability of simulation, collaborative and prototyping tools provided by Web 2.0 have reduced the separation between users and producers. 3. Commercial Product Development on an Open-Source Base Large companies are not the only players trying to understand where the boundaries are between commercial development and community-based open-source development. It is of course the biggest challenge for opensource to prove it can create products that are accessible to nontechnical users. This emerging trend to use “free” and “open” software is quickly becoming of interest to many “for-profit” giant companies like IBM, HP, SUN, NEC, Yahoo and Google.
Many open-source developers are experimenting to find the best way for their work to “cross the chasm” from early adopters to a wider market. There seems to be a natural complimentarily between opensource and commercial development
Figure-1 Market Share of major players from 1997-2008 Open-source provides raw material, if you will, that can be further refined and extended by commercial development. The Figure-1 gives us a glimpse of ups and downs in the market share of major software vendors. In summer of 2008, Evans Data Corporation conducted primary market research on application servers-interviewing over 700 developers and ICT professionals worldwide and asking them to rate the top application servers that they had personally used. TABLE-1 User Ranking-Application Servers-2008 User Ranking-Applicat ion Ser ver -2008
450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 Oracle WebLogic Server
IBM WebSpher e
Red Hat JBoss
Microsof t Windows Ser ver 2003
SAP Net Weaver
Sun Java Syst em Applicat ion Server/ GlassFish
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Users were only asked to rate the features of those application servers that they had used, and only shown questions pertaining to those application servers if they had previously indicated they were a user of the product. Consequently, the information reflects the opinions and perceptions of the software’s users. The rankings are shown in Table-1 given above. In another survey conducted very recently after the release of Microsoft Vista the Microsoft Windows still holds 57.5% of the market while Linux has 40.6% as its share (Table-2). When it comes down to the operating system market, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are in a traditional three horse rage for the largest install base. So far, Microsoft has virtually owned the market, dominating with a share of over 90% with the Windows platform, Apple is runner up with Mac OS X at about 5-6%, and Linux is the undisputed underdog with percentages varying in accordance with different reports from under 1% (Net Application) to almost 2% (W3Counter). At the same time, a survey, put together by the Linux Foundation, comes to underline a strong growth in popularity for the open source platform, even with the advent of Windows Vista and Mac OS X. TABLE-2 Market Share OS Market Share- OS
published by Evans Data Corporation, a vendor-neutral third-party market research firm (Figure-2). The data shows 40% database usage by developers, up from 32% two years ago. Evans Data Corp. noted that with more and more developers using Open Source (65% in North America in Fall 2006), usage of MySQL is projected to continue to increase in the future. According to another recent JoinVision study "Open Source in the Fast Lane", ICT specialists indicated they deploy MySQL, an open source application 30% more frequently than Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or DB2. Because of its popularity, MySQL has the support of leading American ICT companies including major hardware and software vendors such as AMD, Apple, BMC, Business Objects, Dell, Embarcadero, EMC, Intel, Novell, Quest Software, Red Hat, SAP, Sun, Veritas and others.
Figure-2 Database Market Share 3.1 Myths and Realities of Open Source & Open Standards- Case study of Apple
70.0% 60.0% 50.0% 40.0% 30.0% 20.0% 10.0% 0.0% Microsof t
Linux
Apple
However, in the area of databases MySQL has gained 25% market share in overall database usage by developers in the last two years, according to data drawn from a range of recent multi-client surveys
As an extreme case the work done by Apple Corporation is a good example how a company can take open-source software, such as UNIX and turn it to a commercial product. The strength of open source development helped to make up for a grievous weakness in Apple's previous strategies. In the 80s, Apple introduced the Macintosh as an appliance computer. The Mac greatly reduced the complexity of computing by using highly sophisticated,
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custom software that presented complex and foreign ideas in intuitive ways. There is school of though which believes that for Apple the mass market profits came from hardware, not software sales. Apple was developing some of the most complex desktop software in the industry, and had no way to earn its money back apart from using it to add value to Macs. CEO John Sculley determined that Apple needed to start selling its Mac System Software as a retail package. However, sales did not turn out to be very impressive, partly because the Mac System Software had already been established to be free, and asking consumers to pay for something they currently get for free is a difficult sale. That put Apple in a tough position. It could drop its entire business model of building Macs as ready to go, sophisticated machines and port its windowing software to run on UNIX or DOS PCs, or it could struggle to maintain itself as a proprietary island in a sea of standardized UNIX machines and DOS computers. Others may have pointed this out in their research papers, but I was wondering why it is that Apple is often thought of so well in open source circles. While I was in living in USA I would see tons of Mac laptops at conferences but any mention of using Windows and you would get flamed pretty quickly.
Figure-3 Boycott Apple logo Yet Apple is actually more closed than most companies. In Fact, it is one of the
reasons why they lost the PC war. They use some open source in Safari and OS/X but as far as I can tell, they don't give that much back. Yes, they have an open source section in their developer connection website. But I don't see anyone really complaining about that, especially in ASEAN open source circle. On the other hand, there are lots of open source activist groups in USA that oppose the double standards adopted by Apple and they rally around in conferences to boycott Apple products (Figure-3). 3.1 Logs and lumber In the open-source community programmers often use the metaphor of logs and lumber. Open-source, they argue, is a great way to produce logs. But while there are expert users who are happy to build log cabins, or to split their own logs into lumber, a wider class of users can be reached if companies provide “lumber” in the form of pre-built binaries, value-added interfaces or development environments, documentation, and other elements of large commercial products [5]. Many small companies, such as Scriptics, Sendmail and ActiveState Tool Corporation are taking a hybrid approach, providing both a rich open-source product base and proprietary value added extensions. Strong partisans of the GPL and the strict OpenSource Definition might find fault with such an approach. Ultimately, though, experimentation in the market will tell us more than philosophical debates whether an open-source license (or simply an open architecture), access to source code (even if only on the basis of a paid license), or tools for integrating the user community into the development process, are the most important elements in the continuing success and scalability of open-source and open- standard projects.
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3.2 Open Source- Issues in Thailand The new Thai ICT minister recently gave a talk at the IT Press Club that he does not support eSociety and eBook projects. He gave a short note that he does not see much benefits of open source! This is what he said “With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated,” Apart from Linux, he claimed that most open source software is often abandoned and not developed, and leads to a lot of lowquality software with lots of bugs. “As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away? Thailand can do good source code without open source,” he said. [Source: Bangkok Post] In reality, in ASEAN there are organizations, businesses, government agencies and NGOs which are extensively using and supporting the open source standards and software. 4. Conclusions In this new century the battle for ideological control of software’s next wave is being waged fiercely between two factions. In the growing global market, the private sector is not only seeking more profits for their investors but also wants to use the collective intelligence of the software development community by slightly loosening its grip on intellectual property. On the other side, the supporters of open source wants to do away with intellectual property altogether. To a certain extent both sides agree that distributing source code- the essential blueprints required to modify a computer program- is a good thing. Both believe that empowering users with the
opportunity to change and extend their software will have a positive, reinvigorating effect on software development at large. To some open source is a way of life, not a better way of picking potential winners and losers. Open-source programs such as Linux, Apache, and Perl are no longer fringe product- they are well on their way to the center. That is where agreement ends. And, considering that both sides have completely different ends in mind that should come as no surprise. So far much of the playing field seems tilted towards giants like Microsoft, Google, HP and IBM. And in this new century these big companies have lots to prove. Never has the open source concept really been tested in a radically competitive global arena like the computer industry has lately become. It's not clear that corporate culture will be able defer their attention from IPOs, quarterly reporting of profits, and inter-corporate fighting long enough to recognize how the open source proposition may ultimately appeal to their self interests [6]. Recent failed attempts by Microsoft to take over Yahoo and now Google trying to work with Yahoo indicates where the markets are going. After all, software market is not about the “active vs. common users” or “open vs. closed standards” or “good vs. evil”; we are talking about Wall Street capitalists and billions of dollars in hard cash. Ideological high-ground aside, it will be interesting to see if the open source paradigm holds up in the cross-fire of free markets. In this new century we are going to find out whether it's ultimately about the beginning of a new cooperation or the end of intellectual capital, the open source alternative is going to have to withstand a lot of stress as well in a very competitive global marketplace.
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References 1. Garzarelli, G. 2002, “Open Source Software and the Economics of Organization” Available from: http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/garzarelli.p df [Accessed October 7, 2008] 2. Prahalad C.K., 2006, “The fortune at the bottom of Pyramid”, New Jersey: Wahrton School Publishing 3. Von Hippel, 2005, “The democratization of innovation”, Cambridge, MIT 4. Reddy B, and Evans D. 2002, “Government Preferences for Promoting Open-Source Software: A Solution in Search of a Problem.” Available from: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstr act_id=313202 [Accessed October 7, 2008] 5. Tim O'Reilly, 1999, “Lessons from opensource software development,” Communications of the ACM, v.42 n.4,
p.32-37, Available athttp://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299164 &dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=632079 1&CFTOKEN=35374449 [Accessed October 10, 2008] 6. Sigi Goode, 2004, “Something for nothing: management rejection of open source software in Australia’s top firms.” Faculty of Economics and Commerce, Australian National University. Available onlinehttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob= ArticleURL&_udi=B6VD0-4D09J8W1&_user=3837033&_origUdi=B6V7748CNRMV1&_fmt=high&_coverDate=07% 2F31%2F2005&_rdoc=1&_orig=article&_ac ct=C000061497&_version=1&_urlVersion= 0&_userid=3837033&md5=2a53f962aef933 1ac08e82a73d790166 [Accessed October 10, 2008]
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