Despite the fact that many believe FLOSS of interest mainly for developers, I strongly believe that we are simply starting to see a rush of different projects that extend the collaborative development approach to non-software areas.
During the research activity in the OpenTTT project, we tried to find non-software projects that are developed or extended in a collaborative way, similar to the “bazaar” or moderated bazaar typical of most FLOSS projects; having restricted this to 65 examples, we have found many interesting facts:
many large scale software projects are really mixed media projects, as exemplified by the map created by Matthias Mueller-Prove, that shows that the number of people participating in “ancillary” areas like documentation, promotion and such is as large as that devoted to development. KDE and GNOME has similar proportion of non-code participation.
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whenever the software allows for mixed participation, such participation happens. It is relatively easy to see that simple Wiki-based tools seems capable to attract a large participation base, while cooperative schemes for music or artwork are less present. In fact, most non-textual forms are more oriented towards “remixing”, that is the leveraging of a digital artifact for integration into some other work, and not modification and improvement of it directly. I suspect that as more complete and complex “packaged” file formats (like those used by proprietary video editing suites, for example) become used by open source tools, we will begin to see a more interesting approach not only towards remixing but towards “reinvention” as well. A wonderful example is NineInchNails’ open source remix project.
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the sheer scope if the phenomenon is amazing- collaboratively created prayer books? (see the open source judaism project, or the Open source Haggadah). The Multimachine tool is also amazing (an accurate all-purpose machine tool that can be used as a metal or wood lathe, end mill, horizontal mill, drill press, wood or metal saw or sander, surface grinder and sheet metal “spinner”. It can be built by a semi-skilled mechanic using just common hand tools; for machine construction, electricity can be replaced with “elbow grease” and all the necessary material can come from discarded vehicle parts)
I believe that as FLOSS demonstrated that software can be created with good quality and innovation in collaborative modes, this will show in many other areas as well.
Yesterday a broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies announced the collaborative development of Android, the new open platform for mobile phones by Google.
The Open Handset Alliance, that’s the name of the most promising technological club after the GSM MoU club agreement, lists already 34 members. Among them names like Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nvidia, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics and HTC.
This alliance shares a common goal of fostering innovation on mobile devices and giving consumers a far better user experience than much of what is available on today’s mobile platforms. By providing developers a new level of openness that enables them to work more collaboratively, Android will accelerate the pace at which new and compelling mobile services are made available to consumers.
So Google is not interested in making money on software (like Microsoft), or hardware (like Apple). As usual they want to make their money on services. As reported by Wireless, according to Opus Research, mobile advertising spending in North America and Western Europe will reach a combined US$5.08 billion by 2012, up from an estimated $106.8 million at the end of this year.
The Open Handset Alliance describes itself as “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices” aiming to develop technologies that will cut the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services. But Google knows very well that mobile innovation basically has been hampered by “device fragmentation“, and android is the ultimate answer to this specific issue.
It’s both possible and highly unlikely because the more constraints the manufacturers put on the platform the less beneficial it is.While a license would allow that kind of behavior … it’s unlikely you’ll see [a locked down] scenario.
The Symbian promise was aimed at a similar goal, when it was established in UK as a private independent company in June 1998. The original shareholders were Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia In October 2003 Motorola withdrew from Symbian as a shareholder by selling is stake to Nokia and Psion, becoming a simple licensee.
I had doubts on the Symbian technological club since early 2003, as I wrote in an article. The idea was good, but the implementation was quite poor, since even the most important shareholders were adopting incompatible Symbian’s dialects.
While I agree with Savio Rodrigues saying that is a very pragmatic decision, I believe that platform differentiation is a two fold process of securing individual vendors’ businesses and at the same time prevent lock down scenarios.
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Stephen Walli citingChristensen reminds that once the vendor starts to over deliver on customer needs, customers can’t absorb (and so don’t want to pay for) new innovation. Office 2007 Total Cost of Ownership seems to confirm Christensen’s theory, at least considering the necessary retraining costs from Office 2003 to Office 2007. So far, so good.
Within the context of the “Festival della Creatività” on October 26 and 27 took place in Florence the first edition of QuiFree.it, a two day event on free knowledge and open source.
After mentioning some public and tv ads sponsored by the Italian Government, I reported some findings from the EC-funded project tOSSad - Towards Open Source Software Adoption and Dissemination. The project, aiming at improving the outcomes of the F/OSS communities, proposed to use mass media and branding of Open Source products to address identified weakness. The weaknesses of the F/OSS solutions perceived by the experts in the IT throughout Europe namely were:
Lack of Awareness
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Lack of Training
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Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture
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Unwillingness to Change
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Lack of Connectivity
Lack of awareness cluster, composed by answers which have identified problems in public knowledge about F/OSS solutions, included categories of answers like: “public is uninformed about OSS solutions”, “no public interest and no marketing”, “low penetration of IST and Open Source in SMEs in the region”.
The solutions proposed by the experts, ranging from “awareness campaigns about social and economical benefits” and “using mass media for advertising (by large F/OSS based companies)”, to
addressing the younger generation, for example “involve schools and universities to promote F/OSS solutions”.
Getting back to Open Source Enterprise, I mentioned Gartner’s findings. Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006 and predictions set the percent share to 27 in 2011, when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion. But look also at Saugatuck Technology, as reported by Matt, telling proprietary vendors how to survive the open-source threat. The Open Source Market is ready for prime time. At least customers are.
As results from another Gartner Dataquest graph, the compound annual growth rate of open source software will more than quintuple that of proprietary software in the next five years. More important, the growth of the emerging phenomenon of Internal Open Source Development.
Customers are getting themselves organized, because small to large Italian firms can’t accomplish their needs. The Italian ICT market is a fragmented archipelago, made by lots of micro-companies where only 0,2% of ICT firms employ more than 250 employees. Small IT firms sometimes employ also gifted hackers, but they can’t manage to keep them busy doing just what they are really good at. Medium to large ICT companies offer a suite or two, often based on third parties open source products, and have no connection with open source communities.
As shown by an OpenLogic study, a quarter of interviewed customers using more than 100 Open Source products can boldly affirm that they saved more than 60% of their IT budget. While 44% of customers using about 1 open source product answered that is “too early to tell”. At the end of the day, open source is not a magic wound, and you need an open source policy and strategy to really take advantage of.
But the Italian open source market, likely not differently from many other European countries, has almost no open source product firms. VAR are having big trouble to sell off-the-shelf Linux distro, and to retain customers is not easy as soon as they get technologically autonomous. System Integrators and ISV, no matter how big they are, have no capacity to define and sell packaged services yet.
The absence of a wide enterprise grade commercial support opened new opportunities, allowing firms like BlackDuck, OpenLogic, Palamida, SpikeSource and SourceLabs to offer “horizontal” services not related to a single package. For example, firms offering intellectual assets protection take deliver assessment services for many if not all packages.
Their business model might be considered “horizontal”, as opposite to the classical (vertical) business model, where a firm offers every kind of services for a single package/distribution.These companies will play an important to role in the developing of an efficient and effective open source ecosystem. Nonetheless traditional forms of partner engagement might not work, and things like Open Source Franchising will definitely come to play, soon.
There are still just two ways to make money from OSS: “invent your own recipe” or being proficient at “cooking others’ recipes”. If you don’t like cooking, you’re out of the market.The result?
Roberto has over 20 years experience in the computer industry, and has spent the last 10 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he also served on some advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. He works at SourceForge, and opinions expressed here don't necessarily represent employer's positions, strategies, or opinion.
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