The Federal Aviation Administration saved $15 million dollars and completed an upgrade to the air traffic control systems in one-third of the projected time.

“The upgrade is part of a broader service-oriented architecture initiative that will replace proprietary traffic management systems with applications using Java, Web services, open-source software and Oracle products. …

The air traffic flow system, called the Enhanced Traffic Management System, predicts traffic surges, gaps and volume across the national airspace. The FAA tracks about 8,000 airplanes at any given time. The agency uses the real-time analysis system to keep the skies running smoothly.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is on all traffic management systems at the traffic flow central processing facility, located at the Transportation Department’s Volpe Center in Cambridge, Mass. More than 100 sites rely on the system for air traffic management, including military facilities and international sites.” (FCW)

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Have you ever wanted to know just how much money has been invested in open source companies? A recent article, The Open Source Venture Capital Universe, attempts to answer this question and more characterizing open source investing as: “A rollercoaster – as trite as that image may be – is the right analogy for venture capital investing in open source companies. And what a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Matt Asay puts the figure somewhere around $1.3B and rapidly growing. It is anyone’s guess for where open source investing will go from here.

I found this info via Alexander Muse at the Texas Venture Capital Blog.

Ross Mayfield describes the Power Law of Participation as patterns that “have emerged where low threshold participation amounts to collective intelligence and high engagement provides a different form of collaborative intelligence” (Mayfield). Within this model, a large number of users of social websites will not have a high level of engagement thus taking advantage of the value with few contributions back to the community while other users will contribute most of the content. This generates two very different forms of intelligence, collective and collaborative, which co-exist together to form the essence of a community.

This reminded me of a number of studies on open source that support this idea. For example, a case study of the Apache project published in 2000 found that 80% to 90% of the submissions came from a set of 15 core developers in a community of more than 3000 people. A study of the GNOME project had similar results with 11 people contributing most of the output. Relating this back to the Power Law of Participation, the small number of core community members leads to collaborative intelligence, while the larger community provides an important collective intelligence by contributing bug reports, ideas, and comments. These two types of contributors and the resulting intelligence generated both feed off of each other and allow the community to prosper. I would be interested to see how this applies to other communities.

Sources:

A case study of open source software development: The Apache server (Mockus, Fielding, & Herbsleb, 2000).

Effort, co-operation and co-ordination in an open source software project: GNOME (Koch & Schneider, 2002).

I have heard a number of people talk about Richard Stallman’s ideas in the context of wanting software to be free (as in price). This is a misunderstanding about how the Free Software Foundation defines the word “free” meaning freedom, including the freedom to view the source code, modify it, and redistribute it to others.

A recent incident in Brazil highlights this misunderstanding. At the 7th Annual International Free Software Forum, Stallman asked for a small donation to the Free Software Foundation (US$2.00 – $5.00) in exchange for the time that he spent signing autographs and posing for pictures. This resulted in a geek protest and march at the event. Richard Stallman responded with the following:

“I believe that all software ethically must be free, free in the sense of respecting the users’ freedom, but I don’t believe that software must be gratis–nor services, such as autographing or posing. Rather, I believe people deserve the freedom to decide whether to do these things. So I decline to support the newly formed gratis autograph movement. Instead, I hererby launch the free autographing movement, which advocates everyone’s freedom to sign autographs or not.” (NewsForge)

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Rob Enderle does not think Linux will ever get traction as a desktop OS. He presents an interesting argument based on history with IBM’s OS/2 and the OEM business model. He highlights a number of challenges including OEM costs, the number of Linux distributions, excessive advocacy, and more.

He also outlines “A Reliable Road Map to Linux Desktop Success”

“The list of clear requirements includes:

• Clear OEM resources to match or exceed those currently provided by Microsoft. This would include R&D support and co-marketing dollars.
• Embrace existing desktop requirements (roadmaps, application support, proprietary drivers, consistent patch releases schedules and documentation, clear escalation lines for support).
• Seek out reasonable advocates who will take direction from their executives and not from other advocates.
• Make it profitable for the OEM.” (Enderle)

His conclusion is that he doubts these requirements can be achieved. I think that we have many challenges before Linux can become a viable solution for broad desktop deployment, but I am not quite this skeptical.

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A recent ZDNet interview with Jesper Anderson, Oracle’s senior vice president for application strategy, shed some more light on Oracle’s open source strategy. Oracle has a strong preference for the use of Linux internally at Oracle, which Anderson said is driven by Larry Ellison.

“I mean I’ve been in meetings with Larry where people walked in with purchase order requests for big Sun Solaris or HP-UX servers and Larry just looked at it and said ‘Nope, denied’.

And then he turned around and said ‘it’s not the money, you come back to me with a purchase order, same amount or more for Linux, and I’ll approve it right away’,” Anderson said.

It was good to see that this strong preference for Linux usage internally at Oracle is not driven as a cost savings move, but for more strategic reasons.

Anderson also pointed out that “the service component of our software business is increasingly important. The maintenance revenue of our business is a bigger and bigger part of our business.” This seems to be part of why they see open source as an opportunity for them. I am still concerned that Oracle may try to acquire a critical mass of open source companies, which would consolidate too much of the open source ecosystem under one company; however, with the Red Hat acquisition of JBoss, this is becoming less of a concern.

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Earlier blogs have discussed the tremendous opportunity that open source could have for developing nations; however, this does not mean thinking of open source as a cheap alternative to Windows. The real opportunity for open source in developing nations is for governments to use open source as a way to grow the local software ecosystem by creating local support and services companies that help organizations more effectively use open source software. Local software companies can also use open source software as a starting point while building value added products on top of it.

Currently, many governments encourage the use of open source software; however, they have few open source developers. The UNU-IIST Global Desktop Project is working to address this issue. The UNU sees that

“Being a ‘passive consumer’ rather than an ‘active participant’ is not in a developing nation’s best interest as both government and business will miss out on what essentially is the power of open source: technological self-determination. Of perhaps more immediate interest are the new businesses that are growing out of the open source phenomenon. Because the underlying technology is freely available, entrepreneurs can build value added products on top of open source software, giving startups quicker time to market while lowering development costs.” (UNU)

The UNU-IIST Global Desktop Project is chartered with growing the number of open source developers in Asia by focusing on improving the open source desktop. It will be interesting to see the impact of open source over the next few years as governments start to focus less on using it as a low cost alternative and more on how they can leverage open source software in order to grow their local software ecosystem.

I have been seeing quite a few Earth Day technology news stories and blogs over the past few days encouraging people to recycle old electronic equipment. An even better solution is when computer equipment can be reused to help the “needy get nerdy” (Free Geek). Free Geek will take donated computers and other electronic equipment and reuse as much as possible to create computers for those who need them. Materials that cannot be used again are sent only to recycling companies that handle them in an environmentally responsible manner.

The refurbished computers are loaded with open source software (Linux, OpenOffice.org, and more). To become eligible to receive one of these computers along with training on how to use it, a person must spend 24 hours volunteering at Free Geek. The original Free Geek is located in my adopted home town on Portland, OR, and additional Free Geeks have started sprouting up in other locations including my original home state of Ohio (Columbus); Chicago, Illinois; South Bend, Indiana; Olympia, WA; and Ephrata, PA.

Please consider contributing to these organizations by donating equipment or volunteering your time to support both the environment and open source software.

Open source bounties are not a new concept, but I had not heard much about bounties lately, so I wanted to bring it up on this blog. Bounties are designed as a way to encourage development of a particular feature within an open source project. In most open source projects, developers contribute to those areas that are of greatest interest; Eric S. Raymond refers to this as “scratching a developer’s personal itch.” To encourage development of a particular feature, organizations and other individuals can offer a bounty usually in the form of a specified amount of money for the addition of a feature meeting certain criteria. As just one example, Novell offered a series of bounties for GNOME a few years ago and others have initiated similar bounties with other projects with mixed success. There are even companies like Bounty Source that provide tools to help facilitate this process. Lately, I have been hearing more about companies funding developers directly. For example, many large software companies, IBM, Intel, and many others, have people on their payroll who are responsible for contributing to open source projects like the Linux kernel.

I suspect that having people on staff to do open source development as a full time job is probably a slightly better solution for most companies. For smaller companies or companies that only want a few features, bounties might be a better option. Please feel free to add a comment to this blog if you have experience using either of these options and want to share the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

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I have discussed the difficulties of getting wide adoption for Linux on the desktop in quite a few blog entries (here and here). In short, we have a chicken and the egg problem: there are not enough Linux desktop users for application vendors to justify the port to Linux on the desktop; however, users are not willing to move to desktop Linux until it supports the applications they require. I have also talked about the lack of vendor driver support that would allow users to plug and play with any device they happen to buy at the local electronics store (scanners, printers, digital cameras, MP3 players, etc.) The human tendency to resist change is another factor slowing the growth of the Linux desktop.

Apple, on the other hand, has done a better job of getting vendor and driver support for OS X. Cranky Geek, John C. Dvorak has suggested that Apple release OS X into open source, which is not as radical as it seems at first glance, since OS X is built on BSD.

“A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes.” (Dvorak)

Dvorak takes this idea in a different direction than what I am about to do; however, I found the idea of an open source operating system from Apple intriguing. Setting business issues about whether or not Apple would ever really do this and whether this would make good business sense for Apple aside for the time being, this idea is worth exploring. By building on Apple’s current success with consumers and adding a solution that would be supported by the open source purists, Apple might be able to more effectively increase market segment share on the desktop. Under open source distribution licenses, it could also be used as a low cost alternative to Windows, particularly in emerging geographies. This makes the gigantic assumption that an open source OS X would also run on mainstream (not Apple-specific) hardware. Getting back to the business side of the equation, Apple would need to find an appropriate business model for open sourcing OS X, which could include a basic open source version with an up-sell to a premium version or a support and services model.

Taken to the extreme, we could position Linux as a server operating system and open source OS X as the open source desktop solution; however, I think that this is a bit extreme. A more likely case is that we could get consumers to start embracing an open source OS X desktop solution, which might also drive increased demand for Linux on the desktop helping to resolve the chicken and egg issue.

In reality, an open source OS X is probably a highly unlikely scenario, but it would make for a very interesting environment.