The Microsoft Killers [FR as "Open Source/Access"?]

Prospect Magazine UK ^ | February 2004 | Azeem Azhar

[Clint Williams]

The recipe for Coca-Cola is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world. Yet a small Canadian software firm has sold 150,000 cans of a rival fizzy cola, which tastes very like Coke, and has made the recipe public. The firm behind the drink, Opencola, makes software, not drinks. It used the drink (and its open recipe) as a metaphor for the most important trend in software today.

Unlike most traditional software firms, Opencola produces open source technologies. Open source is a philosophy for software licensing designed to encourage the improvement and use of software by anyone who wants to join in. It ensures that the source code, the underlying instructions of the software, can be examined and modified freely.

The open source movement eschews proprietary controls and its software is usually produced not by firms, but by networks of volunteers who look after different pieces of an application. For this reason it has, until recently, been regarded as anti-corporate-associated with hackers' bedrooms and academia, an eccentric corner of the market.

Today, open source has grown up and has an uncontested momentum in several key areas of the software business. Linux, an operating system that competes in Microsoft's dominant market, has gained a beachhead in many companies. Oracle's dominance in databases is coming under threat from MySQL, whose software was downloaded over the internet around 10m times last year. And nearly 70 per cent of the computers that serve web pages run Apache, an open source application. Almost three quarters of large US companies intend to increase their use of open source technologies, according to Forrester Research.

In its February 2003 filing to the securities and exchange commission, which regulates stock markets in the US, Microsoft admitted that open source posed a significant challenge to its business model. And it is starting to fight back. Microsoft's original attack on Linux concerned security. But that has backfired. The growth in internet viruses that hop from Microsoft server to Microsoft server has demonstrated that a product with a single architect, like Windows, is more vulnerable than one, like Linux, with many. The open source philosophy means that although the code is open to malicious actors, it is also accessible to more friendly eyes, which can track down and resolve problems quickly.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's aggressive chief executive, once called open source a "cancer." But other blue chips have rallied to the Linux flag. Three years ago IBM announced it was investing $1bn in consulting and support services for Linux-based systems. The greatest concern large companies have about software is support: who will fix problems when they arise? IBM's decision to offer support contracts has calmed those fears, and partly for that reason key components of the New York stock exchange now run on Linux.

In a few years, Linux-based computers will handle many of our telephone calls. The new range of telecoms systems from Nokia, the mobile telephone company, will run Linux. And now governments are questioning the need to stretch treasuries to finance proprietary software when free versions are available. When the Munich city government hinted it would dump Microsoft in favour of Linux, Ballmer cut short a holiday to petition the mayor. The intervention was in vain. Last May the city announced that it would install open source software on its 14,000 machines. The Microsoft contract, for licences, training and support, was initially worth $36.7m according to USA Today. The winning bid from IBM and the German Linux group Suse was actually $39.5m, higher than Microsoft's. But Microsoft's strategy of introducing expensive upgrades every few years adds a financial risk for any purchaser. "On strategic issues, it was clearly open source," says Harry Maack, who advised the city.

In November, Sergio Amadeu, Brazil's top technology mandarin, declared his wish to "create a continent" of open source in the federal government. And this January, the Israeli government announced it would stop buying Microsoft software in favour of open source.

In Britain, the offices of government commerce and the e-envoy are now backing trials of Linux-based applications. Last October, Whitehall announced trials of open source applications on civil servants' computers. If successful, Microsoft software on 1.3m government desktops might be replaced with open source alternatives. The savings on licence fees could run into tens of millions.

When a company or government department wishes to use a piece of open source software, all it needs to do is find it on the web and download it for free. This has not changed over the past decade; what has changed is the back-up support and consultancy, which, as the example of Munich shows, is far from free. Big technology companies like IBM and Linux-support specialists like Red Hat provide company IT directors with the expertise to customise open source applications to their needs and the reassurance that when things break down there will be help.

Origins of open source

Open source can be traced back 20 years, to the time when only a few dozen machines in the US research community were connected to the internet. The scientists managing applications on the network were hackers-not in the sense of cyberspace criminals, but in the sense of programmers who solve software problems.

These people wrote the ancestors to software used today in the internet without much thought to ownership. For the network to work, the computers needed to talk to each other. And the easiest way to do that was to share. So Sendmail, written by Eric Allman in 1979, delivers the bulk of email sent on the net today. Bind, which powers the domain name system, allowing us to use addresses like www.google.com rather than the underlying machine address, was created by a team at Berkeley. (You can bypass Bind: reach Google, for instance, by typing in 216.239.59.99.)

By 1984, things had changed. Companies had begun to bury software under patents and copyrights, keeping the source code secret. Richard Stallman, an MIT computer scientist, believed this was damaging the industry. It stopped the free flow of ideas, because without the source code, programmers could only see what a program did-not how it did it. Stallman developed the idea of distributing free software with its source code and a licence that allowed you to modify the source code as long as the modifications were kept in the public domain. Software needed to be free: "Free as in free speech, not free beer," as Stallman likes to put it. The licence was known as the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

The most famous software issued under the GPL is Linux, an operating system created in the early 1990s by a young Finn, Linus Torvalds. Linux is older than the term "open source," which was coined in 1998 by Christine Peterson, a nanotechnology expert, and was intended to scare business less than Stallman's techno-utopian "free software." Open source embraces a variety of licensing regimes but what they have in common is that the underlying source code is shared and visible to all.

The design and development process is radical too. Programmer Eric Raymond has characterised it as a "bazaar" of chattering opinions. Commercial software is normally designed like a cathedral, with a single architect directing the operation top-down. By contrast, open source is a bottom-up development, with people volunteering to do what they do best. This is not anarchy. Work on the software is usually guided by an ultimate arbiter, normally the person who started it all off. This arbiter resolves conflicts which contributors haven't managed to sort out among themselves.

In the case of Linux this is Torvalds, working in his spare time, and a group of lieutenants. In practice, though, most work gets done without Torvalds casting an eye on it. Linux users themselves provide quality control: downloading updates to the software and hunting for bugs. In Raymond's words, "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Commons-based peer production

Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale University, has called this "commons-based peer production." The commons refers to the sharing of the underlying code or the output that is open to all, akin to the public land that farmers once grazed their livestock upon. Peer production means that producers participate for their own varied reasons and in ad hoc ways, not necessarily via legal contract or management fiat. Benkler calls this a third mode of production for the market, distinct from the company and the "spot market" (or, in employment terms, the freelancer). Open source shows that it is possible for part of the economy to function without companies but with many self-employed individuals contracting with each other.

Benkler cites examples of areas in which commons-based peer production is superior. In one case, Nasa used volunteers to identify geological features on Mars. The project, called Clickworkers, allowed anyone to look at images of sections of the planet and identify features. Around 85,000 people took part, and nearly 2m images were checked. According to researchers, the result was "virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience."

As a template, Clickworkers has its limitations. Each individual task was discrete and required little expertise other than common sense and the ability to control a mouse. It would be more challenging, say, to get volunteers to write an encyclopedia. But that, remarkably, is what Jimmy Wales, a Florida-based entrepreneur, has achieved. For the past three years he has been running Wikipedia, an internet-based, open source encyclopedia.

An encyclopedia normally takes years to create. World experts write the articles and an editorial committee reviews them. An encyclopedia written by the average internet user in under three years does not sound promising. But Wikipedia appears to work. There are almost 200,000 entries created by thousands of different people. The website now receives more visitors than Encylopaedia Britannica's online edition. And unlike the Britannica, parts of it are available in 55 languages.

Wikipedia is Wales's second attempt at creating a public domain reference work. For his first attempt, Nupedia, he insisted potential contributors provide credentials before they could participate. After two years he had 12 articles to show for his efforts. Contributors just couldn't be bothered with the rigmarole of identifying themselves. So Wikipedia has no controls. Anyone can visit the site and create or edit an entry. You might think this is a recipe for mayhem. In fact, it provides for an open peer review of every article. Monomaniacs obsessed with a single issue, like Holocaust denial, can cause problems. But ultimately Wikipedia has a gatekeeper in the form of Wales himself, and he can take steps to exclude troublemakers.

Education is another fruitful area for open source. In 2001 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled OpenCourseWare, which publishes the syllabuses, lecture notes, reading lists and even student solutions to 500 different courses. While MIT retains copyright, it allows anyone to access the courses. The institution is clearly confident that the value it adds lies not in the written part of the courses but in the teaching and the environment, which students can get only by attending and paying fees. By contrast, Oxford limits access even to its exam papers to university members.

Several organisations are now compiling class notes for all educational levels and releasing them under a form of public licence. The aim is to provide teachers with access to resources that don't tax school budgets. They include Commontext and the Open textbook project, both launching this year.

Academic journal publishing is another business targeted by open access. The market is a cartel, dominated by Reed Elsevier, Springer-Verlag and a few others. Many academic institutions complain of the high price of subscribing to these publishers' journals. The open access movement aims to increase distribution of research through journals unhampered by restrictive licensing regimes and high subscription costs-indeed, it has been doing so for several years, and some of them have become essential sources for scientists.

Open access journals usually charge authors for each published article rather than readers for subscriptions. Charges for BioMed Central, a biosciences open access publisher, are around $500 an article, which covers peer review, editing and distribution costs. The journals themselves are available free online. This is an appropriate model for scientists whose objectives in publishing are to establish reputations, secure funding sources and add to the body of knowledge. A subscription fee is a barrier to at least two of these objectives, while author charges reflect the benefits to researchers of publication.

In December, the British parliament's science and technology committee announced an inquiry into scientific publishing, and in particular the cost of journals and the extent to which open access journals could replace them. This follows a Royal Society report which called for reform of the intellectual property system to achieve greater openness for scientific literature.

Benefits, motives and public goods

Why do people join open source projects without financial reward? There are many reasons, including enjoyment and the acclaim of peers. The latter motive, especially in fields like software, can also overlap with opportunities to demonstrate talents to employers.

One of the best technology magazines on the web, Slashdot, has only a few members of staff who post short articles and allow readers to comment and elaborate: most of the site content comes from readers. In South Korea, OhMyNews, a leading online newspaper, follows a similar model. Its 50 editorial staff are supported by 27,000 volunteer "citizen editors," who produce nearly 200 stories a day, most of which are published. In a typical edition, these volunteers contribute four fifths of the stories. OhMyNews is no bit player-it outstripped its conservative rivals, Chosun Ilbo, JoongAng Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo, in its coverage of Roh Moo-hyun's election campaign in late 2002. Its reward was the first interview with the new president. While OhMyNews does pay its contributors, it doesn't pay much. A typical story will earn you less than $1, a front-page story about $16. Volunteers are driven by a mix of non-financial motives.

Several of the above publishing examples are not strictly "open source" in the sense of projects based on the idea of continual improvement by self-selected individuals whose enhancements must be freely shared. They are more accurately described as "open access" projects, in many cases only made possible by the internet. But they overlap with open source practice in two ways. The first is that they provide a public good that can be exploited by all. The second is the idea that those contributing to the public good may want to do so for non-financial rewards.

...

[CharacterCounts]

Is the law a good example of open source?

No!

Trust me on this. I'm a lawyer.

99% of the law (the common law) is created by lawyers and judges in an adversarial system. The end law may be available to anyone, but no lawyer or judge created it for free.

[CharacterCounts]

Your's is the best explanation of Open Source vs. paid for software I have heard to date.

Thanks.

[PAR35]

I do know a place that sells Cokes brought in from Mexico. They retail at just over $6.00 for a 6 pack. The same store has the Dublin, Texas Dr Peppers (made with real sugar, sold in tall glass bottles). They are a little cheaper.

Coca Cola could make big money if they would sell a premium Coke, made the old fashioned way, for a premium price.

[Old Professer]

Where's my Coke?

[jpsb]

I'll have to look into kiwi's not familar with them. I have a hardly ever used forum, modeled after FR that I am putting into the public domain. Just ziped up the source code and linked to it. Did the same with the on-line trivia game so maybe folks will help develop cool forum software and a trivia game. We shall see. I've lots of servlets that I built to run my hardly used web site, it is even SOAP enabled! That the heck here is the URL Haven't done much with it lately but does work.

[King Prout]

didn't you get reduced to your component molecules on thursday?

[nuconvert]

Enough of this talk....I need a Coke.

[SauronOfMordor]

But I can't afford to work for free - I have afamily to support.

Think of open-source software as advertising. You put out some open source software for a particular area. People use it. Your name becomes better known. When they want special customization, or a special project in that specialty, who are they going to think of asking first?

[SauronOfMordor]

The other thing I am having trouble with is the concept of one person or group developing software for free and another company such as Big Blue maintaining and customizing it for profit. It sounds like Big Blue is trying to strip the gravy off of other peoples efforts. This doesn't sound like a concept with a long term future to me.

If I'm using a product for commercial purposes, my senior management wants the warm feeling of knowing that, if a bug is found which affects production, that some competent organization is going to take responsibility for fixing it NOW, not when somebody happens to feel like it would be a fulfilling experience. Companies WILL pay for the IBM safety net and hand-holding

[Nick Danger]

Open source can work in certain situations, but there are software products that I don't believe will ever be open source. Think of vertical market applications...

I think you have the right answer here, but not in response to the question that was asked. The original poster had the idea that if a corporation paid IBM (or Accenture, or me) to modify some open source package that they wanted to use in their business, they would have to open source the modifications and then all their competitors would have it, too. But that's not really how it works. You can do anything you want for your own use, and keep it secret. The only time you have toss the improvements back on the pile is if you go into business as a provider of that kind of software, using GPL'd code as a base (to get to market more quickly than writing the whole thing yourself).

Many open source licenses (the BSD license, for example) do not even have that restriction. You can (and Microsoft has done this) take BSD code and incorporate it into your commercial products.

You are absolutely right about the vertical market apps. The sort of people who do these projects do stuff because it's fun. The guy who slogs all day on a hospital administration package wants something a little more exciting for his hobby activities. With linux he gets to work on as OS kernel, which is really cool. Or a web browser like Mozilla. But start an open source project and say, "Let's all write a package for a veterinarian's office!" and watch people stay away in droves. Somebody actually tried this. Here is a link to an open source project to do an app for veterinarians. It drew 2 -- count 'em -- two developers, who were last heard from in August of 2003.

Most non-programmers do not understand the extent to which open source software is driven by the same impetus that causes people to join community symphony orchestras. If you have the music in you, you have to play. You think it's fun. Going to practice twice a week isn't a chore, it's associating with other serious musicians and improving your skills and an all-around fun thing. The very best programmers are like that. Circumstances (like having two kids to feed) may require them to spend their days maintaining the gas company's billing operations, but by night they can become Kernel Man, coding at the bleeding edge of OS development. They have the music in them; they have to play. It's fun.

Vertical-market apps are not fun. They're just work.

[Future Snake Eater]

My programmer fiance wants to know what language that is--you've stumped her!

[Mr. K]

That is a nice fairy tale, but I need to buy food in the mean time....

[Nick Danger]

Looks like Flash "ActionScript".

[Joe Bonforte]

Vertical-market apps are not fun. They're just work.

To each his own, I guess. I get more of a charge out of solving a complex business problem with a clever use of technology than working on generic system-level functionality.

[palmer]

One aspect of open source I haven't seen mentioned is the competition of architectures. There are many people reinventing the wheel and the result is inevitably a better wheel. Undoubtedly that happens at MS too, but the open source community has lots of students with lots of extra time and energy.

The neat thing about inventing a new architecture to do something is you can become indespensible for maintaining it, which is one of things the proprietary companies hate (they want to keep their employees in their place). So some of the more successful inventors have grabbed a chunk of power to do the right thing, or cash in, or screw up. But even if they screw up the design or maintenance, other people will step in to take over.

[stylin_geek]

Yeah, but anyone who signs a long term contract with IBM should have their head examined.

[js1138]

Vertical-market apps are not fun. They're just work.

I don't know. I worked in Mortgage Banking software for fifteen years. Programming is programming. The difference in satisfaction is related to whether you are give a goal and allowed to reach it on your own, or whether you are given specs in pseudocode and required to be a human compiler. Been both places.

[Askel5]

===
Of course you can't work for free, that's why your job will soon be going to Honduras or India.

Ouch. too true.

[SauronOfMordor]

That is a nice fairy tale, but I need to buy food in the mean time....

That's cool, I understand. What I'm pointing out is that having a widely popular open-source app on a college student's resume doesn't hurt his job-seeking prospects.