F/OSS: An Innovation-Friendly Sofware Engineering Paradigm

Free/Open Source

An Innovation-Friendly
Sofware Engineering
Paradigm

F. LETELLIER
IN'Tech – 12 janvier 2010

François LETELLIER www.flet.fr

Free / Open Source Software
 Free software ≠ freeware
 Four “Freedoms” (R. Stallmann)
to run the program, for any purpose
 to study how the program works
 to redistribute copies
 to improve the program, and release your
improvements to the public
 A whole range of licenses – based on copyright
 Copyleft : GPL, LGPL, ...
 Academic / permissive : BSD, MIT, APL …
 Internationalization : CeCILL, EUPL

 F/L/OSS = Free/Libre/Open Source Software


Source Forge
500 top projects New technology N. for a platform Existing techno.

New market Radical innovation 1% <1%

Existing market <1% 10% No innov. 87%

Source: Innovativeness of open source software projects, K. Klincewicz 2005


structure

input output

R&D expenditure # researchers # patents filed
# start-ups # publications
Licensing


Source: European Commission, “Towards a European Research Area, Key Figures 2001 –
Special edition: Indicators for benchmarking of national research policies”


F/L/OSS =
Software Innovation Dark Matter ?

Hobbyists, part-time contributors
Volunteers or transparent efforts
Anonymous (collective)
Incremental
Free (gratis), Free (open)


The finger
pointing to
the Moon
is not the
Moon

FLOSS potentially saves the
industry 36%+ in software R&D
investment that can result in
increased profits or be more usefully
spent in further innovation

Study on the economic impact of OSS on innovation and the competitiveness os the information and
communication technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, 2006, UNU-MERIT, NL


Uses at home/soho
Builds on other works Sell substitutes Contributes as a hobby
Company
Research XYZ
Lab
Transfers
research results

Worldwide F/L/OSS Code Base
Shares R&D on Develops with
non core-business taxpayers money
Company Company Public
XYZ XYZ Administration

Uses in production process
Sell hw/sw complements Offers services
“publish”
According to a protocol: the license
“subscribe”


Free/Open Source Projects
 Project - the basic unit in F/L/OSS communities
 collaborative development
 technology driven - mostly code production
 Project leaders
 often are at the origin of the project, oversee its major
direction
 personality and charisma are key
 Core members «(sometimes organised as PMC)
 make significant contributions over time
 usually less than ≈ 15 p (over this limit, the project is likely to
give birth to subprojects)
 Active users (aka « contributors »)
 report bugs, write documentation, occasionally patches

Evolutionary dynamics

FLOSS License
Free distribution

Modif. Source
code
(contrib.)
Source
code Source
code
Source Source
code code

Source
code Source
code
Source
code


Source : FOSS-Bridge workshop, Hanoi, 2008

Utilisateurs

Contributeurs

Besoins
« Committers »

Maîtrise du code Diffusion
(légale, technique) Licence libre

Code source
Gestion des versions


Collaborative Development
Environments (“Forges”)
 Mailing lists, forums - form a knowledge base
 Wikis - online documentation
 Source code management - so concurent
development can happen
 CVS, SVN
 Bug tracker
 Bugzilla, TRAC
 Administration tools, user management, stats,
continuous integration, ...


F/L/OSS
Software Engineering Tools
IDEs SCM
 Eclipse  CVS
 TopCaseD  SVN
Test  GIT
 Junit CDE / Forges
 Continuum  Savane
 CLIF  Gforge
 LibreSource


F/L/OSS Languages and...
(Source) Code!
Compilers Librairies, frameworks
 C - GCC  Struts
 Cocoon
Interpreters / script  Spring
 PERL Platforms
 PHP  Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP
 Python... Middleware
 JBoss
 eXo Portal


The F/L/OSS “Adoption Ladder”
Project &
Value appropriated ecosystem
coordination
Development time

Identification,
Adoption, Migration, Collaborate
Training and redefine

Champion

Devt time
Contribute Community
interaction
Use Support to 3rd parties

Time
Denial Engineering driven Business driven

François LETELLIER Source: FLOSSMetrics project
www.flet.fr

F/L/OSS Policies
in Western Companies
27% corporations have a formal FLOSS policy - 18%
plan to adopt one in the coming year
67% companies mostly use FLOSS as ‘gratis’ software

54% use unchanged or adapted FLOSS code in their in-
house developments
49% contribute to FLOSS (bug reports, patches)
11% have FLOSS committers in their staff

Source: CIO.com APR 2008


Selecting F/L/OSS Projects

 # of developers, contributors
 Activity on the mailing lists, forums, rate of release, # of
downloads
 Code quality and maturity, available documentation, bugs
reported and fixed, roadmap
 Reputation, notoriety, references
 Compliance with open standards (even though not in the
requirements)
 Tests, benchmarks, pilot experiments - don't trust the
glossy brochure
 License (& legal)

QSOS


Employment Profile of FLOSS
Developers
Developers: Do you think that proven participation in the
FLOSS community can compensate for the lack of formal
qualifications, like certificates or university degrees?

14,00%

Yes
No
16,00%
Don't know

Employers' perspective: While hiring, how do you compare
a formal computer science qualification to practical
experience as a FLOSS developer?

70,00% 15,00%

28,00%

Formal better
FLOSS better
Both equal
Don't know
Source: presentation by Rishab Aiyer
Ghosh, ICOS 2005

39,50%
17,50%


Associations
of Companies

Associations
of Individuals

Individuals


A Business Ecosystem Platform
The OW2 Value Proposal

Software
Technical Services Academi
a
Vendors
Systems
Forge Companie Integrators
Mailing lists, Wiki, etc. s Government
Individual
s
Community Services
Governance framework Produce
Users
Activities rs
Re-use Use / Integrate

Marketing Services Contribute Feed-back

Projects promotion
Brand and awareness

© OW 2 Consor t ium 2 0 0 8 www.ow2.org 25

26

FLOSS Impact
Estimate in the European Union (2006)
● The existing base of quality FLOSS applications
would cost firms about 12 Billion Euros to reproduce
internally
● This code base has been doubling every 18-24
months over the past 8 years and this growth is
projected to continue for several more years
● Increasing FLOSS share of software development
from 20% to 40% would lead to a 0.1% increase in
annual EU GDP growth, excluding benefits within the
ICT industry itself, ie 10+ Billion Euros annually


“Enterprise friendly”
Management and Governance

Collaborative, Free/Open Source
Project Based Software Engineering
Engineering paradigm Tools


Thank you for your attention!

François Letellier - www.flet.fr


F/OSS: An Innovation-Friendly Sofware Engineering Paradigm

Recomendados

Recomendados

Mais conteúdo relacionado

Destaque

Destaque (6)

Semelhante a F/OSS: An Innovation-Friendly Sofware Engineering Paradigm

Semelhante a F/OSS: An Innovation-Friendly Sofware Engineering Paradigm (20)

Último

Último (20)

F/OSS: An Innovation-Friendly Sofware Engineering Paradigm