By Marina Sum, staff writer, Sun Developer Network
Sun's Simon
Phipps, chief open source officer, and Patrick Finch, open-source
community coordinator, led an almost packed JavaOne session yesterday.
They delved into the history, current status, and future challenges of
open source, punctuated by many beautiful photos from Simon to, often
humorously, convey the points. Great job!
History
Open
source started in the early 1980s with pioneers like Richard Stallman,
who believed that software should come with freedom to revise the code
and who launched the GNU Project. Another notable figure was Bill Joy,
a cofounder of Sun, who "wanted to freely collaborate with people" on
software. In fact, the philosophy behind the BSD license for UNIX is
easy collaboration.
Over the years, Sun has become involved in
numerous open-source communities: OpenOffice.org, Project GlassFish,
OpenSPARC, NetBeans, Java technology. "There have been many
opportunities to make mistakes," said Simon. "Nonetheless, we've done
a lot of excellent work."
Toward the end of the 1990s, FOSS
[free and open-source software] continued to evolve into an important
trend, leading to the publication of open-source license standards in
1998 for a total of 60 licenses. Inevitably, picking the right one
involves legal experts.
The Present
Now
that the Internet has become pervasive, examples of open source abound,
but also controversies, because "open source means different things to
different people." Still, the movement is spreading globally and
changing the way of doing business, with development centers in China,
India, and South America. Traditionally conservative Gartner predicted
a year ago that by 2012, 70 percent of all software will be based on
open source. That percentage now reads 90!
Who are the
open-source developers? They include those who work on kernels; who
build plug-ins and device drivers; who create enterprise applications;
and who integrate systems. Be sure to count the user community,
too. Simon cited Apache as a shining example of "a democratic, highly
organized community of diverse interests with well-stated governance
models."
The "Adoption-Led Market"
The traditional "procurement-driven" market, whereby software projects go through the
select-evaluate-build-deploy-support cycle, gated by a licensing
barrier, is switching more and more to a different model. That is,
project teams select from what's available in open source, evaluate,
and then prototype and build a solution fast, leveraging self-support
from communities with little or no vendor contact. Once the solution
stabilizes, deployment follows, leading to demands for support.
"Enterprises
want insurance for software; software companies sell insurance in the
form of support and bug fixes. Users then become customers," explained
Simon. See his posting for details.
Consequently,
IT managers must decide whether to hire support personnel; purchase
subscriptions for support, training, warranty, and indemnity; or just
risk it out. No matter what the choice, IT now has more control over
on what and when to spend its budget.
The Challenges of Licensing, Patents, and Trademarks
In
quoting Eben Moglen, "A license is the constitution for the community,"
Simon advocated only a limited number of licenses because "license
proliferation limits the ability of software projects to be embraced by communities." Read his white paper (PDF) on this topic.
Simon
believes that as much as that software patents are a fact of life and that
companies will continue to encourage employees to file patents, the
entire subject is "very broken." Currently, enterprises tackle patents
through grants, covenants, and licenses, with licenses being the best
approach, according to Simon, who proposes that an independent body
look into the ramifications of the options.
Trademark violations are all over, for example, the Mozilla and Firefox logos. Again, might an independent group be the answer?
What Next?
With
corporations "getting up close and personal," Simon believes that
management should continue to send developers to conferences like
JavaOne and other collaborator and community events. As for open
source, "Jump in!" "The future is ours to shape. The pivotal moment in
IT is open source, which is definitely heading for mainstream,"
concluded Simon.
The Mink Connection, "Simon Phipps's view of the Web," is chock full of gems on open source. Amazing photographs, too! Have a look.
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