Free/Libre Open Source Software
I’ll be at the 3rd Free Software World Conference in Badajoz/Spain from February 7-9. Last year’s event was huge with 6500 attendees.
I will be one of the presenters of the tOSSad EU project, where I am a member of the steering committee on behalf of eZ.
Will you be there as well?
David A. Wheeler made clear that Open Source is indeed commercial. Let’s iron out another misunderstanding: Open Source is not altruism!
The confusion – that Open Source is based on altruism – is a dreadful mistake. Speakers who argue that it happens due to the unselfish concern of developers for others, are simply unable to understand what is happening.
Those who say Open Source is altruism think of knowledge as a scarce resource, that only altruistic persons would share. The opposite is true: knowledge is an abundant good. For “trading” it, you get attention, trust, authority, etc. – all the things that help you to further develop your expertise and be successful.
As long as you don’t understand that point, you won’t understand the knowledge economy of Open Source. To extend Wheeler’s statement: Open Source is commercial when it comes to making money as well as “buying” knowledge with knowledge. This has nothing to do with altruism.
A recently published extensive study on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software on Innovation and the Competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Sector in the EU states:
Almost two-thirds of FLOSS software is still written by individuals; firms contribute about 15% and other institutions another 20%.
Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders […].
While the U.S. has the edge in terms of large FLOSS-related businesses, the greater individual contribution from Europe has led to an increasing number of globally successful European FLOSS small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally.
This existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131 000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers.
Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010.
FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investment that can result in increased profits or be more usefully spent in further innovation.
The notional value of Europeâ??s investment in FLOSS software today is Euro 22 billion (36 billion in the US) representing 20.5% of total software investment (20% in the US).
If your Open Source company plans to sell books about its products or do community marketing via Weblogs, then you need a strategy that takes into account the whole chain of knowledge production within and outside of your organization to be truly successful.
That chain leads from “raw material” such as emails to a blog entry that a staff member writes about a solution found in an email discussion. Another employee or community member might write an article based on that blog post and from several similar articles you could make a book.
In short: email -> blog -> article -> book.
A book is on the one side something like a high-end knowledge product. On the other side, it helps others to learn about your products and to innovate. That would be an ideal knowledge life cycle.
Open Source companies need to take into account the tight relationship they have with the community. The borders between those groups blur and eventually corporate knowledge management also needs to focus on the community.
In fact, the production of knowledge products by Open Source companies will work quite similar to how Open Source code is being created. That means, by listening to your community, you will understand what kind of knowledge products aka type of information they need most. This will help you to avoid wrong investments in the creation of knowledge products.
My dear colleague Zak Greant has written a nice article, where he leaves no doubt about what eZ systems thinks about software patents: well, we simply think they stink 🙂 Zak of course formulates this in a more eloquent way and he also provides some reasons why we don’t like them.Software patents might be one of the biggest issues to gain more freedom, also in democratic societies. Let’s thus say with Martin Luther King: I have a dream, that one day I will live in a world without software patents, where true competition of ideas and innovation exists.
Yes, and I am proud to be in a company not afraid of clear statements.
If you are close, check out this two-days workshop Free and Open Source Software in South-Eastern Europe from March 24-25 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
At the tOSSad meeting in Istanbul, I met Giulio Concas from DIEE University in Cagliari/Italy, also a tOSSad partner. He told me about the Linux User Group in Cagliari and I simply had to picture him wearing the t-shirt of the user group – isn’t it nice?
Some time ago, Lukas asked for an overview of Open Source events and compiled one himself.
The tOSSad EU project also got a list of events online. eZ systems is a consortium partner in tOSSad, thus I recently passed some of the events to Görkem (a tOSSad fellow) which eZ systems had internally. He just added them.
If you’d like to have an event added to the tOSSad list, please leave a comment here.
BTW: tOSSad is an abbreviation of “towards Open Source Software adoption and dissemination”. Take a look at
www.tossad.org for more information.
Here are some more collections:
I am going to present a talk and a workshop at the Free Software & Open Source Days 2006 in Istanbul/Turkey. Currently, the program is only available in Turkish, so I’ll tell you a bit more about my presentations here in English. BTW: They will also be presented in English, because I speak no Turkish:
Feb 25, Saturday, 14:00-15:00
eZ publish is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System based on PHP. It is being used by thousands of customers around the world, installed over 150.000 and with 1,5 million downloads. This talk provides an overview of the eZ publish functionality. You will also get first-hand information on new features and the roadmap ahead.
Feb 25, Saturday, 15:00-19:00
In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Open Source Enterprise Content Management System eZ publish to set-up a typical small business site where you need to customize the CMS system for the customer. This site will include e-commerce functionality, PDF exports, a customized content structure, RSS feeds to publish news and a WebDAV interface for simpler document management.
I am now a fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe. It was about time to give something back to a movement that had such a huge impact on my life in a positive sense. Without free software, I would not have the job I have and the life I live. Long live free software!
Sandro Groganz 