The Announcement Information for the November Meeting has been misplaced. I am currently trying to obtain a copy, so that this portion of the Archive File can be completed.

Dr. Toal said you have heard about open source and 4 or 5 years ago you heard about it a lot when Linux was starting to make news. There are many misconceptions; that open source is not sustainable, pure giveaway, done for fun, detrimental to the economy, anti-Microsoft and altruistic. However, people who work on open source systems get noticed and get hired, and big companies such as IBM and HP are investing in it. Bruce Perens, an open source guru, says that open source has "much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated." Available as open source are Linux, Apache, Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, MySQL, PHP, JBoss and much other software. A short, simplistic definition of open source is software for which the source code is, and must always be, even in derived works, available to all. The main groups are the free software movement (fsf.org) and the open source movement (opensource.org). Opensource.org has a more complete definition of open source. The open source movement grew out of the free software movement. The differences are minor, but the basic philosophies are the same. Users of open source software have the right to obtain and utilize the source code and freely give it away or sell it (bundled or not). They must clearly mark which modifications are their own, not place further restrictions on redistribution and must not restrict its use.

Open source software is usually, but not necessarily; worked on by volunteers, owned by no one, copylefted as opposed to copyrighted. It is free as in speech as opposed to free as in beer. The advantages are you can always get the source code so you can fix problems yourself, someone else can fix problems faster (no waiting months for a next release or patch), the benefit of dozens or hundreds of eyes reviewing the code, the developers are also users, and security resulting from massive peer review of the source code. Dr. Toal did not recognize any disadvantages of open source. He said Microsoft has at least partially matched one of the advantages by releasing Beta test versions of its software to thousands of users. A remark from the audience was that configuration control and standardization across a large corporation might be easier to achieve by using code closely controlled by the manufacturer. Dr. Toal said he thought controlling open source software by version numbers could achieve the same goal. IBM and Eclipse both use open source software and control it.

The economics of open source have been questioned. Why do people do this? Are they sharing and giving things away? Can't they get paid for their time and talents? Aren’t their time and talents scarce resources? The basic idea is that software is rarely the product (although it usually is for Microsoft). Less than 30% (perhaps as low as 5%) of software is sold as product, usually it's developed for a customer. With open source, customers participate in the development. They are not subject to vendors without competition that sell products that aren’t exactly what the customers want and that crash too often. Giving software away might not matter. Software is usually just an enabler (a cost-center not a profit-center). You have to understand the difference between differentiating vs. non-differentiating technologies. A diffentiating technology is one that creates an advantage of your company over another. A non-differentiating technology is background knowledge available to everyone, including your competitors, and doesn't affect your competitive position unless you just ignore it and become obsolete. You should not give away differentiators but do collaborate on non-differentiators to spread out cost and risk. In open source there is a disincentive to not releasing a patch that corrects a bug in order to create a competitive advantage as future open source changes may make your patch obsolete and cause additional cost in updating your own system. Nondifferentiators are available to anyone. All retail software is in this category. It works "behind the scenes" as far at the customer is concerned. Examples are word processors, spreadsheets, browsers, mail clients, web servers, operating systems and databases.

There are a number of economic paradigms.

• Retail- massive upfront investment (and risk) that requires a mass market and is not customer directed.
• In house/contract – customer in control, good for differentiators (unless your contractor keeps the rights and resells the product).
• Closed Source consortiums- their history is of "titanic failures."
• Open Source-started by one group, released early, end-users contribute (no marketing costs, no mass market required, no stock-market investment, distributed cost and risk).

Open source contributors can be volunteers who want to gain prestige, learn about new technologies, want to catch a potential employer's eye and gain reciprocity and trust from cooperation. Companies participating in open source software may offer different licenses, (1) an unrestricted personal license, (2) a commercial license costing money to allow inclusion in derived works. Companies may sell training and services and may sell extra products. IBM sells DB2 on Linux. Hardware companies like open source operating systems and software because their hardware is hard to duplicate and software is a commodity. As a commodity, sometimes when the price of something goes down the demand for something else goes up. When software prices go down the market for hardware, services and accessories goes up. Open sources is like capitalism, there is no central controlling agency and the marketplace for software weed out useless things. Many open source products never get used at all. Only the best contributions stay in.

Applicability of the process to other fields? Software is uniquely easy to share. Bandwidth is easy to share as personal computers on the internet have been used to provide cooperative processing. Music peer-to-peer transfers have been successful (and threatening to music producers). Some beginning bands are willing to have their music downloaded to freely to gain attention. Research information and biological databases are valuable and easy to share. Dr. Toal tried to think of open source outside of information technology, but could only come up with carpools.

In the future there is room for both open and closed source software. Which will dominate? Dr. Toal believes that open source is the only viable economic approach and wonders how long retailers can survive. Will Microsoft still be selling operating systems 30 years from now? Maybe the open source idea will catch on elsewhere. Y. Benkler said that social sharing may be a "third mode of economic activity."

For more information:

http://www.opensource.org/
Basic information on open source software.

http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3623762
The economics of open source.

http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html
Descriptions of how open source software works.

http://www.catb.org
Eric Raymond’s Essays: The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Magic Cauldron

The essays and the website listed above it give a lot of information about the open source process. Eric Raymond is definitely anti-Microsoft and quite outspoken. He has some papers leaked from Microsoft interspersed with his commentary.

http://www.fcw.com/article90919-09-26-05-Print
A description of 5 open source software products.

For self study get Ray Toal's presentation "Economics of Open Source Software" from his webpage at:
www.technocage.com/~ray

Then use the references to do a more detailed study.

Dr. Toal gave us a fast one hour introduction to a very interesting topic. Digging into these details provides food for thought on how open source soft works and whether or not retail software (and Microsoft) will survive in the future as seen by some open source proponents. An unanswered question might be "in my lifetime" or considering my age "in your lifetime?"

This was the third meeting of the LA Chapter year and was attended by 8 persons.
Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary