FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE ---"share and share alike.
"
FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
FOSS
By: MOINUDDIN AHMED
Roll No.-100-30-2005
MTECH IT, 1ST SEMESTER
Gauhati University
ASSAM
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS FOSS?
POPULARITY OF FOSS
LIST OF FREE AND OPEN SOURCE
SOFTWARES
HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM FOSS
RUNNING A PROFITABLE BUSINESS WITH
FOSS
CONTENTS contd..
FOSS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MODEL
WHICH LICENSE TO USE?
SHORTCOMINGS OF FOSS
HOW TO START OR CONTRIBUTE TO FOSS
PROJECT
FUTURE PROSPECTS
INTRODUCTION
A very promising and profitable industry.
FORBES - 65 software companies in the 2010 edition amongst top
2000 large companies active in all kinds of industries.
DataMonitor forecasts that in 2013, have a value of US$ 457
billion
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft was the richest person by
selling software products.
The success story of Oracle . The same happened with Larry
Ellison
Conventional software mostly are proprietary
Sealed inner mechanism
Free and Open Source Software made with just the
opposite mindset
The tremendous contributions to computing, both
research and commercial projects
making easier for large group of people.
growing phase, promising future
In this seminar I have tried to simplify the notion of
FOSS, commercial and non-commercial projects.
WHAT IS FOSS?
There are two terms to separate in FOSS.
Free software is a matter of liberty, not price.
Freedom to
Run (freedom 1)
Study how program works (freedom 2)
Redistribute copies (freedom 3)
Modify / improvise (freedom 4)
Open mainly points to Open Source Code of the program,
available for others.
get software at no cost but as per license we can enjoy the above
four
POPULARITY OF FOSS
going through phase of immense transformation.
Currently it is worth $60 billion
SourceForge.net hosts more than one million users,
involved in some way with approximately one hundred
thousand projects
no real geographic barriers
These figures speak volumes, something unique about
the philosophy of FOSS
Freedom, grow beyond its creators
Popularity of Apache Web Server
Cost comparison between Microsoft and FOSS Solutions
Microsoft
Solution
Linux/FOSS
Solution
Savings
Company A: 50
Users
$87,988
$80
$87,908
Company B: 100
Users
$136,734
$80
$136,654
Company C: 250
Users
$282,974
$80
$282,894
Sources:
wikibooks.org
Global percentage of people demanding Enterprise edition software that is foss-licensed (Gartner survey)
LIST OF FOSS
a) List of FOSS Software that runs on Microsoft Windows, Gnu/Linux and,
in some cases, Apple Max, Unix and BSD operating systems
Productivity based applications
Wordprocessing - Open Office - http://www.openoffice.org/
Publishing - Scribus - http://www.scribus.net/
PDF Creator - Pdfcreator http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
Mail Client - Evolution - http://projects.gnome.org/evolution
Compression - 7Zip - http://www.7-zip.org/
Text editor - Notepat++, http://notepadplus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
Financial - GnuCash - http://www.gnucash.org/
Internet Based applications
FTP - FileZilla - http://filezilla-project.org/
Remote connection - Vinagre - http://projects.gnome.org/vinagre/
Web development
LAMP component- EasyPHP - http://www.easyphp.org
General purpose IDE platform - Eclipse - http://www.eclipse.org/
CMS -Joomla
Multimedia
Image Editing - GIMP - http://www.gimp.org/
Audio Editor - Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
CD Creator/Burner - Infra recorder- http://infrarecorder.org/
Image Viewer - http://imgv.sourceforge.net/
Video Editing - Kdenlive - http://kdenlive.org
Systems
Ghost - http://www.fogproject.org
HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM
FOSS
1)Dual license model
released under a restrictive open-source license ,provide an alternative
proprietary license.
You have some sort of monopoly in the market leader
Motivation: Client likes product and needs it for commercial use. does
not want to breach the open-source license and is willing to pay
Open-source license: GPL suitable license to this strategy because it is
restrictive
Examples:
Mozilla Foundation has a deal-partnership with Google and other
companies
Apple Inc. offers Darwin for free, selling Mac OS X.
Red Hat offers the Fedora for free, selling Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL).
MySQL is offered for free, but with the enterprise version you can get
subscription, support and additional features.
2)Dual product model
penetrate the market by releasing an open-source product,
sell a different product with an extended version, plug-ins or upgradation.
Motivation: The user gets to be a part of an open-source
community process, contributes to the source and improves it.
Users purchase other related products from the project
professionals.
Open-source license: MIT, BSD, Apache or any other noncopyleft license.
Example:
Eclipse and its non open source plug-ins.
Sun Microsystems offer OpenOffice.org for free, while
selling StarOffice.
3)Professional services model
This strategy requires a large base of clients
the product must not be simple to use
There is no problem implementing this strategy combined with one of the
other strategies discussed before
In fact it is recommended as a complementary strategy for both.
Motivation: We are the experts in this open-source project because we
Open-source license: Any
Example:
wrote it, therefore clients would like to purchase support and other
services from us.
a) JBoss itself is open source but RedHat provides a support
subscription for JBoss Enterprise Middleware with prices from around
$6000 to $110,000 per year
4) Open source bounty
It is a reward, usually monetary, for making positive contributions to an
open-source project.
Eg.BountySource
Motivation: there is at least someone in this world who can solve my
problem.
Examples:
Sun MicroSystems has offered $1 million in bounties for OpenSolaris,
NetBeans, OpenSPARC, Project GlassFish, OpenOffice, and OpenJDK.
The Google Summer of Code and the OSU Winter of Code provide
stipends to students working on open source code.
Mozilla introduced a Security Bug Bounty Program offering $500 to
anyone who finds a "critical" security bug in Mozilla.
Bounties are often used for implementing minor features, whereas
bidding and/or grants are more typically used for major features.
RUNNING A PROFITABLE BUSINESS
WITH FOSS
Initial research for feasibility criteria.
tool for strategic planning and decision support since
running a profitable business is not easy.
Two methods for software models
total cost of ownership (TCO)
the return on investment (ROI)
TCO
Direct Costs those identified in traditional IT
budgets, including (Hardware & software
acquisition, operation and administration costs, etc)
Indirect Costs those costs generated from IT users
including (Downtime due to misuse or mistakes, enduser operations, continuous training needs etc.)
TCO for free and open
source projects can never be Rs.0
ROI
We need a method to measure something more important. How
much we will get in return on making an investment.
A simple way to look at ROI
ROI=RETURN/INVESTMENT
FOSS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MODEL
STONE SOUP MODEL
LICENSES
SHORTCOMINGS OF FOSS
Lack of business applications
Alhough GnuCash, TurboCash do exists, basic, polished
accounting applications as good as Tally do not have FOSS
equivalents at this time.
Scarcity of competent people. It is rare for a software
developer to encounter, say, accounting problems.
Interoperability with proprietary systems
not entirely compatible with proprietary systems.
For organizations that have already paid massive amounts of
capital into proprietary applications, may prove to be prohibitive
Documentation and polish
Established FOSS lacks the user-friendliness
No warranties- regarding virus and performance
related issues.
Staff must be open source savvy-When compared
with existing proprietary systems. The cost of training
is considered as a major disadvantage when migrating
HOW TO START OR
CONTRIBUTE TO FOSS PROJECT
Numerous websites hosting projects
Contributing Time/Skills
Most open source software is built completely by volunteers (without
compensation) because they want a product that fits their needs.
The list of skills of contributors may seem large, but every person has different
skills to offer and your skills may be what it takes for a project to evolve. In most
cases you do not need to be a programmer to help
By adding his hands, eyes and associated skills to their project he may take project
to the next level
Product Purchases
As with the Membership and Subscriptions, by purchasing goods from the
project's store
Donations
Feel free to visit the project's home page to see if a donation link
The laymen Contributions
as a user can give back in a way that requires no money and
limited time.
by filling bug reports and recommendation so they can fix issues
and adapt the product to better fit the needs of the current users.
As you have seen from the list there are many ways to help the
community more in the long term.
FUTURE OF FOSS
Currently, proprietary software is king.
When you buy a new computer, you will be getting Windows That
is the "default choice".
However, it is not the only choice! Equivalents available
There's plenty of money in open source for commercial vendors.
Worth billions in IT world
but there's also plenty of opportunity for customers to build and
support their own open source derived projects.
Free from VENDOR LOCK-IN forever !
We're in the 21st Century now. customers get to decide
The Customer Century.
REFERENCES
www.wikipedia.org
www.dwheeler.com/
www.foss.in
www.oscon.com/
www.opensource.org
wwwr.oss-watch.ac.uk/
www.gnu.org
www.opensource.mit.edu/
Localization of FOSS by Sarmad Hussain, Pakistan
Open Sources Voices from the Open Source Revolution - Eric Raymond
Open source approaches in Advances in Geographic Information Science
OReilly Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
A primer on open source software for business people and lawyers,
Stephen J. Davidson
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