lauri@imke

In this short article Lauri Laineste describes some business models of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software). This review is a part of Open Source Management course.

As free software may be freely redistributed, free software generally is available at very little cost. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as support, training, customization, integration, or certification. It’s not easy to find the right solution for marketing a open-source product, but still a lot of companies (especially the ones distributing Linux) have become very successful.

Examples

Let’s talk about Red Hat succes-story. With projected revenues of about $300 million last year, the 13-year-old company relies on a subscription model. An annual fee per server buys updates, upgrades, certifications, unlimited incident support throughout the year.

One strong example would be also JBoss, which is a division of Red Hat. JBoss has managed to sell conferences, support, certification, even a reference manual. Each of these profit centers provides a strong revenue stream. Providing a strong application server platform, along with a company of services and development concepts to support, JBoss has certainly been able to use the community to help develop their vision.

MySQL employs a dual licensing model. It distributes the database software for free if people agree to distribute any modifications under the GPL, which is the basic license for a lot of (but not all) open source software. The other part of the dual licensing agreement covers the MySQL Enterprise edition, which comes with services and support and doesn’t require redistribution.

A similar example would be Eclipse which is a development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. If you want, you can use it for free, but people at Genuitec saw an opportunity for a cool service, MyEclipse, a subscription based toolbox for enterprise Eclipse development.

A failure?

It’s hard to find real failures in this field, but after reading this article it seems like atleast one open source operating system has chosen wrong strategy. We’re talking about Linspire, which is said to be the easiest desktop Linux. At first we could argue about the quality of this software, because there is nothing much special in Linspire: Debian has the history and dpkg. Fedora has the legacy of Red Hat. SuSE has the huge community and Novell’s backing. Ubuntu has the six month cycle and the wonderful community. And Linspire has… CNR (the Linspire package manager).

Besides that Linspire has made a not-so-good deal with Microsoft which is about adding Windows Media, Live Messenger, TrueType font and MS Office support to Linspire. The idea seems to be good, but Linspire doesn’t have the guarantee for future support from Microsoft. If Microsoft comes out with new versions of the applications mentioned, Linspire should buy a new support-package and what is the worst - Microsoft can stop offering protection whenever they want. Could they survive without the support for these mainstream MS applications?

Conclusion

In general it seems to be quite easy to come up with a company selling CD’s with the recent version of GIMP, but in real-life finding customers doesn’t seem to be the easiest task anymore. As we can see, there are companies who know the secret of making money with open-source products. Customers are willing to pay for the support they get from the software developers and distributers. Also a model providing open-source products pre-installed on servers and other gadgets is a popular one.

Some open source purists will argue that the vision behind the open source project should be the project itself and the community that will benefit from it. But these days, it’s common that companies work with the community to both give back to the company that initially invested in the project.

Source

The Best Open Source Business Models
Open Source Business Models: a Taxonomy of Open Source Firms’ business models
Nuts and Bolts of Open Source Business Models
Web 2.0 Expo: Open Source Business Models
10 Open Source Companies Set to Dominate 2008

In this short article Lauri Laineste describes some legal cases involving FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software). This review is a part of Open Source Management course.

Since free software is often the easiest solution for companies looking for new markets and fast product-development (as it’s free), there are numerour cases where companies tend to misunderstand or overlook the licenses attached to open-source software (usually GPL).

Case study “Verizon”

Verizon, a telecommunication gigant has one of the latest GPL-related lawsuit to handle. The Software Freedom Law Center has sued the company on behalf of the developers of BusyBox, a set of Unix utilities typically used in embedded systems. According to the license the source code should have been added to the box, but for some reasons the company has failed to do it. At first the developers informed the company about the problem but as the company did not respond, they had to sue Verizon. The case is still open.

Actually The Software Freedom Law Center has filed three other lawsuits on behalf of the BusyBox developers (Erik Andersen and Rob Landley) claiming improper use of this device. One was settled, while the other two remain pending.

Source:
Open Source Developers Settle GPL Lawsuit
Verizon hit with GPL copyright lawsuit over router software

Case study “SCO”

On March 6th 2003 The SCO Group (a software company focused on UNIX systems) sued IBM for contributing with no authorizaton SCO’s intellectual property to the codebase of the open source, Unix-like Linux operating system. And that was a $5 billion lawsuit. SCO wanted revoke IBM’s license to ship its version of Unix and even sent a warning to the biggest companies who might be using Linux, that the operating system might not be reliable. The question was about owning the intellectual property rights: SCO was in opinion that after buying UNIX operating system in 1995 from Novell also received the copyrights and stated that Linux contains features from the UNIX that they had bought and further-developed.

This lawsuit caused outrage in the free software and open source community. They had arguments such as SCO actually doesn’t own the code and they’re not the owners of the UNIX operating system. Besides that it was mentioned the Linux operating system was written form cratch by hundreds of collaborators with a revision history. They also pointed out that Linux might have the same features as the UNIX developed by SCO has, but it doesn’t mean that the code has been copied from SCO UNIX - it could have been done from other open-source operating systems.

The lawsuit ended on August 10th 2007, when the court announced that Novell (and not the SCO Group) is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system.

Considerable is the fact that after losing the lawsuit, SCO lost 70% value of its share on the market.

The list of SCO’s other lawsuits.

Source:
SCO vs IBM
SCO sues Big Blue over Unix, Linux
SCO loses long-running UNIX case
SCO Goes Down in Flames: Novell owns Unix

Author

Lauri Laineste

IMKE, Tallinn University

Keywords

open source, free software, gnu, license, software

Abstract

In this short article Lauri Laineste takes a closer look at the ‘Open Source’ and ‘Free Software’ definitions. The point of this article is to make clear what are the differences between Open Source,- and Free Software schools and why there is a need for two different licenses. Laineste brings out the conditions that a software has to fill in order to gain the Open Source or the Free Software license.

Introduction

During the golden 60’s, when the first commercial computers started to spread, software on the machines was free (libre). It came with source code and was easily shared. The business at these times was the hardware. But during the 70’s computers became less expensive and more accessible - non-technical office workers and home users had a need for computers. The software companies started to see an oppurtunity in making money with software. Companies started to sell only the compiled binaries.

The situation started to change in the mid 80’s, when Richard Stallman saw an danger in propertiary software: users could buy a copy of a program but couldn’t change or distribute it. Without source code the software had no value. One thing lead to another and the organisations fighting for libre software were born.

Research question

What is the main difference between Open Source and Free Software schools?

Methods

Literature analysis is used in creating this article.

Open Source

OSI stands for Open Source Initiative and is a organisation that promotes open source software. According to Wikipedia the organisation was founded in February 1998 by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond when Netscape Communications Corporation, published the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product as free software, due to lowering profit margins and competition with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer software.

Free Software

FSF stans for Free Software Foundation and is a organisation to promote free software movement. According to Wikipedia the organisation was founded on October 4, 1985 by Richard Stallman to support the GNU Project.

FSF vs OSI

Both of the schools have more or less similar aims, but differ in their philosophy and values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. People intend to mix these 2 principles.

The definition of free software (via fsf.com): Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms.

The definition of open source (via opensource.com): Under the Open Source Definition, licenses must meet 10 conditions in order to be considered open source licenses:

1. Free Redistribution: the software can be freely given away or sold.
2. Source Code: the source code must either be included or freely obtainable.
3. Derived Works: redistribution of modifications must be allowed.
4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code: licenses may require that modifications are redistributed only as patches.
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: no one can be locked out.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: commercial users cannot be excluded.
7. Distribution of License: The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: the program cannot be licensed only as part of a larger distribution.
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software: the license cannot insist that any other software it is distributed with must also be open source.
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral: no click-wrap licenses or other medium-specific ways of accepting the license must be required.

Conclusion

It seems like for the Open Source, the question whether a software should be open source, has a practical meaning (the availabilty to modify the code); for the Free Software, it seems to be like a principal, that the users have the right for free software.

References

Free Software vs Open Source [Accessed Dec. 13, 2007]

Open source history [Accessed Dec. 13, 2007]

Roberts J., (2007), Free software vs open source [Accessed Dec. 13, 2007]

Stallman R., (2007), Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software [Accessed Dec. 13, 2007]

Stallman R., (2002), Why open source needs Free Software’s ideals [Accessed Dec. 13, 2007]

Why Free Software is better than Open Source [Accessed Dec. 13, 2007]

Since TV was invented in the 30’s, it has been the revolutionary product, that every single home needed to have. TV was like the heart of the home - after a long workday all the family came together, had a dinner and ofcourse, watched the Larry King’s show or 8 o’clock news. Actually, a nice tradition. I have a clear image in my head, when our family got the first TV with a remote control, it was somewhere in the beginning of the 90’s and when finally the cable was connected, the show had jus started. It seemed like TV and all the foreign channels with hundreds of different cartoons are so interesting that you could even forget about playing football with your friends outside.

So, what’s the sitation today? Actually, I even can’t remember the last time I turned the TV on in order to watch a movie or another episode of Simpsons. Since I moved to Tallinn 5 years ago to start my studies at university, I haven’t had a TV at all. To be honest, I never had a need for it. Since everybody and everything is connected to the net, the classical TV is not so tremendously interesting anymore. Classical TV is static, internet isn’t. So, in order to stay popular and gain new watchers, the old and good TV has to change fundamentally.

Internet killed the television star

In general, TV needs to get interactive. Interactivity sells and it’s so old-fashioned to watch “Friends” only once a week on specific time. It would be more attractive to see the movies and serials on the times, that are most suitable for you. And if you feel like, the TV box should enable you to show all the “Friends” episodes in a row. That would be fun! This kind of features are not supperted by the classical TV, but engineers have been busy developing a lot of cool applications that bring TV to the next level.

A lot of Internet-based TV applications have shown up lately: the popular Joost, Babelgum and Zattoo etc (via Read/WriteWeb). Joost was one of the first successful pioneers to show up in the internet-based TV world. I’ve been Joost’s beta tester since January and have seen the amazing development of this application. At first, it had only some sample programs and now there’s a great variety of programs and 250 different channels all together. Joost is based on P2P technologies (the more user it has, the stronger the connection is) and is a typical video-on-demand example. You decide when you’re in a mood for another Happy Tree Friends cartoon or a political debate. That’s the most important feature IPTV application can deliver.

Besides the video-on-demant feature, Joost has a lot of useful widgets. Personalizing is the keyword at the moment and Joost has all the tools that are neccessary to configure the application in the way you want. The widgets let the users to chat with friends via Gmail Talk or Meebo. The Meebo add-on was introduced a week ago and gives a totally new perspective for the Joost’s functionality. In addition, all the users who are watching the same contect, can chat in a public chatroom and share their thougts about the show. The chatroom is another cool social-feature that makes Joost much more fun to use. Rating the programs and reading the news are also some possible actions you could do while watching the channels on Joost. I wonder when they add the social networking side to Joost - so every members could create a profile that contains the information of the programs they have seen, which are the highest rated shows, what are their friends watching and what they are waiting to see.

Babelgum is similar to Joost, but doesn’t contain so many channels as Joost has. Babelgum lets the users to great personal playlists and in general is a straight-competitor to Joost. Zattoo, which has been mentioned before, has only Swiss-content at the moment and differs from Joost and Babelgum in the way, that it’s streaming the live-shows. So, it’s not so flexible, but a great application to keep your eye on the content that’s being showed at the moment.

Grassroots journalism in TV

Publishing news has been the main feature the TV has always delievered. There are channels which have concentrated only on the news and the others publish news as short and informative programs. The changing TV and developing technologies have given new oppurtunities to publish news and give a new perspective to grassroots journalism - the journalism that can be created by everyone (and not only by professional journalists).

Al Gore founded an innovative TV program - Current TV, which lets users to contribute in creating the news. Interesting is the fact that the channel is preparing to make the break-through in the web. The web is more flexible in order to make Current TV more attractive and interactive. In the web the users could submit videos and video-comments arranged by their web-cams and rate the news so other users could see only the most relevant materials. It will have basicly the same principle as Digg has, but it will be in TV. Cool! MacManus introduces one of its feature called Viewpoints - all the users can submit 1-minute-long video-comments on certain topics and then other users can rate the comments or post their own 1 minute-long video-comments. The most relative video-comments are shown on Current TV channel. Indeed, a new and frash way to browse news.

Mobile TV

Mobile media will be the next big hype after the social revolution in the web. As I mentioned in my last article (Mobile Revolution), mobile services have started to develop fast and everyone wants to be mobile. Partly it’s because the new technologies enable to create quite complex services and nearly half of the world’s population is connected via mobile devices. So, what about watching your favourite movie from a mobile? Ofcourse it’s not the same as doing it in the cinema while eating pop-corn, but in some cases the mobile TV will certainly rock the market. For example, watching news and some short programmes would be quite well followed from mobile devices. Still, Mobile TV is making it’s first steps and not reachable for everyone.

Mobile TV could be successful if the companies could agree on the revenue model and common standards. At the moment you pay for mobile TV according to the megabytes you download, but it would be much more reasonable to pay for certain shows and programmes. It would make the pricing also more clear to customers.

Mobile TV requires much more resources to build a stable network as building a traditional TV network. One possibility would be to use DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld). It enables to build networks similar to classical TV - there will be one neutral operator that operates the mobile TV network. The network will be used by (mobile) companies who could publish their channels. In total, there can be up to 40 different channels in one network - some of them can be paid and some will be opened for everyone (like the national channels in TV).

Conclusion

TV is a huge business and everyone wants to take it’s share. Nowadays it’s not only the business of broadcasters, but also the software and mobile companies are keeping their hands busy creating new and interesting TV-applications.

In order to stay popular, TV has to change it’s structure and gain the features the all-powerful internet has. Nobody’s interested in the static TV anymore - while watching a movie that was directed by Steven Spielberg, I’d like to get all the information about the movie and the producer, other movies directed by him, ratings, reviews and user-comments of the movie. It all should be online and done in one interface.

Mobiles are just not for talking anymore. Actually they havent been for that for some good years now, but today these small gadgets look especially hot and attractive. Richard Wray (2007) points out, that there are approx. 3 billion mobile phones in the world today and another billion next-generation phones will be sold already next year. This is the reason why Apple came out with the revolutinary iPhone and Google is trying to catch the plane talking about the Google phone.

It’s also the question of globalization - people are not depending on the desktop PC’s anymore, since the global lifestyle prefers laptops and now even more smaller and lighter mobile gadgets. Mobile services are one of the biggest trends in the future web-world (MacManus, 2007).

Jaokar (2006, 1-15) explains the human need for Mobile 2.0 services. He’s doing it very creativly using the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The theory sais that there are some things whitout we couldn’t live (we need food and sleep) and after we have achieved them, we start to look for something more (we want to feel secure and to be loved) etc. Now, the same theory has been set to the mobile services - after achieving the basic needs (calling the ambulance in case of accident), people want more out of the mobiles (i.e order ringtones, send MMS’s etc) and the highest element in the pyramid is creating content and using complex services with mobile devices. Actually we could live without them, but there still is quite clear need for these kind of services.

Citizen journalism and mobile technologies

Mobile technologies have given a strong input for the citizen journalism development. Newsvine, one of the most popular citizen journalism sites, was recently acquired by MSNBC. It shows, that the leading news-agencies see the potential in citizen journalism and have started to give more attention on this issue. But not only the agencies, also the mobile companies want to take their share. Interesting is the fact, that Nokia has developed in co-operation with Reuters a The Mobile Journalsim toolkit, that consists of a multimedia phone equipped with a Bluetooth keyboard and other fancy gadgets. It shows that journalism is getting more-and-more mobile and gives an oppurtunity basicly for everyone to take part in the journalism process. Daily newspapers have sections, where their readers can submit photos and videos taken on the streets and from places where the reporters already have missed the “big fire” or the accident. It has all the characteristics of Web 2.0, which is the keyword for user-created-content.

Intersection of mobile and Web 2.0

Kharif (2006) points out that since mobiles are ruleing the market, popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have opened mobile services. The PC isn’t necessary anymore to keep the eye on your friends’ activities in Facebook or MySpace. It’s easy to take a snapshot with your handy and instantly upload it to the web - a cool way to share your travellings with your friends and family at home. Interesting is also the fact, that some mobile companies have contracts with social networking sites, so the phones have pre-installed applications to make communicating with the site and uploading new photos even more easier.

Actually the same thing is going on with blogging - the PC is boring and clumsy. Use mobile devices to post about your trip to south-Spain and with a integrated GPS it’s possible make it really interesting to follow. Locative services will rock the mobile market.

Locative services

The advantage of the mobile devices is the fact, that you always have them in your pocket and ready to use. Jensen (2007) is in opinion that, the next big thing after Web 2.0 will be locative services. I totally share this idea, because all the information in the web would have much more value if it has been tagged with it’s location. It would be cool to save the keywords “champions league final live” (if you’re interested in watching tonights game) and while walking around in the city, your mobiles gives you a hint that the pub cross the road is showing this game live. The information gets relevant in these specific locations.

It’s also with the million Flickr images. They would be much more valuable, if they were seen at some specific locations (but not at your desktop). Imagine yourself being a tourist in India and you would receive a bunch of photos of Taj Mahal being close to the building. It would give a good overview of the building - some pictures are zoomed in, taken in different light conditions etc.

In Tokyo, a new mobile service is being tested at the moment. Michael Fitzpatrick (2007) mentions that the RFID tags are used to describe the streets, shops, underground, etc in Tokyo. There’s also a practical reason for that - the city is huge and even some streets don’t have names, so for tourists getting lost in Tokyo would be no problem. The new system indicates if the supermarket has a sushi-restaurant or in the underground the mobile would show you the photo how the stop looks from the street - so you could easily recognise your stop (in case you feel a bit uncomfortable in japanese).

Mobile services go too far?

Yuki Noguchi (2006) introduces an application Dodgeball, which is a mobile social software. The point of this application would be tracing your friends with a mobile device - it will give you an overview where your friends have been. Actually it has quite a lot of features, even the popular dating service. While walking around in the city, you could specify that you would like to meet a 22-year-old brunette who likes classical music. And wow, you’re mobile will let you know, if there are any of these girls close to you. Dating 2.0? Besides it’s possible to receive messages if some of your friends is in a nearby cafe.

Actually these kind of services have quite a serious privacy issues to face, but nevertheless, it seems like people still want to ‘be on the map’. Interesting is the fact, that this service is owned by Google. It won’t take a lot of time, before Google will know everything about us. But yeah, fortunatelly the phones still have the magical shut-down button.

Conclusion

Mobile services and especially locative services will receive more and more attention. It seems like all the big web-companies are finding ways to reach the mobile market. At one point of view it will boost the technological development on mobile devices, which is definetely good. Besides that, mobile manufacturers are opening SDK’s, so software developers could write cool widgets for mobile devices. Recenlty Apple introdeced the SDK for iPhone. That’s a great oppurtunity to develop even more complex mobile services. Entrepreneurs from the mobile field intend to call these services also as Mobile 2.0 (most probably because of the Web 2.0 hype), but one thing is sure - the desktops are being conquered by all-powerful mobile gadgets.

List of references

Jaokar, A., Fish, T (2006) Mobile Web 2.0: The Innovator’s Guide to Developing and Marketing Next Generation Wireless/Mobile Applications. Futuretext

Kharif, O. (2006), Social Networking goes Mobile. [Accessed 28.10.2007]

Wray, R. (2007), The world has gone mobile mad and gadget crazy as prices fall. [Accessed 28.10.2007]

Jensen, M. (2007), The Next Big Thing: Why Web 2.0 isn’t Enoug [Accessed 28.10.2007]

MacManus, R. (2006), Understanding Mobile 2.0. [Accessed 28.10.2007]

MacManus, R. (2007), 10 Future Web Trends. [Accessed 28.10.2007]

Noguchi, Y. (2006), Friends at Hand And In Your Face. [Accessed 28.10.2007]

Fitzpatrick, M. (2007), Tagging Tokyo’s streets with no name. [Accessed 28.10.2007]