Impact of Industry

• What role does industry play?

• Who are the major players supporting open source and proprietary software?

Microsoft’s position of the the biggest player in the proprietary software market, is no longer threathened by its traditional commercial rivals, e.g. IBM and Sun Microsystems, but by a seemingly motley collection of free software tools and operating systems collectively dubbed "open source" software.

Unlike most commercial software, the core code of such software can be easily studied by other programmers and improved upon - the only condition being that such improvements must also be revealed publicly and distributed freely in a process that encourages continual innovation. From an operating system Linux to a web server Apache these open source programs are emerging not just as inexpensive but as more robust and dynamic alternatives to commercial software. Another major open source softwares with good reputation in the industry include also GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), Samba etc.

If open source software is reemerging as an important force, it is largely as a reaction against Microsoft itself. Competitors who themselves have seen their own proprietary alternatives sink under the Microsoft steamroller have suddenly seen alliances with open source software as a chance to halt the Windows monopoly. By itself, this alliance is unlikely to make open source software a real alternative to Microsoft and, more problematically, the opportunism of the alliance creates a whole set of tensions that need to be resolved for open source software to succeed.

• Mixing of the open and closed source - effect on industry as whole, why firms want to do it?
• Future of coexistence of Linux and Windows
• What is the history of patents/copyrights in the software industry?
• What are the implications of open source on intellectual property rights?

The increasingly fast evolution of information and communications technologies has placed enormous pressure on the Intellectual Property legal regime throughout the world. The traditional schemes of protection of copyrights, trademarks, patents, software, databases, and so forth seem less well-suited to solve many of the problems faced today by governments, businesses and citizens throughout the world.

One of the major challenges that software industry faces is the open source software. The open source movement presents both opportunities and challenges within the intellectual property context. Nevertheless, the intellectual property regime related to open source software, is not altogether clear. Arguably, open source software is as much about the licence as it is about the development methodology. Well-known licences such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) have well defined conditions for contribution of code to the ongoing development of the software or the incorporation of the code into other packages. However, doubts have been raised about the legality of such licenses. Likewise, some purported rights-holders in the chain of title to important open source code have challenged end uses of the technologies on intellectual property grounds, most prominently in the case SCO v. IBM, pending in the United States court system and which could have implications for open source software development projects around the world.

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/tips.xml http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html http://opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php

• Who sets the policy (regulations) that manages creation of software?
• Problems of monopoly in case of closed source?