Impact of Industry

• What role does industry play?

The charateristic of the industry will have impact on the future of creation of software. Few of these are:

1. The size of the companies
2. The competitive enviornment
3. Outsourcing strategy
4. Barriers to entry
   1. Technological expertise
   2. Distribution and service network
   3. Brand image

• 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 - why firms want to do it? Effect on industry as whole?

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. This is why OSS has significant market share in many markets, is often the most reliable software, and in many cases has the best performance. Furthermore, OSS often has far better security, perhaps due to the possibility of worldwide review, and the total cost of ownership for OSS is often far less than proprietary software, especially as the number of platforms increases.

With the number of open-source products on the rise, there has been a surge in services offerings--such as consulting and support--designed specifically for open-source software like Linux, the Apache Web server and MySQL database. One of the biggest frustrations on the part of IT with the vendor-dominated industry is that you had over-engineered products with so many features stuffed into them that 80 percent of them were not used. With open source, you strip down the code and use exactly what you need.

Big companies looking for help in assembling new systems based on unfamiliar open-source programs are fueling a race among providers--some new, some holdovers from the dot-com boom and long before--to become the trusted name in open-source services. Corporate customers will have more providers to choose from for installing and maintaining open-source software. The rise of open source services also reflects how software distributors are increasingly competing on the services they provide, rather than on software features. Open source won't be about the software at all--it will be about the services.

Seeking services revenue is not restricted to the open-source crowd. With corporate spending on software restrained, established providers of proprietary software increasingly rely on ongoing revenues, such as maintenance rather than new license sales. In an earnings call earlier this year, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison touted the company's "subscription" maintenance business as "an extremely high-margin business."

Professional services firms have had practices for proprietary software--such as SAP or Oracle software--for many years. But in open source, most service providers are still relatively young and the market is unsettled, which means that companies that partner today could become competitors in the future.

More and more, the emphasis is going from the bits to the services wrapped around those bits. The open-source movement has already rewritten the rules for how software is licensed and used. Now the computer services market is changing to keep up.

References: http://news.com.com/Open+source+reshaping+services+market/2100-7344_3-5504851.html?tag=nl http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

• Future of coexistence of Linux and Windows

Open source software can coexist with commercial software in market niches where flexibility is paramount and communal development works well. In others, where ease of use or customer support and training are more important and financial incentives spur innovation, commercial software may dominate.

• What is the history of open source versus proprietary software?

The history of copyrights and licenses for software creation is relatively long considering the short lifespan of computers. In the post World War II era, the federal government of the United States funded a $3 million project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for researchers to create, share and innovate new software. This was the beginning of the fundamentals of OSS. It wasn’t until the development of UNIX in the 1980’s that a battle for standardization and proprietary software appeared. In order to settle on a standard for all government and university computer systems, the government granted a $500 million contract with Sun to provide their UNIX instead of other versions. Soon afterwards, Netscape and Microsoft were battling for the internet standard which opened the door for proprietary software. The government backed away from further involvement and with the internet boom, commercialization and proprietary software took over. Nowadays, open source advocates are growing as a backlash against Microsoft, including the creation of the free software movement.

References: http://www.netaction.org/opensrc/future/return.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software

• 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

• Problems of monopoly in case of closed source?