User:Cwtseng/FSOSS 2011

Free Software and Open Source Symposium, 2011

Introduction

The 10th “Free Software and Open Source Symposium”, commonly known as FSOSS, is an annual event held in Seneca College to discuss and share the latest trends in open source.

“It is an event aimed at bringing together industry, developers, educators and the community and any other interested parties to discuss open source, open web, and academic/industry partnerships.” – Source, FSOSS 2011 There were two presentations that I really wanted to attend (which I will discuss later in this paper) and I was left with two options – either pay the registration fee or go in as a volunteer. I decided to go for the latter as my current financial standings is not in my favour.

There are many presentations that were held during FSOSS 2011. I had the opportunity to attend a number of these presentations and I will talk about two of them.

Mike Hoye: How to start an Internet Famous Business with Open Source Software

One of the presentations I attended was from Mike Hoye. Mike started a new internet based business in late 2010. He did this after he quit his job and was given a 1 year deadline to start a new business and bring in profit. His company launched products like BeSDS and BerrySync. His presentation is to talk about what he did right or wrong and the lessons he learnt from it. As an individual trying to launch a technological product in a highly saturated market, it is hard to deliver a stable and competitive product within an estimated timeline. According to Mike, one of the biggest challenging was trying to resist the temptation to add features to the product to make it stand out from the others. This often ends in missing the deadline, while the company is losing money in the meantime.

According to Mike, one of the key rules to ensuring that a small start-up business could survive is to stick to an initial plan and try to get a product out into the market. This rule can be seen often in the open source world where products are released often and quick. The reason for doing such an approach is to get a product out there. The longer a product stays as an idea, the older and staler the idea becomes. This is the reason for saying “no, no, no…repeatedly”. To adopt a new feature into the product requires additional research and software fixes which will take time and time is a major constraint for a new company.

The model of starting a new business that delivers technological solution is quite similar to the model of operation adopted by the open source community. This involves tracking any issues that may arise and managing the source code. As such, one of the biggest assets of a new start-up company is their source code and the issues of their software solutions. Without them, the business will not be able to sustain itself in the market. As Mike Hoye states “If you are small and nimble, you can still pick your battles that make your opponent’s assets irrelevant”. One of the many problems that plague a new start-up is trying to hide their ideas from big corporations. The reason for doing so is often individual wishes to protect their ideas and try to prevent corporations capitalizing on their ideas. This is one of the biggest mistakes that a new start-up can make as it is important that big corporations cannot ship a product that is bigger, better and fast due to research and budget approval which will usually take a year before a prototype is created. Therefore, it is highly important that the company ship a small percentage of the idea in the form of a product and then improve on them in the later versions. This way, the idea is out in the market for various users to test it out and improvements are made based on the feedback that we get. This process of developing a software product is similar to how the Linux distributions are made. A famous example is how the iPhones were launched. The initial iPhone excelled in only one feature, which is the multi-touch functionality. One the other hand, the general basic features are commonly available with other phones. Another problem that often plagues a new technological start-up the developer tends to write a lot of program code. This is not advisable as most of those codes could already be written by someone else and may even be more efficient. This is always more financially and timely feasible than writing your own code, which will have bugs and will take time to fix. Being an open source business, program codes are usually not proprietary and the start-up company can often make use of them as long as those works are properly credited and appreciated. This is often accomplished through a social contract with the open source community. Open source code is a form of social contract and there is no licensing involved. As a common and appropriate thing in a social contract, the start-up company should give back to the community as well. By doing so, we can also build a good relationship with those individuals and can request their help when the time requires. Mike Hoye closes of his presentation by summarizing the mistakes he made during his one year period and they are:

• Late Marketing – This caused a problem as users are not aware of the existence of his product