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The other session I found personally relevant was Khalid's talk titled "Open Source for Fun and Profit: Making a Career". I was stunned at the throng of people present. The talk took place in the upper Kaleidoscope room and had audience members lining its glass walls. Audience members were forced to stand because there were simply not enough chairs to accommodate for the number all of us. Luckily I didn't arrive too late and managed to get a seat. I interpreted the amount of audience members present as a sign that there is still much confusion as how a business or individual can make a profit from free or open source software. I am hopeful FSOSS 2010 will have similar talks or even an entire stream addressing this issue.

Khalid began by first providing his background. He is the founder of [http://2bits.com/ 2bit.com Inc.], a privately owned incorporated company based in Waterloo. His firm provides domestic along with international custom web page development for businesses seeking to place their business online. His talk mostly focused on his own experiences with generating a profit by the use of [http://drupal.org/ Drupal], an open source content management system. Khalid then went into more detail about the different features of Drupal. Its scalability, themes and speed were some of the advantages he reviewed. He also mentioned that Drupal is now actively actually being used by the [http://www.whitehouse.gov whitehouse.gov] website, which I found quite interesting.

During his talk, Khalid drew an interesting a fascinating analogy between biological symbiosis and software development. He argued developing closed source software is similar to a biological [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism parasitic ] relationship whereas open source development more closely matches a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism mutualistic] or a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commensal commenalistic] relationship. In a parasitic symbiosis, one biological organism benefits, while the other suffers. A simple biological example is of course is a human parasite. While the parasite benefits from a host by feeding on its flesh, the host is physically harmed and potentially killed. A software equivalent is a closed source company which released releases an application juggernaut which benefits by capturing the majority of profit from consumers while dwarfing any other smaller yet functionally equivalent products. The smaller company will obviously lose profits and similar to the biological host, the parasite well established company may lead to the hostother company's demise. An example Khalid used is two competing hardware assemblers, HP and Dell. He went on to say that the two companies are striving strive for complete market share, firmly believing if one is to succeed, the other must fail. He firmly asserted this isn't necessary and each company can have their own 'piece of the pie'.

I began to think about other examples. Because of Microsoft's huge presence in software, it attracts developers many development studios to adopt its Visual Studio IDE, shunting most developers to buy this product. Other IDE producers then lose profit because their products were may not have even been considered. A more extreme example of a parasitic occurrence was in the mid 90's. Novell released its WordPerfect application to run on the Windows operating system. However, Novell later claimed MicroSoft omitted technical details (such as API documentation) from of its operating system. This prevented Novell from making their product as powerful as MicroSoft's Word. The issue still creates much debate. Whether or not Novell was correct in their claims of lost revenue is still uncertain, but this does produce an interesting case.

A third more contemporary example is that of the browser wars. After an installation of Windows, Internet Explorer can be found right on the desktop, ready for use. Many users are apathetic about which browser they choose. Since it is present by default they simply use without a second thought. Microsoft is easily able to drown out competitors simply because they build both a browser and a popular operating system on which Internet Explorer runs. One of the major reasons I choose to use Mozilla's Firefox is because it not only uses open standards but also has proven to be a extremely innovative.

Khalid then went on to explain describe the an almost reciprocal mutualistic symbiosis. In this symbiosis, two biological organisms both benefit from their interaction. Khalid claimed open source development leans more towards this win/win relationship. For example, when developers decide to adopt the LAMP system for their web development, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/PERL developers all benefit. Each of these systems were developed separately but can be brought together to solve real world problems. Of course even open source isn't purely mutualistic. There are competitors such as in the case with Drupal and Joomla, both are useful content management systems. The competition however isn't of the same natureas compared to a closed vs. open source program. Even looking at the different distributions of Linux, there exist so many and yet each aren't actually trying to drown out the other.

Khalid then addressed some of his views and experiences working in open source environments. He recited a few anecdotes in which individuals have fixed or updated his old applications by sending him patches for review. This is yet another example of a relic project left behind and subsequently picked up and improved by another interested party. Additionally, this exemplifies the mutualistic relationship present in open source software development. One developer has their legacy application resurrected while the other one gains meritocratic status. That contributor can then place this on their resume when looking for future work. On the other end, the developer receiving the patch has benefited because their time was save saved from doing it themselves.

Khalid then continued into Then the presentation narrowed to profit -generating portion of his talk. How exactly can one make a profit from software which is either free or has its source readily available? To do this, other avenues need to be perusedrather than selling the software directly. There are a slew of available options such as providing web hosting, publishing books, conducting seminars, selling video tutorials on open source tools, teaching classes in universities and colleges and of course hosting symposiums. At the conclusion of his talk, someone an audience member asked him about how to go on starting a business. He began to list the the different legal forms of ownership available. I found this interesting because I am currently enrolled in a Canadian Business course in which we learn this material. Hearing that individuals are actually seeking out this information makes attending some of the classes much more meaningful.