User:AaronMT/FSOSS 08

FSOSS 2008 Report (DPS909)

Free Software and Open Source Symposium

Introduction

Upon observing, analyzing and assessing the presentations to which I appreciatively attended at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium, I will focus, illustrate, and describe my findings on two speakers and their associated presentations. Seneca College's 7th annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium, captured the essence of the open source spirit by bringing in a vast assortment of speakers, long and diverse; representing the best of the web, the open source desktop, open source business/law, and the quintessential open source spirit. Professors, students, employees, administrations, and community leaders all brought together to discuss the essence of the open source world.

Using Drupal: Community Powered Code to Run Your Site

James Walker, Lullabot's Director of Education, community involver in security and infrastructurer, and engineer behind some of Drupal's staple core presented an informative outlook on Drupal: Community Powered Code to run ones site.

James provided an in-depth analysis of Drupal, detailing the absolute importance of the open source community.

Drupal’s success story is built upon the framework of what James described, as contributions vs. the core of the Drupal framework. These two composite factors are what drive the Drupal community and the open source product towards success.

James addressed about how the official release of Drupal, known as "Drupal core", contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create a classic "brochureware" Web site or an interactive community Web site.

Web site content can be contributed by registered or anonymous users (at the discretion of the administrator), and made accessible to Web visitors by a variety of criteria including by date, category, searches, etc. Drupal core also includes a hierarchical taxonomy system which allows content to be categorized or "tagged" with keywords for easier access.

The second half of the Drupal foundation is the amount of contributions it receives by people around the world extending the Drupal core.

Drupal core is designed to be modular with a system of "hooks" and "callbacks", which are accessed internally via an API. This design allows third-party "contributed" (often abbreviated to "contrib") modules and themes to extend or override Drupal's default behaviours without changing Drupal core's code.

James made reference to the size of the Drupal community, a community with a large amount of users and developers. More than 350,000 user accounts have been created on Drupal.org, and over 2000 people have signed up for developer accounts.

Komodo: Making Proprietary Products Open Source

Shane Caraveo, a senior developer at ActiveState and technical lead for the Komodo IDE, spoke about ActiveState Komodo, the name given to a family of integrated development environment (IDE) applications produced by the software firm, but specifically spoke about Komodo Edit known by its open source project name, Open Komodo.

In late 2007, ActiveState announced that Komodo Edit would be developed as a free software project. The new project is known as Open Komodo. In March 2008, ActiveState released the first version of Komodo Edit (4.3) built on top of the open source project.

A year past the initial release of Komodo Edit, Shane shared thoughtful insight and knowledge on the topic of making proprietary products open source; focusing on the struggles, roadblocks and great successes of ActiveState.

In essence, when Shane and other lead developers raised the idea to tinker with manifesting an open source product based upon a proprietary product, a set of guidelines were established, that fundamentally detail the purest sense of the open source idea.

They are as follows:

• Gain contribution
  • Through the essence of open source, one is permitted to use, change, and improve software, and to redistribute in modified or unmodified form. Users are treated like co-developers and so they should have access to the source code of the software. Furthermore users are encouraged to submit additions to the software, code fixes for the software, bug reports, documentation etc. Having more co-developers increases the rate at which the software evolves. One is fundamentally contributing towards the success of the project. Shane stressed that anyone can act as a contributor; common ways exist so that one can contribute. By using Komodo Edit in your everyday life and recommending it to others, by helping other users, by translating, documenting and testing one is contributing. Shane explained that many of these tasks do not require special technical skills. No matter how one wants to contribute, ActiveState welcomes new drive and ideas and any contributions to help improve Komodo and spread Open Source to the world.
• Explore new business models
  • As Shane explained, with the embracing of an open source business model, one becomes exposed to a number of great new ideas, such as:
    • Collaboration and project management: Collaborative work is resource efficient, duplication of effort is avoided.
    • End-user support - Open-source offers an alternative model, where easy access to the source code allows the proliferation of a multitude of alternative support organizations, each remaining small enough to remain responsive to the needs of its own set of customers.
    • Security - Flaws certainly occur in both closed-source and open-source software. However, as Shane explained, it has frequently been the case that a patch to fix one security problem in closed-source software has created another problem or failed to fix the actual problem, and other times a firm may leave a known flaw exposed for months or even years at a time. These sorts of issues seem to be less common in open-source software.
• Increased user base - As you establish a growing community your user base will increase. The most important factor of successful open source software is its community and user base. Active contribution and a thriving philosophy of sharing, establish a user base that will fundamentally support your product.
• Repositioning the product - Establishing a new, free product among a line of other retail products - drives interest, curiosity and exposure.
• Exposure to new markets - A leap away from a highly fragmented market with stern competition (integrated development environments).
• Increase commercial sales - Shane detailed on the fact that companies will support the product the open source product and purchase the retail edition for commercial backing (support) purposes.

With these great ideas comes challenges, and roadblocks. As Shane detailed and as I hinted above, software firms have two common problems: How does one expose a software product in a highly fragmented market stuffed with competition, when one has low financial backing? and Would open source, better our product?

ActiveState resolved the fist issue with an attempted fix by implementing strategic marketing, which fundamentally increased their user base but neglected to obtain a dominance in a niche area. This fixed the first problem but the second remained.

The solution was to open source the product alongside an extended feature retail release. As a result, their user base greatly increased; those unwilling to pay for a product now were able to use the product and contribute, and ActiveState could explore new business models.

A firm like ActiveState embraced many fears prior to open sourcing Komodo, such as:

• Would the free version collapse sales on other Komodo IDE products?
• Could they build a community from scratch and leverage that community, and if they built it would they actually come?

But, as a result of open sourcing, ActiveState witnessed first hand, the essence and spirit of open source by the manifestation of a community of users willing to contribute patches, such as: language localization. Thus a benefit that ActiveState did not anticipate not have any resources to support on their own.

Ultimately, through the success of Komodo Edit, downloads are growing, sales are slowly increasing and the community is expanding to new frontiers. An outlook to the future details continual growth of the Komodo user base and expansion of community.

Shane's view on open source detailed the idea of choice, interoperability, freedom and standards. As detailed, ActiveState is allowing the community to take Komodo Edit to where they want to take it.

Comparison

In light of the points made by both Shane and James, there are very similar patterns that may be observed through the details of both presentations and both stories presented.

Both presentations focused on the aspect of how the core components of their represented software products, would be failures if global contributions ceased to arise.

The success of Drupal and Komodo Edit are due in part to the fact that many volunteers contribute in many different ways.

The observable pattern is that community and volunteer contributions are essential towards the success of an Open Source project.

Both Shane and James personal views on Open Source and FSOSS in general are similar in that they both agreed that Open Source is about respecting user’s freedom. People work on Open Source software because, they believe in the moral/social reasons or the practical advantages to an open development model.

My Personal Views on Open Source

To articulate, assess and describe my humble personal views on open source, I have encapsulated my findings into three core components of what I believe to be the essence of open source as formulated into my personal view.

(1) Community (2) Innovation (3) Opportunity

Community: Open source projects live or die by contributions made by those who exist within a formulated community surrounding an open source project. In essence, the community acts as a shield; the best protection open source has is the community’s belief in it. In essence, this becomes the spirit of open source, a spirit based in freedom, artistic expression,technological innovations and opportunity.

Building a community around a piece of open source software can be slow, hard work and success is contingent on many things. Nevertheless, without a community, there simply is no project. Community building does not happen automatically and has to be carefully managed.

Having been exposed to the world of open source software prior to DPS909, my view of the community aspect has not changed. I became familiar with the world of open source software with Linux, in particular, with Debian, now my favorite operating system - Ubuntu. Having used an assortment of open source alternatives, for mere reasons as not being able to afford propitiatory software, I felt it was necessary to give back to the small time developers and subtle communities. Having people courteously and respectfully help me out in time of need, I whole heartedly feel as if it is necessary to return favor - give and ye shall receive. Personally, I enjoy helping people solve their problems in Ubuntu because they helped me. Known by fact, if the community is absent, Ubuntu would be far less popular. The project thrives on the core essence of the well established community, who are able to submit feedback, patches, reviews, documentation, artwork and ideas to better the product.

Innovation: Open Source software has many great characteristics: it’s inexpensive, shared, and creates alternatives to the vast world of proprietary software. Open Source software is also innovative, far more innovative than any commercial software company.

An area shrouded with complete innovation is that of Sun Microsystems Java. As one may recall, Sun built the entire Java Community Process and Community Source Model to provide some of the advantages of Open Source without what Sun considered as the disadvantage – that there wasn’t a strong property model. If one were to look at Java’s projects today, one would see a list of innovative Open Source projects like Hibernate and Struts.

One would also see innovation in the area of web browsers. Mozilla Firefox created and popularized many of the features that perhaps other companies, even Microsoft may duplicate in their next release. One mustn’t forget that Apache still dominates the internet server market. As well, one might recall how Linux leads operating system development, no other OS runs on watches and supercomputers.

One might reminisce about how it was not feasible to create the web without Open Source, even though proprietary software producers attempted (Ted Nelson & Xanadu).

Open Source is taking over the creative lead in a lot of technologies. The purpose of intellectual property law is to promote innovation, yet, tight control is the only model it knows. I believe that since there now exists another way to innovate, intellectual property law will require change.

Opportunity: The final core essence of Open Source is that of opportunity. Open Source software and development is all about participating in the open source community. As awareness of open source software grows, and as open source usage becomes a more common part of everyday software development, more and more individuals and organizations wonder how they can get involved with the open source community.

Participating in the open source community, to me, is to provide feedback and bug fixes to open source projects. In many cases, these thanks are the only payment they receive for their efforts. If you discover and/or fix a bug in the product, you can benefit the entire community by sharing your discovery or patch with the product developers.

These opportunities enhance intellectual growth and provide information and knowledge beneficial towards everyone who is involved in the community. The Open Source world is an open community and the fact that anyone can assist and contribute is a fascinating aspect. Understanding the issues and opportunities inherent in open source is the first step in using it effectively to deliver maximum value towards one’s project and community.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I was pleased with the presentations that I viewed at FSOSS 2008. Having been the fist symposium I have ever attended, I selected presentations that I hope would keep me interested. Focusing on Track A and Track B, I visited a multitude of interesting discussions and topics ranging from Copyright Bill C-61 to Mozilla Security to developing C# with Mono. My personal view on open source has improved post FSOSS 2008 because I discovered just how much of a dependency successful open source projects rely on the community through feedback and contributions. It is in essence, the fuel that drives the vehicle and without it, the vehicle is moving nowhere. I had a great time and look forward to more in the future.