Presentation: To Open Source Or Not, That Is the Question, SCU, 2013-10-16

This is the presentation material for the talk on "To Open Source Or Not, That Is the Question" at Santa Clara University, 2013-10-16. Peter Thoeny prepared this talk as food for thought for companies who consider building a business around open source.

Copyright © 2013 by TWiki.org. This presentation may be reproduced as long as the copyright notice is retained and a link is provided back to http://twiki.org/.

Slide 1: To Open Source Or Not, That Is the Question

Consider building a business around open source?

Slide 2: About Peter

• Peter Thoeny
• CTO and Founder of TWiki, the open source wiki for the enterprise, managing the project for 10+ years
• Invented the concept of structured wikis - where free form wiki content can be structured with tailored wiki applications
• Recognized thought-leader in wikis and social software, featured in numerous articles and technology conferences including LinuxWorld, Business Week, Wall Street Journal and more
• Graduate of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
• Lived in Japan for 8 years, developing CASE tools
• Now in the Silicon Valley for 15 years
• Co-author of Wikis for Dummies book
  

Slide 3: Agenda

• Crowdsourced Wikipedia
• Open Source Model: Rewards and Risks
• Open Source License vs. Copyright vs. Brand
• Open Source Licenses
• Dual Licensing
• Commercial Open Source
• Open Source & The Cloud
• Enterprise Collaboration with TWiki

Slide 4: Crowdsourced Wikipedia

• Wikipedia: Wiki + Encyclopedia
• A free encyclopedia written collaboratively by you
• Project started in January 2001
• The most active public wiki: 4,400,000 articles and 20,000,000 registered users in the English language Wikipedia alone (ref. Wikipedia statistics)
• Anyone in the world can edit any page.
• Doesn't that lead to chaos?
  • Domain experts contribute
  • Well defined policies for contributing and handling content
    BUT: Reality of edit wars; larger group overpowering smaller group
  • Graffiti gets removed quickly (many eye balls; rollback available)
• Content can be freely distributed and reproduced under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

Slide 5: Wikipedia Contributions = Open Source Principals

• Publish early and often
• Democratic and open: Anyone can contribute
• Robust: Mistake happen, can be fixed quickly
• Scale: Domain experts
• Quality: Peer review

• What else? Let's talk!

Slide 6: Open Source Model: Rewards and Risks

• Rewards:
  Fast pace development
  Innovation
  Scale
  Serendipity
  What else? Let's talk!

• Risks:
  Community build-up => "Art of Community" book
  Quality => Community governance, release process
  Less control => Community governance
  Trolls => Community governance
  What else? Let's talk!

Slide 7: Open Source License vs. Copyright vs. Brand

• Open source license: What you can do; how you can redistribute the software.
• Copyright: Who owns the intellectual property of the software.
• Trademark: Who is allowed to use the brand name for commercial purposes.

• Details: TWiki.org blog "Open Source License vs. Copyright vs. Trademark - How They Differ"
  

Slide 8: Open Source Licenses

• Principal: License to make the source code of software available for everyone to use, review & modify.
• Free: Free to use, modify and redistribute without having to pay the original author.
• Commercial use? Some licenses allow commercial use.
• Open Source Initiative (OSI): Approves open source licenses

• Comparison of free software licenses

• Details: Wikipedia:Open-source_license

Slide 9: Popular Open Source Licenses

• GNU General Public License (GPL) - most common
• GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
• Apache License 2.0
• BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" license &
  BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" or "FreeBSD" license
• MIT license
• Mozilla Public License 2.0
• Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
• Eclipse Public License
• OSI currently approves 70 open source licenses

Slide 10: Dual Licensing

• Definition: Release the same software under two (or more) licenses.
• Prerequisite: Only works if company owns 100% of intellectual property.
• Example: MySQL

• Business model:
  • Release software under GPL
    Free distribution
    Build brand
    Serendipity
  • Release same software under commercial license
    No GPL contamination
    Revenue for vendor & customer

• Details: Wikipedia:Multi-licensing

Slide 11: Commercial Open Source

• Commercial open source^[1]
  • vs. community open source
• Model of Fedora/Red Hat, Zimbra, MySQL
  • vs. Debian, PostgreSQL, ...
• Success metrics:
  • Market share, pace of innovation, health of community, revenue
    

[1] The Commercial Open Source Business Model by Dirk Riehle

Slide 12: Open Source & The Cloud

• Most cloud products are powered by open source software
• Complexity of cloud - assemble an ever changing puzzle
• Even more complex with PaaS (Platform as a Service)
• Standards:
  • OpenStack: Founded in 2010 by NASA and Rackspace, most popular
  • Eucalyptus: Open source AWS-compatible private clouds
  • CloudStack: Citrix, handed over to Apache Foundation
  • NIST Cloud Computing Standard

Slide 13: Enterprise Collaboration with TWiki

• TWiki is a wiki engine and wiki application platform, established in 1998
• TWiki is specifically built for the workplace
• Large number of TWiki Extensions: 200+ actively maintained extensions
• Open Source software (GPL) with active community, hosted at http://TWiki.org/
• Thousands of downloads per month, 600,000 total downloads, estimate 50,000+ installations, 130+ countries
• Est. $27M of human capital invested (ref. Ohloh)
• Source Forge 2009 "Best Enterprise Project" Finalist (among 230,000 open source projects)

Slide 14: Competitive Landscape of Wikis & Enterprise 2.0

Slide 15: Enterprise 2.0 & Structured Wiki Applications

Slide 16: Example: Sales Pipeline Tracker

Slide 17: TWiki Open Source Community

• Clear mission, charter, roadmap and release focus
• 14 years - several iterations on governance
• Ubuntu style community governance and code of conduct since Oct 2008
  • Designed to scale
• Small but helpful & inviting community Get involved!
  

Slide 18: Evolution of TWiki.org Community Governance

Slide 19: TWiki.org Code of Conduct

• Be considerate.
• Be respectful.
• Be collaborative.
• When you disagree, consult others.
• When you are unsure, ask for help.
• Step down considerately.

• Details: TWiki.org Code of Conduct
  

Slide 20: The Right To Fork

• Software fork: Developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software.
• Fork as development branch, vs. split in the developer community.
• Friendly fork vs. hostile fork.

• Free and open source software:
  • Right to fork from the original development team without prior permission without violating any copyright law.
• Commercial software:
  • Fork happen too (e.g. Unix)

• Details: Wikipedia:Software_fork

Slide 21: TWiki and Open Source Business

• Ecosystem: TWiki Consultants & corporate contributors
• Hosting in the cloud, value add
• Marketplace for TWiki applications

Slide 22: Questions & Discussions

This presentation: http://bit.ly/twPres12

(http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPresentation2013x10x16)

Slide 23: BACKUP SLIDES - TWiki I/O Architecture

Slide 24: Role of Wiki Champion

• A wiki champion is a person who:
  • understands the process of the work for a given project or business (the domain), and
  • knows how to use a wiki (best practices in collaboration)
• The wiki champion is coaching the employees
  • Advocate, important role especially in the initial phase of a wiki
• Typically a part time role
• As the wikis gets larger and grows laterally, new wiki champions emerge

Slide 25: Initial Deployment of a Wiki

• Plan content and rollout
  • Pain killer vs. vitamins
• Build initial structure
• Populate initial content with help from early adopters
• Initial rollout with smaller group
• Train and coach users
• Do not underestimate inertia and time
• Expect quick growth after slow start
  • Example: Wind River's wiki has now 120K pages and 20K page changes / month
    

Slide 26: Be Aware of Mental Barriers

• Wikis can be intimidating; the wiki pages appear "official" and corporate
  • Overcome your own internal resistance to edit existing content
  • Paradigm shift: Content is owned by team, not individual
• I want my contributions to be near "perfect"
  • It is more effective to post content early and let the team provide feedback and revise it iteratively

Notes

• This presentation is available at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPresentation2013x10x16
• This presentation is based on the SlideShowPlugin and uses the TWiki:Main/PeterThoenySlideShowTemplate

Copyright © 2013 by TWiki.org. This presentation may be reproduced as long as the copyright notice is retained and a link is provided back to http://twiki.org/.

See also: What is TWiki, TWiki presentation, public TWiki sites, TWiki screenshots, TWiki.org Blog

-- PeterThoeny - 2013-10-16

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