The Power of Open Source Development

This article of mine appeared in the August 2009 edition of Network Computing's India edition. Please feel free to translate, rewrite and publish it in your local geo to promote the message of open source. If this gets published elsewhere, kindly send me a copy/the link so that I get some sense of how useful this is.

The Power of Open Source Development

Using open source development methodologies, John O'Hara, of JPMorgan developed a standards-based alternative to expensive proprietary middle ware

By Venkatesh Hariharan

Most literature around open source focus on using open source software. While the benefits of OSS are gaining increased recognition, some smart organizations are going a step further and applying the Open Source Development Model (OSDM) to solve problems that proved to be otherwise intractable. OSDM is based on collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge and Linux is one of the best examples of how this model works.

In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of source code for Linux and licensed it under the liberal General Public License that gave anyone permission to copy, modify and redistribute the code. The only condition was that anyone making improvements to the software and redistributing the changes had to share the improvements with the rest of the community. This liberal license attracted thousand of contributors over the years who contributed their bit to improving the code base of Linux. A Linux Foundation study found that Fedora, a community Linux distribution has now grown to contain almost 204 million lines of code.

There are two reasons why Linux and other open source software have demonstrated such explosive growth. One is the growth of the Internet, which is the largest collaborative platform in the history of mankind, connecting 1.4 billion people across the world. The other is the open, participative, distributed development model of open source where users are actually encourage to contribute to the development of the software. This is in sharp contrast to proprietary software that allows very limited rights to users.

Some of the most savvy technology users are embracing the participative nature of open source software to build technologies that suit their needs. For example, John O'Hara, senior architect and distinguished engineer at JPMorgan launched AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) as an open source project after being frustrated with developing front- and back-office processing systems at investment banks. “It seemed to me that we were living in integration Groundhog Day - the same problems of connecting systems together would crop up with depressing regularity. Each time the same discussions about which products to use would happen, and each time the architecture of some system would be curtailed to allow for the fact that the chosen middleware was reassuringly expensive,” says O'Hara.

In 2003, O'Hara embarked on a quest to standardize MOM (message-oriented middleware) technology, to enable mission critical enterprise applications to send messages to each other in a reliable and scalable manner. He decided to break from the past by using OSDM to start the AMQP project and sought Red Hat's expertise in governing open source projects. “Red Hat took the lead in establishing the legal framework for the standard; it, too, understood the issues in managing open intellectual property. The key part of doing this is to ensure that everyone contributing has the authority to do so and that there is a paper trail from every potential owner of IP through to the group effort, and that the intent to share is clear even in draft revisions of specifications. The result was a contract that clearly committed the members of the working group to promote unrestricted open middleware through AMQP.” For developing the software, O'Hara tapped iMatix, a boutique European development house that had clearly demonstrated a commitment to open source.
The AMQP project is a perfect example of what Prof. Eric Von Hippel, Professor of Innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management calls, “user-driven innovation.” In his book, Democratizing Innovation, Von Hippel says that open source software projects are exciting examples of complete innovation development and consumption communities run by and for users. Today, users like Credit Suisse, Deutsche Börse Systems, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase Bank Inc, the TWIST consortium and others partner with IT leaders like Cisco, Red Hat, Microsoft and others in the AMQP consortium.

Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. AMQP today has several implementations in open source and proprietary software. Imatix built an open-source implementation called, OpenAMQP. The beta version went live in 2006 and by the following year it was supporting 2,000 users on five continents and processing 300 million messages per day. Today, there are several open source and proprietary implementations of AMQP, including OpenAMQ, the original open source implementation. In a powerfully interconnected world, the open source development model used to build AMQP demonstrates the the power—and value—of collaborative software development.

Microsoft-Novell, Once Hot and Heavy, Cooling Down

Channel Web has this article on how the Microsoft-Novell deal is cooling off. Microsoft's multi-million dollar deal to resell Suse Linux subscriptions was like Coke selling Pepsi, an unreal deal between two competitors. When I first read about the deal, my sense was that it would fizzle out in a couple of years. As a journalist, during the dot-com boom, one has been witness to countless dog-and-pony shows but none of these short-term tamashas can substitute for a robust business model.

In some ways, this is a real pity because if any company could have provided some competition to Red Hat in the enterprise Linux space, it was Novell. When Novell purchased Suse, I was asked by a journalist for my opinion. My take was that Novell has established channels and a large support team in India for Novell NetWare and if they successfully transition this team to Suse, Red Hat would have a tough competitor on their hands. That transition never happened. If Novell had succeeded, it would have expanded the overall Linux market and that would have been great for open source.

A year after the deal, I joined Red Hat and one of the first things I came across was our chairman Matthew Szulik's famous quip, "It's a marathon, not a sprint." It seems so easy to set up an enterprise Linux business. Download the source code, build a distribution, hire a bunch of smartly dressed salespeople and voila! you have an enterprise Linux business. But, as even mighty Oracle found out, it ain't that easy.

Building a distro may be the easy part, but the really hard (and unglamorous) part is ensuring that thousands of underlying hardware configurations and thousands of software programs that run on top of the distro are certified and supported. This is truly a marathon and not a sprint. The day somebody is seriously ready for the marathon, Red Hat will have competitors.

Red Hat CEO on the "economics of abundance"

Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst was interviewed by Bangkok Post recently. I liked his comments on the "the economics of abundance" versus the old notion of "intellectual property."

Red Hat's CEO spoke of "the economics of abundance" that applied to software, and how, in the digital age, when intellectual property could be copied for free the question was "How do you build economics around that?" And he noted how the use of "old-world concepts" such as "it's mine and it's property," by calling it "intellectual property," built on an old-world sense that it had value and cost a lot to duplicate.

Emphasising that Red Hat was a very strong believer in intellectual property rights, he said that in the old-world, with physical things, you couldn't give away a product for free to try out, "but if you think about the economics of abundance, where bits can be copied for free, why shouldn't that be a business model?

"It's kind of flipping business models on their ear," he said. "Rather than apply old-world physical products' commercial principles, let's start from scratch and say 'is there a whole new way to create value?' And that's what we think we're doing and that's pretty extraordinary too. We still have a long way to go. And I don't think that we're fully there in understanding yet. All
content, music ... how do musicians make money? Should it be using DRM, or is there another way to do it?

BusinessWorld on ODF versus OOXML

BusinessWorld magazine has an article on the recent standards battle at the Bureau of Indian Standards over Microsoft OOXML proposal. As you know, the OOXML proposal was rejected unanimously by the LITD15 committee formed by BIS to review OOXML. The ODF Alliance which includes FSF, Red Hat, IBM and Sun worked hard to ensure that OOXML was not approved. The reasons for this can be read at www.noooxml.org

BusinessWorld is now running a vote on its web site asking readers:

"Which documentation standard do you want to vote for?" The link for this article and the vote (see right hand top corner of the page) is:

http://www.businessworld.in/content/view/2458/2536

I request all FOSS supporters to vote for ODF. Next Monday's issue of BW also has an article on this subject and I am looking forward to it.

Media coverage of OOXML issue

The media seems to have taken great interest in the OOXML issue. The Economic Times, which is the world's second largest financial newspaper had an article titled, India throws MS open format out of the window. The article said:

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents.

In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

The Open Document Format (ODF) alliance, enjoying widespread support from academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google, were in a jubilant mood having succeeded in stalling OOXML from being accepted as a standard in India.

Business Standard, had an article titled, "BIS stumps Microsoft for new language"

Leslie D'Monte / Mumbai August 24, 2007

Microsoft today suffered an initial setback when the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-appointed technical committee did not approve of its Open Office eXtensible Mark-up Language (OOXML) as an alternative standard for electronic office documents to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

It qualified its disapproval with comments. The BIS can review the decision till September 2, when the same has to be submitted to the ISO along with 123 other country-specific standards bodies.

This article quotes a Microsoft spokesperson saying, "We respect the decision taken by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-appointed committee. At the same time, it is important to note that all the BIS members unanimously support the need for multiple standards. Going forward, we will work with the BIS and the committee members on the comments noted during the ballot resolution process.”

Well, I attended almost all the meetings of BIS and certainly do not agree with this viewpoint. My submission to BIS is that vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementations. Who in the world wants two different HTML standards? I certainly don't.

Hindustan Times had an article titled, A New Duel.

Friday August 17, 12:54 AM

The biggest IT giants are at war. A war so huge that its magnitude spans almost the entire planet. The bone of contention is who will control your office documents - to be precise, the underlying document formats that run on your computers. It is a bit like what language a national anthem will be written in. It involves pride, sentiments and high stakes.

The rivals in this high pitched battle are Microsoft on the one hand and an influential axis of IBM and Sun Microsystems on the other. The IBM-Sun axis is backing the Open Document Format (ODF) alliance. A veritable who's who of the industry is lined up, taking sides.