Free Software: Driving Innovation By Knut Yrvin

Agenda Economic impact of free and open source software Empirical studies Development methods Examples with Qt ©Nokia 2009

FLOSS Impact 2006 The European Commission released a study of the economic impact of Free/Libre or Open Source Software (FLOSS) on the European ICT sector in 2006. Key findings: FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investments Increased profits, or invest more usefully spent in further innovation Source: http://www.flossimpact.eu/ ©Nokia 2009

Job demographics Only 7% of programmers in the US work in packaged software companies 30% work in sectors producing mainly custom software / integration / support Almost 60% work in the “user sector” - finance, government, manufacturing, retail, etc Source: http://www.flossimpact.eu/ ©Nokia 2009

Spendings 16% of software spending in the US is on packaged proprietary software (19% in EU) >50% is in-house software development (30% in EU) Rest is custom software Source: http://www.flossimpact.eu/ ©Nokia 2009

68% incorporated FLOSS in their products in 2006 Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab@dxm.org Licensed under: Creative Commons cc-nd-nc Source: http://www.flossimpact.eu/ ©Nokia 2009

Gartner predicts 80% will include Free and Open Source software in their products in 2012 ©Nokia 2009

Take home You might reduce R&D investments with 34% by reusing software made by volunteers and free or dual license software companies You might increase your market opportunity with more than 50% targeting in-house and custom development with free software Source: http://www.flossimpact.eu/ ©Nokia 2009

What's in it for me? Maintenance Development platform n Maintenance Platform lock-in n Purchasing proprietary software Development reuse on all platforms Reuse Reuse Proprietary software Open Source with Qt ©Nokia 2009

Value of reuse Maintenance Development platform n Maintenance Platform lock-in n Purchasing proprietary software Development reuse on all platforms Reuse Reuse Proprietary software Open Source with Qt ©Nokia 2009

Value of cross platform Maint... Maintenance M. Dev... platform n Development platform n+1 Dev. n+2 Maintenance Platf... lock-in n Platform lock-in n+1 Pl. n+2 Purchasing proprietary software Development reuse on all platforms Reuse Reuse Proprietary software Open Source with Qt ©Nokia 2009

Thanks KitWare: Bill Hoffman, VP & CTO VideoLAN: Jean-Baptiste Kempf, Chairman Ogre: Steve Streeting, Founder & Project Lead (Munich only) ©Nokia 2009

Traditional product development Users identified Developers identified COMPETITIVELY BID CONTRACT DEVELOPMENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN-HOUSE AND CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT Time Project Start System Delivered Introducing fellow developers late as in product development, it may exclude the power FLOSS ©Nokia 2009 Jonathan Grudin: The development of interactive systems http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/jgrudin/past/papers/ieee91/ieee91.html

In-house development or competitive bid with external contributors Users identified Developers identified COMPETITIVELY BID CONTRACT DEVELOPMENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN-HOUSE AND CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT Time Project Start System Delivered User and external developer participates from the start ©Nokia 2009

Faster, Better, and Cheaper Free/Open Source Software Development (F/OSSD) often entails shorter development times that can produce higher quality systems, and incur lower costs than may be realized through developing systems according Software Engineering (SE) techniques. [...] Internet time and F/OSSD projects also tend to produce incremental software releases at a much faster rate, even to the point of releasing unstable but operational daily system builds. This denotes not only a reduction in product release cycle times compared to Software Engineering practice, but also a significantly restructured life cycle process and process cycle time reduction. Walt Scacchi from Institute for Software Research University of California, Irvine http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Papers/New/Scacchi-BookChapter.pdf ©Nokia 2009

Development models First utilising Open Source is not as big change as some engineers and business people believe. Open Source development might look like in-house customer driven development, where users and developers are identified, working together from project start But you might introduce users and co-developer outside of your company, participating in the project. That's new, and a challenge for many. ©Nokia 2009

New practices and tools Also learning some new development practices Online repository (git, gitorious, subversion etc.) Open e-mail lists and IRC channels (where your developers actively participates) Online bugtracking Wiki with project description and sharing for howto's guidelines, requirement etc. This in addition to a product page Be humble ©Nokia 2009

Expectations Don't expect immaterially success It will be a considerable learning experience, especially in the beginning. Don't give up Seek out new business partners In several cases, business costumes and municipalities finance open source project together Better to relay on a professional organisation, then volunteers who might get other interests which grabs their attention. Do-ocracy can be a strong allay: They who does something decides. Please be humble regarding external contributors. By using do-ocracy, your engineers may include what paying customers want, which has to come first. Some in the community might reject that. Then they're not in for do-ocracy ... Be humble and competitive Do-ocracy explained: http://www.communitywiki.org/en/DoOcracy ©Nokia 2009

Today Qt includes Webkit – a community originated WebRuntime component which Apple hosts. Integrated in Qt. Used on Nokia phones. Used by Apple and Google. Phonon – is Qt Multimedia API, co-developed with KDE developers This list is just a couple of samples Our list of using FLOSS components in Nokia is long and comprehensive. Qt Development Frameworks is just one such example – enabling you to reach out to hundred of millions of new devices faster, better and cheaper ©Nokia 2009

Relation between skills learned in Free Software an a professional career FLOSS developer community is for most participants a place to “learn and develop new skills” This skills are not just technical, they are often better learned than in formal courses, and lead to jobs Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab@dxm.org Licensed under: Creative Commons cc-nd-nc Source: http://www.flossimpact.eu/ ©Nokia 2009

Business models: Voluntary – Dual License - Support Debian KDE Apache Mainly one license: GPL Qt MySQL Two licenses: GPL and commercial Qt (with LGPL) RedHat Zimbra (MS Exchange competitor) Mainly two licenses: GPL & LGPL ©Nokia 2009