1. NTNU activities in Open Source Software; ideas for cooperation?
IDI, Institutt for datateknikk og informasjonsvitenskap / Department of Computer and Information Science
Reidar Conradi, Sven Ziemer, Thomas Østerlie, Letizia Jaccheri, Claudia A. Martinez, (Alf Steinar Sætre, IØT)
NTNU activities in Open Source Software; ideas for cooperation?
Telenor-NTNU Contact Meeting
18 Dec 2008
attn/ Paul Skrede et al., Telenor
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

2. Table of contents IDI and NTNU: who, what, … Software reuse and CBSE
The Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon
OSS activites at NTNU
Ideas for Telenor activities on OSS
Telenor + NTNU = true?
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

3. 1. IDI Department at NTNU
IDI: 160 employees, NTNU’s largest, and with 31 nationalities!
46 teachers (faculty), 24 tech./adm., 63 PhD fellows, 23 temporary researchers/teachers, 8 adjunct teachers (IIs).
100 courses, 6000 individual exams per year, 800 full-time students, participating in 10 study programs.
175 master candidates and 15 PhD candidates per year.
Annual budget (2008): 67 MNOK from NTNU, 18 MNOK from projects.
Important value chain: teachers - postdocs - PhD students - master students - bachelor students.
11 research groups, incl. SE group below.
168 counting ”Frida” publications in 2007.
Software engineering (SE) group in 2007:
5 teachers, 4.5 researchers, 15 PhD fellows
47 papers – ¨and 20 written by the researchers
Ca. 25 master candidates
5 MNOK in external projects
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

4. Research fields of the SU group (1)
Distributed
Software Eng.
Software
and Art; Computer games
CBSE: COTS/OSS,
Evolution, SCM
Reliability,
safety
Co-operative
work
SPI, learning organisations, SE education
quality
Mobile
technology
architecture
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

5. Research profile of SE group (2)
Empirical research methods (all)
Quality, QA, SPI, knowledge management (Conradi, Stålhane)
Reliability and safety, testing (Stålhane)
Software reuse, component-based development, open source (Conradi, Jaccheri)
Cooperation technologies, awareness, ICT & learning (Divitini, Prasolova-Førland)
Mobile and ambient technology (Divitini, Wang)
Computer games for higher learning (Wang)
Software and art (Jaccheri)
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

6. Research projects in SE group (3)
25++ NFR and EU projects over past 20 years, most with industry:
INCO, MOWAHS, BUCS, SEVO, WebSys: basic SE (NFR IKT2010)
NorskCOSI: inner and open source (ITEA)
SPIQ, SPIKE, PROFIT, EVISOFT: empirical SPI in Norwegian software-intensive industry (NFR BiA)
MOSS: Computer games (Telenor, NTNU)
MOTUS-1, MOTUS-2: ICT & learning (NTNU, Telenor)
FABULA: mobile technology and learning (NFR VERDIKT)
ArTe: Computer art: dissemination to youth (NFR regional, 2009)
ASTRA: awareness (EU FET)
TARGET: virtual 3D in learning (EU IP)
Travel in Europe (EU, subcontractor)
CESAR: safety in transport sector (EU IP, ”Airbus” w/ 53 partners)
under evaluation by NFR and EU
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

7. 2. Software reuse and CBSE
Systematic software reuse (from 1970): making shared code for internal (re)use across projects and departments in an organization.
CBSE – Component Based Software Engineering, like hw plugins?
Independent of programming language.
Cost of reuse: % to generalize, break-even after 1-2 reuses.
Assumes stable architectural and domain knowledge - reusable software is ”discovered”, not ”pre-designed”!
Huge benefits: cost, time, quality, standardization of architecture and processes/tools (XML, UML, Java, Eclipse) – a gradual modernization of products with ”best practise” processes.
But hard: assumes adjusted company processes and culture; new roles/responsibilities, cost/benefit analyses w/ uniform internal investment rate (?), new cross-dependencies, risks and ad-hoc tradeoffs.
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

8. 3. The OSS phenomenon (1)
Since 1995: OSS as a flood wave; enabled by Internet and web. Part of “social computing”, cf. Facebook.
Generalized into Creative Commons for global development and sharing of “free” digital artefacts in any domain.
s of free/open source software “components”:
Infrastructure (Linux, Apache),
libraries (Hibernate),
shelfware (Acrobat, OpenOffice, SVN versioning tool)
Based on launched (“gone open”) OSS projects, each with a community of developers, co-developers and integrators/users.
Many licensing models:
GPL: “contagious” openness by using OSS – so-called “copyleft”.
BSD: any use is OK, as long as name of originator follows the OSS.
eCos v1.1: all local changes to a down-loaded OSS must be reported back to originator, but impractical even via SVN.
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008 8

9. 3. The OSS phenomenon (2)
Use of OSS has attracted much attention from industrial and public sectors: e.g., IBM and Sun Microsystems; Skattedirektoratet and Kommunenes Sentralforbund, Bærum kommune.
St.meld. 17 (2006/2007) by Government: promoting OSS and open standards, new and
OSS phenomena is changing the whole paradigm of software development and associated economic patterns and interactions – by cooperative, distributed innovation.
To stay competitive and innovative, Norwegian software-intensive companies and public institutions must undergo this economic and cultural revolution:
novel Business Models
novel Innovation Theories
Ex. Often shared/free code w/ surrounding paid service providers – as for Apache, but who is “responsible owner”?
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008 9

10. OSS Business Models (3)
In general, to enter in the OSS field, companies have to manage Intellectual Property (IP) differently and to innovate more:
Sale/
divestiture
Revenues
New revenues
Spin-off
License
Own market
revenue
Own market
revenue
Internal and
external
development
costs
Internal
development
costs
Cost and time savings
from leveraging
external development
Costs
[Chesbrough2006]
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008 10

11. OSS Business Models (4) From COSI ITEA project: 16.11.2018
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008 11

12. Novel Innovation Theories (5)
Traditional innovation models are based on the protection of IP, so they are inadequate to capture value from OSS for companies.
So, conception of such models must change for societies and companies to reap the full benefits of OSS - from “private investment” to “collectively action”.
The guidelines to deal with old vs. new development processes hardly exist.
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008 12

13. Novel Innovation Theories (6)
Several issues need to be addressed:
How to succeed in attracting co-developers when “going open”?
How can traditional (i.e. paid software development by software companies), coexist and even amplify the benefits for both the “old” and “new” work mode?
So rely less on classic OSS idealism, rather refine and commercialize more cooperative work modes.
Friprog’s learning ecosystem to systematize the (meta-) services that might be needed (next slide):
How to establish such an ecosystem? Roles?
How to build competence?
How to offer legal or economic advise?
How to make decisions about changes in old vs. new systems?
How to build and maintain expert communities?
How to manage experience bases (avoid the “white elephants”)?
And practically: if (most of) the code base is shared and “free”, where are the revenues coming from?
[Chesbrough2006] Henry Chesbrough: “OPEN Business Models”, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.
[Browning2008] L. D. Browning, A. S. Sætre, K. Stephens and J.-O. Sørnes: ”Information and Communication Technologies in Action: Linking Theory and Narratives of Practice”. New York: Routledge.
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008 13

14. Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008 14

15. 4. OSS research at NTNU Why is this interesting for you?
Experience from industry related research
What should we focus on in future research?
Experience from education
What should students know about OSS?
Letizia 15
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

16. multi-faceted OS research…
political
social
sciences
software
engineering
learning
psychology
juridical &
Economical (not yet)
Letizia
focus on company based software engineering, reuse, and COTS (Reidar will present in an historical perspective he will mention Thomas’s work on gentoo )
ITEA COSI project (Øyvind will present)
Companies
processes
Open source survey
intersects both with 1) and 2)
Open standards (case at ARM, Eskil will present)
Education (Letizia will present)
Open source and Art (Letizia will present) 16
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008 16

17. research activities OTS surveys Open source survey ITEA COSI project
Focus on company based software engineering, reuse, and OTS
ITEA COSI project
Open source survey
Open source and Art
Case Open standards (ARM)
Letizia
Education
Case
Gentoo 17
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

18. Open Source Software (OSS): origin and now
1650?: free flow of ideas begins in scientific community.
: DoD/DARPA’s development of Arpanet / Internet TCP/IP protocols -- open and distributed development, anti-authoritarian “counter culture”.
: Openness spread through Berkeley’s adaptation of Unix, with built-in Internet protocols and generous BSD licenses with all source provided.
1985: Free / Open software: int’l movements (Stallman).
2000: Social computing and creative commons for knowledge work – standardized formats for “zero-cost” digital information: Wikipedia, the world is ”flat”, ...
2008: 1,5 billion Internet users, 3 billion w/ mobile phones.
Reidar
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

19. OSS issues
OSS “projects”, each w/ net community lead by original provider, co-developers, code integrators, users, ...
Ex. eZ has had 2.3 mill. downloads, over 1000 plugins made by community.
Ex. Adobe Acrobat similarly over 500 mill. Downloads.
COTS and OSS: many similarities.
Over 30 portals with domain-specific COTS/OSS software.
New way of making open ICT standards: rough consensus and (two implementations of) running code.
Over 50 licensing schemes.
Business model:
Apache: open and shared source supported by a cooperative foundation (“IBM”); separate payable services.
eZ: dual model with free previous version, payable current version plus services and support.
Success criteria??: for provider in “going open”, for future co-developers, for code integrators, …
Reidar
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

20. OSS roles
OSS (component) provider: Leads a “gone-open” software project, ex. Linus Thorvald & Linux
OSS co-developer or participant: assists the provider in more technical work – the OSS “idea” of joint, altruistic work
OSS integrator: makes new software system by re-using OSS software/components
OSS user: may download “free” (not open) binary software on a private computer, e.g. Acrobat
OSS customer: specifies and finances new software, later as OSS?
OSS skills: technical, commercial, organizational, creative
Reidar
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

21. Software reuse, components, OTS = Off-The-Shelf (COTS, OSS)
Software reuse: by code libraries in repositories
Develop for reuse: make assets / components
Develop with reuse: CBSE using these assets
Advantages of CBSE, own or OTS components:
Cheaper, earlier & better software
Spread novel work practices & software architectures, leading to standardization
Re-user communities for experience mgmt/support
I.e. software development gets ”modernized”
Non-technical obstacles: price/licensing, ROI, (re)negotiate requirements, less “control”, too “radical”
Reidar
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

22. NTNU: CBSE and OTS studies
: EU projects (e.g. REBOOT) on internal software reuse; hard!
1995-: New global “bazaar” of COTS/OSS, through web
: Industrial surveys on OTS reuse Norway, Germany, Italia, China Developer panels and follow-up interviews with qualitative data to give insight
Research instruments and raw data: “gone open” – please repeat our studies!!
Reidar
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

23. NTNU: Roles in OTS-based reuse
From forthcoming paper by Jingyue Li et al., IEEE Software 2008
Reidar
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

24. NTNU: gained insights on OTS reuse
1a. Ask colleagues to find “right” component;
1b. Otherwise search the net, download 3-6 candidates for evaluation and selection
Summary: no formal selection method, selection can be hosted by most lifecycle processes, need component “uncle” for maintenance, “quality“ not a problem
Problems: effort estimation, integration, debugging, customer non-participation, licensing, company policies, how to classify components (ontologies)
Reidar
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

25. Action Research on Gentoo OSS
PhD by Thomas Østerlie
Gentoo: OSS release management tool, scripts, 300 co-developers in 40 countries
Worked as co-developer for two years; distributed, participative, “in-process” field study
Remote debugging: mutual guesswork, as “sense-making”, informal processes
Data: diaries, s, IRC/version logs
Reidar
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

26. research activities OTS surveys Open source survey ITEA COSI project
Focus on company based software engineering, reuse, and OTS
ITEA COSI project
Open source survey
Open source and Art
Case Open standards (ARM)
Letizia
Education
Case
Gentoo 26
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

27. ITEA COSI project Industry and academia 2006-2008
Finland, Netherlands (coord.), Norway, Spain, Sweden
Understand and benefit from Open source software and development practices
Shared internal development
Norwegian COSI
ICT Norway
eZ Systems, Keymind, Linpro, NTNU
Budget about 18 MNOK
Sponsored by NFR: 8.5 MNOK totally
Øyvind
Effective and efficient heterogeneous distributed concurrent development addressing business & process improvement with open and inner source.
Agile developments in distributed settings using open and inner source.
Trust and understanding of open collaborations involving open source community and software intensive system producers.
Understanding & strategic use of the software shift moving from differentiating to commodity software.
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

28. Adoption of OSS in the Software Industry
About 70% (50%) are reusing and integrating OTS (OSS) components
Into all kinds of products
To all kinds of customers
Large companies more often than small
Consultancy companies more often than software houses
15-20% participate in OSS co-development
Means huge, global and dedicated cooperation communities
About 5% provide their own OSS products (”going open”)
Of these ?? % are attracting other co-developers
Øyvind
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

29. Motivations for adoption of OSS
Simplify developer’s job
High availability of information, components and their source code
Simple procurement
Membership of community for support and future influence
Reusable software assets
Increase productivity
Increase quality (reliability, ..)
Increased focus on architecture and even product line
Increase compliance with standards
Reduced costs
Reduced development effort
No license fees
Øyvind
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

30. Selection: Identification, Evaluation and choosing of wanted OSS-component(s)
Evaluation until something ”good enough” is found
Tested further through test integration and prototyping
Informal knowledge driven process based on:
Previous experience
Recommendations
Informal searches
“Surveillance” of the OSS community
Øyvind
Previous experience
Recommendations
Colleagues, friends, customers, competitors
Successful implementations
Informal searches
The Internet, OSS portals, Internal knowledge bases
“Surveillance” of the OSS community
News letters, Portals, Forums, Mailing lists, Magazines
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

31. research activities OTS surveys Open source survey ITEA COSI project
Focus on company based software engineering, reuse, and OTS
ITEA COSI project
Open source survey
Open source and Art
Case Open standards (ARM)
Letizia
Education
Case
Gentoo 31
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

32. Open standards and
Cooperation between ARM Norway (ex-Falanx with Reodor Felgen innovation award in 2006) and NTNU (with half a dozen master’s theses since 2002)
Describing a master’s project (single person one year):
development of a multi-platform graphics application.
Used ARM’s platform for embedded graphics.
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

33. Open standards and ARM Open Vector Graphics (OpenVG)
OpenVG is a standard for embedded systems
Targets: Map applications, scalable user interfaces, e-book readers, games and SVG viewers
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
Open format for describing vector graphics in XML which provides uniform representation of 2D graphics.
SVG Tiny – A mobile profile targeting light weight mobile devices
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

34. Open standards and the application
PC platform
SVG Tiny application Application size ~ LOC
Open Standards
SMIL
XML11
DOM3
XLINK
Other W3C standards...
PNG
JPEG
ARM platform
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

35. Results from application development and porting
Ease of adoption
OpenVG is an open standard, thus royalty-free.
Specification and reference implementation publicly available. No project expenses.
Performance
OpenVG allows for efficient and creative implementations.
Efficient SVG Tiny viewer achievable on a regular PC and ARM platform.
Conformance
OpenVG conformance tests assure correct implementations.
Consistent and correct behaviour of application on PC and ARM platform.
Portability
OpenVG API abstracts and de-couples application from hardware .
High degree of application portability. Less effort
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

36. Research activities OTS surveys Open source survey ITEA COSI project
Focus on company based software engineering, reuse, and OTS
ITEA COSI project
Open source survey
Open source and Art
Case Open standards (ARM)
Letizia
Education
Case
Gentoo 36
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

37. Cases: Art and open source software = SArt
Main objective of SArt
to propose, and assess, and improve methods, models, and tools for software development in art context
Cases (in sourceforge portal)
The Open Digital Canvas Project
Sonic Onyx Project (mobile phones)
The Flyndre Project
Letizia 37
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

38. SArt: art and open source software
Letizia 38
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

39. Premiered art competition The Open Wall Open Contest
Deadline 15th September 2009
The prize award will take place at this year’s festival for art and technology in Trondheim, Trondheim Matchmaking, the 16th - 18th of October.
1st prize 2000 €, 2nd prize 1500 €, 3rd prize 1000 €
Letizia
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

40. 5. OSS ideas … for Telenor (1)
Map existing use of and interest in OSS?
Establish teams/fora/communities for OSS at Telenor?
Success criteria and ROI models for GoOpen?
Alliances with other business units/companies?
How to control or influence (OSS) software, that we have come to depend on – like for most purchased products?
New business/innovation models?
Cooperate with FriProg and NTNU on OSS ecosystem?
Letizia
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

41. 5. OSS ideas for software development at Telenor (2)
When new software is built:
Make “modular” structure to enable reuse of “middle layers” from elsewhere.
Try reuse OSS, COTS, or existing internal components.
(Re)negotiate requirements vs. functinality from available components.
Make incentives to promote “lean code”? A any new code line will later consume 2X of initial cost, so aim for “negative” productivity!
Use incremental or agile lifecycle models, e.g. with 4-week increments.
Apply aSVN-like versioning tool for distributed software development.
But inevitably “software rot” of legacy code creeps in, as implicit assumptions made at start will increasingly hinder further changes.
Letizia
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

42. 5. OSS ideas for software maintenance at Telenor (3)
Maintenance: Any change after first release, 2/3 of costs.
To extend, perfect, correct – and restructure the given software. Need tools to analyze such legacy code.
Time pressure to prefer ”simple” changes, e.g. to copy and paste from existing code, just ameliorating the chaos.
Rather generalize existing code into product lines, and/or try to contribute to OSS, for both code and communities.
Possible link to Telenor’s EVISOFT activity with Simula on software maintenance, using e.g. complexity/cost analysis
More?? – all this depends on you at Telenor
Letizia
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

43. 6. Further work with NTNU: ideas? (1)
Possible cooperation activities
Subset of previous slide for Telenor activities
Possible work modes
Informal by students etc.
NTNU
Telenor, or Telenor + NTNU
Norwegian Research Council
Verdikt, BiA
Postdocs, industristipendiater, other possibilities
EU, ITEA2,….
Letizia
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008

44. 6. NTNU Resources (2) Software engineering group (SU in Norwegian)
publications, student reports, and courses
(SU)
(SU on OSS)
Wiki on open source research
The ITEA COSI Project ( )
NFR-VERDIKT proposal by R. Conradi and A. S. Steinar Sætre: “Open Source Software & Industrial innovation Success factors (OSSIS), 15 Oct
Revised education plans
National research school
International master in OSS
Letizia
Telenor-NTNU OSS contact meeting, 18 Dec 2008