COMP7047 – Open Source Projects

02 – More on OSS background, Business use of OSS

A Brief History of Hackerdom
• Raymond, 2000:
• Abstract:
I explore the origins of the hacker culture, including prehistory
among the Real Programmers, the glory days of the MIT
hackers, and how the early ARPAnet nurtured the first
network nation. I describe the early rise and eventual
stagnation of Unix, the new hope from Finland, and how ‘the
last true hacker’ became the next generation’s patriarch. I
sketch the way Linux and the mainstreaming of the Internet
brought the hacker culture from the fringes of public
consciousness to its current prominence.

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A Brief History of Hackerdom
• Raymond, 2000:
The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics
backgrounds. They were often amateur-radio hobbyists. They wore white
socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded in machine
language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient languages
now forgotten.
:
The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be
conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.
:
[MIT’s] Tech Model Railroad Club’s hackers became the nucleus of MIT’s
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the world’s leading center of AI research
into the early 1980s.
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• Raymond bases some of the earlier history on this book
In this personal memoir, electrical engineer David Lundstrom
recalls the heyday of early computing - the rise of Control Data
out of the Univac division of Sperry Rand, such milestone
computer systems as the Univac and the Naval Tactical Data
System the exploits of CDC's top designer Seymour Cray, and
the gradual corporate shift from the exciting and technically
interesting world of computer design to internal politics and
clumsy bureaucracy. David E. Lundstrom's career spanned 30
years with Sperry Rand Corp. (now a division of Unisys Corp.)
and Control Data Corporation.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/few-good-men-univac

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A Brief History of Hackerdom
[ARPANET’s] electronic highways brought together hackers all over the
U.S. in a critical mass; instead of remaining in isolated small groups
each developing their own ephemeral local cultures, they discovered (or
re-invented) themselves as a networked tribe.

Page 3 –
MIT rejected DEC PDP-10 software and wrote their own operating
system (ITS – Incompatible Time-sharing System)

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A Brief History of Hackerdom
From late 60s – Bell Labs’ hacker Ken Thompson invents Unix and Dennis
Ritchie invents C (both strong in terms of portability, but also used KISS
philosophy)

Top of page 6:
So matters stood in 1980; three cultures, overlapping at the edges but
clustered around very different technologies. [1] The ARPAnet/PDP-10
culture, wedded to LISP and MACRO and TOPS-10 and ITS and SAIL. [2] The
Unix and C crowd with their PDP-11s and VAXen and pokey telephone
connections. [3] And an anarchic horde of early microcomputer enthusiasts
bent on taking computer power to the people.

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A Brief History of Hackerdom
• Page 6 – 8: The Proprietary-Unix Era
• Episodes of “cracking” reported in press, leading to “hacker” as a derogatory
term (note: in 2019, hacker is both positive and negative, e.g. we see lots of
Hackathons encouraging groups of skilled programmers, engineers, and other
technical people to come together and innovate)
• Big rivalry between Berkeley (BSD) and AT&T Unix
• Others had success up to early 2000s, e.g. HP-UX, Solaris, AIX
• Unix rivals began to adopt some standards (e.g. POSIX and System V), but still
major incompatibilities (and court cases, e.g. Novell versus SCO)
• Already we discussed Free Software Foundation – they attempted to build
their own “free” Unix, HURD, but it lacked a kernel
• Then enter Thorvalds and the Linux kernel (which he developed using FSF toolkit)

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A Brief History of Hackerdom
• Early Free Unixes
• BSD continued to be popular (and still is, relatively, with FreeBSD -
https://www.freebsd.org/)
•
By 1993, Linux offers the “stability and reliability of many commercial
Unixes” with much more available software
• This kills of smaller variants of Unix
• According to Raymond, BSD’s close ties to the hacker community keep it
flourishing

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A Brief History of Hackerdom
• Hacker community has come together at times to fight for the cause, e.g.
Clipper proposal to give government control of “strong encryption”, and
various proposals to censor the internet
• the Clipper Proposal was about an encryption chip designed by the U.S. government
that would enforce the use of the chip in all devices that might use encryption—
computers, modems, telephones, and so on. Thus, the U.S. government could control
the encryption algorithm, giving it the capability to decrypt any recovered message.
• Before internet explosion and broadband (or even ISDN), Linux distributed
commercially on CD-ROM

• At this point, Raymond’s article ends and one must pick up the story in
Revenge of the Hackers - http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-revenge.html

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Revenge of the Hackers
• According to Raymond, the Linux community had beaten Brooks’s law to
develop a very high quality operating system:
• Brooks predicts that as your number of programmers N rises, work performed scales
as N but complexity and vulnerability to bugs rises as N . N tracks the number of
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communications paths (and potential code interfaces) between developers’ code

bases.
• Netscape (initially the web’s dominant browser) was being targeted by
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer
• Netscape recognised that if IE dominated, Microsoft could shape open
standards in their favour
• Internal debate about how to counter that threat
• 1998 – Netscape announces it will release source code of Netscape
browser

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Revenge of the Hackers
• This opened up the business barrier
• Raymond argues that the term “free software” has damaged the
movement (partly because of the ambiguity of the term, which we
discussed last week)
• “Most of the damage, though, came from something worse—the strong
association of the term ‘free software’ with hostility to intellectual property
rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear it to an MIS
manager”
• Much to Stallman’s chagrin, the term “open source” was registered as
a certification mark (to certify adherence to the OSD – open source
definition)

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Microsoft’s Fear of Free Software, exposed in 1998

• https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/11/b
iztech/articles/03memo.html
• Microsoft’s marketing strategy of FUD – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, e.g.
announcing non-existent products (a.k.a. vaporware) or spreading
rumours that competing products will crash Windows
• See the various leaked memos and responses from the FOSS
community here:
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

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OSS History (up to 2000)
Brettbauer, 2001:
The history of open source is closely tied to the history of the hacker
culture, since it is largely hackers who have sustained this movement.
“Hacker” is used here in the sense of one who is both a skilled
professional programmer and a passionate hobbyist wishing to advance
computer science, rather than the definition recently used by the
popular press of a destructive system cracker. Eric Raymond’s essay, “A
Brief History of Hackerdom” gives an excellent overview of the
development of the hacker culture.

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Making Money with OSS
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/07/16/how-open-
source-became-the-default-business-model-for-software/
• Sid Sijbrandij (Gitlab co-founder):
Open source and commercial interest were tied from the start. When the free
software movement was rebranded as “open source” it was done in an effort
to make free software principles more appealing to businesses.
The Apache Software Foundation was one of the first projects to incorporate
under the open source moniker. The ASF set many precedents for how open
source should be approached commercially, including creating the Apache
License which allowed for the same freedoms as the GPL without requiring
that derivative works be distributed under the same license. This new, flexible
license paved the way for commercial interest to monetize open source
software.

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• Sid Sijbrandij (Gitlab co-founder), continued:
The ASF also introduced a new way for open source and corporations to
interact: companies could be represented in the foundation by
individual participants. Maintaining an open source project’s autonomy
and community is critical, and this allowed for businesses to have an
influence without monopolizing the project.

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Making Money with OSS
• In late 90s, Jakarta was a “collaboration between Sun Microsystems,
IBM, Oracle, and the server-side Java development community.”
• Now Jakarta EE has moved to the Eclipse Foundation (see see
https://www.eclipse.org/org/workinggroups/jakarta_ee_charter.php)
• Cloud platforms also driving business involvement in open source
• So… corporations and individuals can be involved in shaping open
source software (particularly the big open source projects like MySQL,
RabbitMQ, etc.)
• Up to corporations to devise a business model to monetize the time
they invest in contributing to (and shaping) open source projects

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GitHub’s Effect
• Sid Sijbrandij (Gitlab co-founder), continued:
As the movement continued to gain mainstream popularity and
traction, GitHub brought open source to the world with the pull
request. Making it easier than ever to contribute spurred an
unprecedented network effect. It was the network effect and speed at
which open source communities could innovate that ultimately caught
the attention of software executives.

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OSS Business Models
• Dual Licencing
• Open Core

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Dual Licensing
• Sid Sijbrandij (Gitlab co-founder), continued:
Dual licensing emerged as an early approach to the open source
business model. Under this model, a company offers the same software
under two different licenses, one that is open source, and the other
proprietary. They can control the software, and contributors sign over
their copyright. This model took away power from the contributor and
instilled fear within the open source community. The purchase of
MySQL by Oracle was a seminal event, and evidence that the fears were
not unfounded. In fact, the original creators of MySQL forked the
project, renaming it MariaDB, to protect its open source status.

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Open Core Model
Sid Sijbrandij (Gitlab co-founder), continued:
To succeed as an open source company, you must first be a good
steward of open source. This means no freemium schemes or artificial
restrictions, allowing open source and proprietary software
competition, and removing barriers to contributing.
This co-creation allows for unmatched speed of improvement and depth
of functionality which benefits us all. Open core companies like Elastic,
Docker, Mesosphere, Magento, and more, have shown us that it’s
possible to be a good steward of open source and turn a profit without
jeopardizing the well being of the open source community.

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Open Core Model
• “Open Core” coined by Andrew Lampitt (according to Simon Phipps in
Open Source Strategies for the Enterprise (2012, free from various
sources including Amazon Kindle))
• Core of the software (or platform) made available as open source,
with additional addons only available commercially
• Has detractors who say it is not true open source (i.e. it’s either all
open or not) – it can lock-in customers who need to add the “extras”
• But, has some benefits for the company, e.g. “It also allows open-
source companies to defend against free-loading participants (e.g.,
such as the public cloud providers) by keeping certain features in the
proprietary code base.” (according to TimeScale – see future slide)
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Open Core Model
Simon Phipps in Open Source Strategies for the Enterprise

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Open Core Model
Simon Phipps in Open Source Strategies for the Enterprise

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Hybrid Licencing
• Extends on Open Core to make everything open source, but with
certain parts outside the core available only under a certain licence
• On the other hand, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is entirely open source (see
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine), but has a licence
where you must pay 5% royalty above a certain income threshold
(can modify source for personal use, but not redistribute the core
engine code)
• UE4 EULA: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula
• It is possible to negotiate licence terms for some types of project using UE4

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Alternative Approaches
• Companies can let go of their proprietary products and open source
them, then rely on their standing as the go-to people for add-on
consulting services (support, customizations, etc.)
• They can offer hosting services (and, by the way, sell consulting to a
captive audience)
• See https://blog.timescale.com/how-open-source-software-makes-
money-time-series-database-f3e4be409467/ for the views of
TimeScaleDB (https://www.timescale.com/)

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When Things Go Wrong
• Oracle vs. Open Document Foundation (resulting in LibreOffice)
• https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/oracle-openofficeorg-vs-tdf-libreoffice
• Hudson (out of Sun Microsystems) vs. Jenkins
• See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_(software) (section on the split)
• In both cases, the latter forked projects went on to dominate the
other

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Next Week
• Licencing
• How to analyse current OSS projects

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