FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE ---"share and share alike.

"

FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

FOSS
By: MOINUDDIN AHMED
Roll No.-100-30-2005
MTECH IT, 1ST SEMESTER
Gauhati University
ASSAM

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS FOSS?

POPULARITY OF FOSS

LIST OF FREE AND OPEN SOURCE

SOFTWARES
HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM FOSS
RUNNING A PROFITABLE BUSINESS WITH
FOSS

CONTENTS contd..

FOSS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MODEL

WHICH LICENSE TO USE?

SHORTCOMINGS OF FOSS

HOW TO START OR CONTRIBUTE TO FOSS

PROJECT
FUTURE PROSPECTS

INTRODUCTION

A very promising and profitable industry.

FORBES - 65 software companies in the 2010 edition amongst top
2000 large companies active in all kinds of industries.
DataMonitor forecasts that in 2013, have a value of US$ 457
billion
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft was the richest person by
selling software products.
The success story of Oracle . The same happened with Larry
Ellison

Conventional software mostly are proprietary

Sealed inner mechanism

Free and Open Source Software made with just the

opposite mindset
The tremendous contributions to computing, both
research and commercial projects

making easier for large group of people.

growing phase, promising future

In this seminar I have tried to simplify the notion of

FOSS, commercial and non-commercial projects.

WHAT IS FOSS?

There are two terms to separate in FOSS.

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price.

Freedom to

Run (freedom 1)

Study how program works (freedom 2)

Redistribute copies (freedom 3)

Modify / improvise (freedom 4)

Open mainly points to Open Source Code of the program,

available for others.
get software at no cost but as per license we can enjoy the above
four

POPULARITY OF FOSS

going through phase of immense transformation.

Currently it is worth $60 billion

SourceForge.net hosts more than one million users,

involved in some way with approximately one hundred
thousand projects
no real geographic barriers
These figures speak volumes, something unique about
the philosophy of FOSS

Freedom, grow beyond its creators

Popularity of Apache Web Server

Cost comparison between Microsoft and FOSS Solutions

Microsoft
Solution

Linux/FOSS
Solution

Savings

Company A: 50
Users

$87,988

$80

$87,908

Company B: 100
Users

$136,734

$80

$136,654

Company C: 250
Users

$282,974

$80

$282,894

Sources:
wikibooks.org

Global percentage of people demanding Enterprise edition software that is foss-licensed (Gartner survey)

LIST OF FOSS

a) List of FOSS Software that runs on Microsoft Windows, Gnu/Linux and,

in some cases, Apple Max, Unix and BSD operating systems

Productivity based applications

Wordprocessing - Open Office - http://www.openoffice.org/

Publishing - Scribus - http://www.scribus.net/

PDF Creator - Pdfcreator http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator

Mail Client - Evolution - http://projects.gnome.org/evolution

Compression - 7Zip - http://www.7-zip.org/

Text editor - Notepat++, http://notepadplus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Financial - GnuCash - http://www.gnucash.org/

Internet Based applications

FTP - FileZilla - http://filezilla-project.org/

Remote connection - Vinagre - http://projects.gnome.org/vinagre/

Web development

LAMP component- EasyPHP - http://www.easyphp.org

General purpose IDE platform - Eclipse - http://www.eclipse.org/

CMS -Joomla

Multimedia

Image Editing - GIMP - http://www.gimp.org/

Audio Editor - Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

CD Creator/Burner - Infra recorder- http://infrarecorder.org/

Image Viewer - http://imgv.sourceforge.net/

Video Editing - Kdenlive - http://kdenlive.org

Systems

Ghost - http://www.fogproject.org

HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM

FOSS

1)Dual license model

released under a restrictive open-source license ,provide an alternative
proprietary license.
You have some sort of monopoly in the market leader
Motivation: Client likes product and needs it for commercial use. does
not want to breach the open-source license and is willing to pay
Open-source license: GPL suitable license to this strategy because it is
restrictive
Examples:

Mozilla Foundation has a deal-partnership with Google and other

companies
Apple Inc. offers Darwin for free, selling Mac OS X.
Red Hat offers the Fedora for free, selling Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL).
MySQL is offered for free, but with the enterprise version you can get
subscription, support and additional features.

2)Dual product model

penetrate the market by releasing an open-source product,

sell a different product with an extended version, plug-ins or upgradation.

Motivation: The user gets to be a part of an open-source

community process, contributes to the source and improves it.
Users purchase other related products from the project
professionals.
Open-source license: MIT, BSD, Apache or any other noncopyleft license.

Example:

Eclipse and its non open source plug-ins.

Sun Microsystems offer OpenOffice.org for free, while

selling StarOffice.

3)Professional services model

This strategy requires a large base of clients

the product must not be simple to use

There is no problem implementing this strategy combined with one of the

other strategies discussed before

In fact it is recommended as a complementary strategy for both.

Motivation: We are the experts in this open-source project because we

Open-source license: Any

Example:

wrote it, therefore clients would like to purchase support and other
services from us.

a) JBoss itself is open source but RedHat provides a support

subscription for JBoss Enterprise Middleware with prices from around
$6000 to $110,000 per year

4) Open source bounty

It is a reward, usually monetary, for making positive contributions to an

open-source project.

Eg.BountySource
Motivation: there is at least someone in this world who can solve my

problem.

Examples:
Sun MicroSystems has offered $1 million in bounties for OpenSolaris,
NetBeans, OpenSPARC, Project GlassFish, OpenOffice, and OpenJDK.
The Google Summer of Code and the OSU Winter of Code provide
stipends to students working on open source code.
Mozilla introduced a Security Bug Bounty Program offering $500 to
anyone who finds a "critical" security bug in Mozilla.

Bounties are often used for implementing minor features, whereas

bidding and/or grants are more typically used for major features.

RUNNING A PROFITABLE BUSINESS

WITH FOSS

Initial research for feasibility criteria.

tool for strategic planning and decision support since

running a profitable business is not easy.

Two methods for software models

total cost of ownership (TCO)

the return on investment (ROI)

TCO

Direct Costs those identified in traditional IT

budgets, including (Hardware & software
acquisition, operation and administration costs, etc)
Indirect Costs those costs generated from IT users
including (Downtime due to misuse or mistakes, enduser operations, continuous training needs etc.)
TCO for free and open
source projects can never be Rs.0

ROI

We need a method to measure something more important. How

much we will get in return on making an investment.

A simple way to look at ROI

ROI=RETURN/INVESTMENT

FOSS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MODEL

STONE SOUP MODEL

LICENSES

SHORTCOMINGS OF FOSS
Lack of business applications

Alhough GnuCash, TurboCash do exists, basic, polished

accounting applications as good as Tally do not have FOSS
equivalents at this time.
Scarcity of competent people. It is rare for a software
developer to encounter, say, accounting problems.

Interoperability with proprietary systems

not entirely compatible with proprietary systems.

For organizations that have already paid massive amounts of

capital into proprietary applications, may prove to be prohibitive

Documentation and polish

Established FOSS lacks the user-friendliness

No warranties- regarding virus and performance

related issues.

Staff must be open source savvy-When compared

with existing proprietary systems. The cost of training
is considered as a major disadvantage when migrating

HOW TO START OR
CONTRIBUTE TO FOSS PROJECT

Numerous websites hosting projects

Contributing Time/Skills

Most open source software is built completely by volunteers (without

compensation) because they want a product that fits their needs.
The list of skills of contributors may seem large, but every person has different
skills to offer and your skills may be what it takes for a project to evolve. In most
cases you do not need to be a programmer to help
By adding his hands, eyes and associated skills to their project he may take project
to the next level

Product Purchases

As with the Membership and Subscriptions, by purchasing goods from the

project's store

Donations

Feel free to visit the project's home page to see if a donation link

The laymen Contributions

as a user can give back in a way that requires no money and

limited time.
by filling bug reports and recommendation so they can fix issues
and adapt the product to better fit the needs of the current users.

As you have seen from the list there are many ways to help the
community more in the long term.

FUTURE OF FOSS

Currently, proprietary software is king.

When you buy a new computer, you will be getting Windows That
is the "default choice".

However, it is not the only choice! Equivalents available

There's plenty of money in open source for commercial vendors.
Worth billions in IT world
but there's also plenty of opportunity for customers to build and
support their own open source derived projects.

Free from VENDOR LOCK-IN forever !

We're in the 21st Century now. customers get to decide

The Customer Century.

REFERENCES

www.wikipedia.org

www.dwheeler.com/

www.foss.in

www.oscon.com/

www.opensource.org

wwwr.oss-watch.ac.uk/

www.gnu.org

www.opensource.mit.edu/

Localization of FOSS by Sarmad Hussain, Pakistan

Open Sources Voices from the Open Source Revolution - Eric Raymond

Open source approaches in Advances in Geographic Information Science

OReilly Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing

A primer on open source software for business people and lawyers,

Stephen J. Davidson

END