What a long strange trip it's been
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Thoughts on beaming an open source evangelist Keynote at the OSGIS 2012 conference in Nottingham
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What a long strange trip it's been
- 1. Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been Steven Feldman
- 2. Me
- 5. Does it do the job?
- 12. Cost FOSS4GX
- 15. http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthileo/4826783509/ Getting an Open badge http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/2412755417/
- 16. Spatial isn’t …
- 19. 17th – 21st September www.foss4g.org Open is the freedom to …
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Weaving a personal journey into my view of the development of the Open Source Geo business models and their changing competitive position vis a vis proprietary software Many of you here will be academics or technical people, I am neither (although I am an Ext Lecturer at Nottingham Uni) my perspectives are those of a business person and perhaps of an activist and idealist.
- Back to 1968 Economics student at Kings In the late 60’s I wanted to change the world Somehow I ended up working for Pilkington making mirrors and then got into GI and finished up selling a GI business to Mapinfo and then running their UK business It’s that experience that I want to reflect on in talking about open source
- My heroes were Radical and Disruptive or at least I thought so Click See how many you can recognise, prizes later
- 20 years Building materials – learnt manufacturing economics and business models= to make more cost more materials and labour Environmental Technology Click GDC = re-learnt software economics = once you’ve made it it costs nothing to ship more of it, for a while I thought this was the gift that kept on giving butthen I learnt that you have to keep remaking it MD MapInfo UK Click OSM Contributor, Open Source Advocate, Geohippy Enough about me for the moment, let’s look at how I got to where I find myself today
- 3 perspectives that I want to explore with you that may have influenced the growth of Open Source Geospatial and Open Source in general. I want to share some of the business thinking around OSS particularly from outside of the community and what helped to change my views. Apologies if some of this sounds like standard evangelism for OSGeo but hopefully along the way I will be able to illustrate how the positioning of OSS business models has changed and I will reflect on how some of the counter arguments that my staff at MapInfo for example would have used a few years ago no longer stand up to scrutiny. 3 perspectives What influences customer choice Ethics Business response
- Quite general stuff – applies to most software bought by businesses I want to go through this check list and give a view of how OSGeo stacks up against the proprietary alternatives. Proprietary not commercial because I believe that OSS must be seen as a commercial business model – it just isn’t the same business model as proprietary licensing models Check list = Functionality, Robustness & Support, Feature enhancement, Scalability and of course cost
- Functionality = 1st consideration of a potential customer You need enough and a little bit more – most software vendors with mature products have reached feature bloat stage, they are moving from 80/20 to 90/10 If I put on my ex software vendor’s hat there is little that our software could do that customers needed that cannot be achieved using OSS. This is particularly true of the web and the database where prebuilt glitzy interfaces are not needed. In the past OSS was not noted for it’s elegant or intuitive interface designs but recent releases of QGIS are challenging that perception on the desktop where interface is perhaps most important. In the areas of support for OGC standards which are growing in importance particularly as we step up implementation of INSPIRE in Europe OSGeo probably exceeds the compliance and interoperability of much proprietary software IMO as software product specs mature there is less radical or dramatic innovation in features and the space starts to attract development focussed on better implementations rather than on new features. Enter OSS For the vast majority of applications OSGeo ticks the box on functionality Remember that in most geospatial implementations the software is not used raw out of the box it is part of a solution and the bigger question for a buyer is whether the solutions provider has understood and can deliver their requirements not the functionality of the underlying components which will be selected by the solution provider
- Does it keep working? So the software does what you need it to do, but will it keep on doing it? And if it doesn’t will there be someone there to fix it or support you? Everyone will say that there software is robust and just keeps running and it probably does, there is little basis to suggest that proprietary software is more reliable and robust than OSS, if we consider operating systems or web servers the majority of the internet runs on OSS and appears to be pretty robust. But inevitably stuff does goes wrong – it may not be the software per se it may be the environment or integration issues that are causing a problem, or it could be that you want to make some changes to a system and aren’t quite sure how. In those cases you will need support and even possibly a bug fix. This is often cited as the weakness of OSS whereas actually it is at the heart of the OSS business model OSS businesses make their livings from providing services and support, there is every reason to expect that if you have chosen carefully you will get as good or better support from an OSS vendor.
- Now bugs are another matter. Have you ever reported a bug to your proprietary vendor? Typically there are 2 responses “We don’t recognise that as a bug, it’s a feature that works differently to your expectation”” or “no one else has reported that” or “we can’t you replicate that” – these are all variants of the stall for time technique “We already have that logged as a known issue and it is scheduled for fixing in the next release due (fill in some date about a year away)” or “Yes that does appear to be a bug, I will log it with our development team and hopefully we can get a fix included in the next release” I apologise for stereotyping and to be fair to the support staff they are usually battling with the dev team to get any idea of when fixes will be released. One of the strengths of the OS community is that there are often more people committing code to a project than are tasked with maintaining the proprietary equivalent. So when a user or their support provider reaches out to the community for a work round or a fix there are potentially more people to pitch in and help. Of course as a last resort, if no one steps up to help fix your problem, because the source code is open you could even hire someone to fix a problem and then contribute the fix back to the project for the benefit of other users. And that is also often how a user gets to prioritise a new feature that they need for a project or application, they can sponsor its development for the benefit of all users Collaboration seems to work
- There are 2 aspects to scalability - technical and commercial Enterprise sales forces will focus on technical scalability - How do you deal with more usage? – users, hits, processing, larger data sets etc. I want to let the less technical of you into a secret, the smarter bit of software code will make a modest difference to performance, however most of it is down to increasing processing power, more CPU’s means mean more users, more outputs or faster queries. Of course it needs some smart stuff to ensure that lots of servers are all doing the right bits at the right time but largely people have worked out how to coordinate all of this – think mid tier or grid. No doubt some deep techs will want to dispute some of this with me. So if scaling comes down to servers and racks or VM’s in the cloud there isn’t a problem? Even though there is no marginal cost for the software code you need to deploy across a larger infrastructure the licensing model means you will have to pay. Mike Saunt and I coined the phrase the “Software Tax” to describe this model - that’s the price you pay for software licenses as your application grows in usage or success. As one user said to me “the thing about the internet is that it makes demand and planning so unpredictable, that’s why we need to use open source software”
- So let’s talk pricing for a moment and this free stuff There’s CLICK
- Costs nothing but there’s no such thing as a free lunch or free software, there’s always a catch And there’s CLICK
- Free as in speech or in the open source context CLICK Use how you want, adapt, deploy, scale without constraint
- I wish we could get rid of the Free bit in CLICK FOSS4G Click OSS is not free (well at least not for the enterprise) – it’s a different model Proprietary = License fee (big upfront) + implementation services + maintenance for new features which you may or may not want + support OSS = Zero license fee + implementation services + perhaps a cost to fund new features which you do want + support No software tax for scaling The advantage that OSS brings is that it creates a level playing field for service providers to compete on quality and price of the service package Why is this important? Large buyers of geo solutions (particularly Public Sector) find themselves locked into a very small number of solutions, some have recognised this and are keen to see a competitive alternative
- I said that as a young man I was an idealist and you may think that ethics have little to do with the running of a software business but I would contend that they do, particularly in the geospace where a large portion of our income comes from the public purse and where many of us who “get” digital geography or whatever we call it are such strong advocates of the power of GI or geography to make a difference to some of the environmental and social challenges the world is facing. So this is a little rant from me: Public sector funded software development that is paid for again and again Canadians showed how to do it differently More recently the UK and French govts have funded extensions to OSGeo products as components of an OS INSPIRE solution that will benefit all users Pay once use many times rather than write once and sell many times World bank and other NGO funded projects that push over-specified proprietary software solutions to the developing world rather than seeking to encourage the use of appropriate levels of functionality based on OSS Cadastral systems in developing world Emergency response systems Acknowledge that some vendors are donating software but question their motivation If Proudhon had still been alive today I wonder what he would have had to say about intellectual property CLICK
- Principal players in geospatial market = vendors and SI’s Software companies move into services SI’s adopting OSS
- Everyone wants to get an Open badge They are even going Open Source CLICK
- We’ve been talking about the vision of spatial going mainstream. Well it is now – the Big boys joining in Watch out for the IBM’s and SAP’s who are already big supporters of Eclipse and look like joining the spatial crowd and embedding those capabilities within their enterprise platforms Think - IBM, Oracle, Autodesk, Nokia, Google, SAP, Airbus, BMW, Bosch, Continental, Thales, Hitachi, Siemens, RIM, all of whom are allegedly looking at incorporating spatial.
- Heroes dead or middle aged but still want to be disruptive and to make a difference Advocate for OpenStreetMap and OSS Initiated OSM-GB project here at Nottingham Chairman mentor to Taarifa Working with Astun the open source geo people in the uk Chairing FOSS4G2013 – more on that in a minute
- Heroes dead or middle aged but I still want to be disruptive and to make a difference Advocate for OpenStreetMap and OSS Initiated OSM-GB project here at Nottingham Chairman mentor to Taarifa Working with Astun the open source geo people in the uk Chairing FOSS4G2013 – more on that in a minute That’s quite a journey from running a subsidiary of a US software business 5 years ago! In the words of the song Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been” CLICK I suppose I am the archetypal Gamekeeper turned Poacher But open source is only one of the opens of geo CLICK
- Yup we won the competition to host FOSS4G in the Robin Hood City, the Lace capital of the Britain, right here in Nottingham
- These are the 4 opens of geo that I was going to talk about before everyone else covered most of my topics
- Why do I think this stuff is so important? Well like Sir TBL tweeted at the Olympic opening ceremony – this is for everyone If we believe that geography is a powerful tool for insight and action then it needs to be widely available The 4 or maybe 5 Open’s of Geo make geography, analysis and action available to everyone Open Source gives us the freedom to process and manipulate spatial data at whatever scale we need without paying a license tax Open Standards give us the freedom to find and connect to distributed data sources scattered around the world OpenStreetMap gives us the freedom of a royalty free global map that we can add to, reuse and reprocess OS OpenData gives us authoritative street data, boundaries and postcodes OpenData gives us the freedom to see what government are doing and potentially hold them to account And if you want a lot more Open then you should plan to come to CLICK FOSS4G next year in Nottingham running back to back with GeoCommunity And if you can’t wait till then then come and talk to me and the guys at Astun who do lots of nice open things
- Explain link with AGI GeoCommunity
- Coding Hacking Partying Jousting?