As many of you know, I'm now working full time as the GNOME Foundation's Executive Director. From now on, I'll be blogging primarily on Stormy's Corner. Thanks for following me – I hope to see you at Stormy's Corner.

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Every company should have an open source strategy and policy – or at least cover open source in their company's policy. Even if they don't use open source software, they should have a policy saying whether or not they could use open source or who would have to decide. Otherwise they'll end up wasting developer time.

And yet survey after survey shows that companies do not have open source software policies. Mark Radcliffe reports that the DLA Piper 2008 Technology Leaders Forecast Survey found that only 48% of companies* have an open source software strategy and:

Larger companies, those with more than 5,000 employees, reported use of open source software in only 9% of their products and 65% do not have open source use policies.

I bet even fewer would have an open source strategy. (My argument for a strategy, which I will repeat endlessly, is that if you don't state why you are using open source, you won't set up the right policies.)

* Disclaimer: the study wasn't included and I wasn't sure what "these companies" referred to.

Matt Asay points out that it takes time and work to contribute to an open source software project. What suprised me was that he seems upset (or perhaps disappointed) that it's so hard for an outside person to contribute to an open source software project.

First off, it's not hard to contribute small things. Small things that can be easily verified are easy to contribute. It's harder to contribute large patches and new features. That's because the open source software is built on credibility and trust. A newbie has a trust savings account of zero. They build credibility and trust over time. When an outsider submits code, that code is not just inherently trusted. It needs to be examined, tested, and verified before it's accepted. That takes time – time from already busy committers. But when the code is accepted, that outsider has won a trust point. Over time, their contributions will just be trusted and accepted quickly, not ignored because people don't have time.

Luckily for most open source software projects and the community, trust can be partially transfered between projects. "Your reputation procedes you" and all that.

I've spent a lot of my work time making it easier for people to make contributions to open source software (via OpenLogic's Expert Community and my new job as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation), and I believe you have to work within the model. If you want it to work faster, you have to hire the people that already have the trust (assuming they'll want to work for you), or pay people to spend the time to verify the patches you have (some what like OpenLogic's model) or you have to spend the time to develop that trust.

[From the Open Source Census August newsletter.]

In the previous newsletter we looked at the breakdown of Linux Distributions. Many people have since asked us how open source software compares across different operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac, so we decided to take a look at the average number of open source packages found by operating system. As expected, Linux (an open source operating system) had the most with an average of 87 instances of open source found per scanned system. FreeBSD (also open source) was a close second at 81, but Mac wasn't far behind with 75. Judging by the large number of Macs seen at open source conferences like OSCON and LinuxWorld, there are probably a lot of Mac users who are open source fans.

Windows, although not open source, still had a respectable amount of installed open source software, with an average of 39 instances per scanned system. The number is probably lower than those for open source operating systems simply because there are already proprietary solutions included with Windows. So, in response to questions about whether open source software is found on Windows systems, the answer is definitely yes!

I uploaded some of the Open Source Census data into Many Eyes and I've been having great fun playing with the data. (You can play with it yourself.)

Here are some of the visualizations I've created:

Word map:

Bubble map:

This week theme has been "who's going to pay for open source?" It's shown up in a number of blogs, like Matt Asay's. In several blog posts he's said things like "Who will pay for open source in the future?" and "Someone has to pay for this stuff, and it's not going to be governments." Roberto Galoppini's post quotes Larry Augustine saying that customers need to be educated on the value of open source.

I'm sorry, it's just not the simple. The open source software development model is not a business model.

I've spent many years talking about the business of open source. The question has never been "who's going to pay for it?" Open source is not a business model. The open source model can be part of a company's business model but the open source ecosystem itself is not a business. Open source software is created because an individual or a company sees benefit in it. Although making money can be one of the benefits of open source software, rarely does anybody receive a check to write a piece of open source software, any software, as long as it's open source. They might receive a check to write some software and it might make sense to write that software under an open source license but they didn't get a check just because it's open source.

If companies want to be paid to create open source software, they need to work out a business model that includes creating open source software and providing value that customers are willing to pay for. It's not about educating governments, customers and end users to the fact that they need to pay companies to develop open source software. It's about figuring out why it's beneficial to a company to license their software under an open source license. 

I believe the model is self sustaining and self correcting much like free markets are. OpenLogic provides open source software and services to companies that need it. Companies are willing to pay OpenLogic because they need a number to call for 24×7 support. Now OpenLogic doesn't write most of the open source software they support, so OpenLogic in turn pays open source software developers to help them resolve issues. If not, the developers would just say "hey, we wrote that in our free time, why would we help you make money off of it?" (Actually, they probably wouldn't say that. The open source community is extremely generous and helps many people with problems for free on their mailing lists but OpenLogic wants to pass along some of the revenue to help maintain the ecoystem as well as maintain developer goodwill.) OpenLogic also donates to organizations that support open source software.

Have all the business models that include open source software been worked out? Of course not, we're still figuring it out. But so far, there are many business models that can successfuly include open source software. It's just that there's not one single "open source business model".

If open source software is valuable, it will be created, and it will be part of a much larger ecosystem that includes numerous business models. That's already been proven. It's not a question of who will pay for open source software, it's a question of what problems will open source software solve, and how will companies build businesses around those solutions.

Sam Dean posted a good list of places to find open source software related webinars, free webinars on free software. One of the resources is OpenLogic's archive of webinars. OpenLogic's webinars cover topics that are interesting to open source software users in the enterprise. Some of them we do ourselves but other times we bring in OpenLogic Expert Community members or other topic area experts.

So, my question to you is, what topics would you like to see? How can OpenLogic continue to grow the pool of free open source software webinars?

InfoWorld put out their 2008 Best of Open Source Software Awards (BOSSIES) and SourceForge put out their Community Choice Awards. I thought it would be interesting to see how prevalant these products were in the Open Source Census findings.

Not all the projects had fingerprints in Open Source Census so I just focused on those that did. I am not trying to make any statistically significant statements here, I was just curious. (I think to make statistically significant claims you'd have to look at the rest of the data, know if it's a server application, compare it to other data, etc. All the stuff that IDC and the Census will do before they release reports.)

The number is the prevalance number, the percentage of scans submitted to the Open Source Census with that package installed on the scanned machine.

From BOSSIES:

Application development:

• Prototype, JavaScript Framework 56.7%
• HttpClient, Web Client Library 30.48%
• JBoss Drools, Business Rule Management System 0.38%

Best of open source in productivity applications

• Firefox, Web Browser 83.73%
• OpenOffice.org, Productivity Suite 45.44%
• GIMP, Image Editing 33.67%
• Audacity, Sound Editing 10.31%
• Blender, 3D Modeling 3.34%

Collaboration:

• WordPress, Blog Publishing 4.33%
• MediaWiki, Wiki 3.23%

Networking:

• Wireshark, Network Protocol Analyzer 16.48%
• Nagios, Server Monitoring 5.06%

Platforms and middleware:

• MySQL, Database 27.41%
• VirtualBox, Desktop Virtualization 18.38%
• phpMyAdmin, MySQL Administration 6.46%

From the Community Awards:

• Best Project: OpenOffice.org 45.44%
• Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org 45.44%
• Best Project for Education: OpenOffice.org 45.44%
• Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin 6.46%
• Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin 6.46%

Question: Is it theft if the other person still has it?
Answer: It can be.

However, in the evolution of the human species, this is a relatively new concept. You can steal software, songs, and wifi connections – but yet the other person still has their copy. I think this is why so many people don't feel bad about digital theft – it just doesn't feel like stealing when you haven't taken anything away from the other person.

Matt Asay's example of stealing wi-fi brings up a couple of other good points. Not only are you not taking anything away (unless you slow their connection down) but it's becoming socially acceptable to use someone else's wi-fi and most people would probably assume that if they asked, their neighbor would say yes. (At least if it was for a short term.)

It's going to be a while before we reconcile our social norms with our laws and open source software will be at the forefront since it's so easy to "borrow" it without properly following the license.

The Software Freedom Law Center has published a very detailed guide on how to comply with the GPL, A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance. It discusses everything from common violations to how to include source code to what to do if you get the dreaded "you are in trouble" letter. Worth a read for any organization using Linux or any other GPL licensed software.