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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO FOSS AND ITS STATUS

1.1 INTRODUCTION

During the past many decades, the software market has been

dominated by Commercial Off- The-Shelf (COTS) products that offer

thousands of functionalities. However, many intrinsic limitations of COTS

software have emerged over time such as lack of access to the program code,

cost of upgrades, vendor lock-in , unknown security weaknesses, etc, that led

to the development of a parallel “software economy” based on software that

were free as well as open-source. Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) has

added a new dimension to the way software is understood, developed and

deployed in various areas (Vixie 1999). Though existing since 1960’s, it is

only since late 1990’s that FOSS has changed the face of the Software and IT

Industry. FOSS has grown and expanded in such a dramatic manner mainly

due to the rise and spread of the Internet and the World Wide Web

technologies across the world. FOSS has been widely adopted as the software

of choice in many core areas of computing and Linux dominates today in

embedded systems and in servers. Vibrant communities support Linux kernel

development and many popular FOSS packages. Beyond the use of Linux,

FOSS can be found in many domains, including (to name a few) software

development tools and environments; computing infrastructure; mapping and

geospatial imaging; modeling and simulation; communications and

networking;security; academics; e-governance, real-time computing, etc. A

representative list of some popular and proven FOSS Products and

Technologies is given in Appendix-1 to convey a sense of the spread and

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rerach of the same.(The column ‘License’ shown here would be explained in

the next section.) This sudden and remarkable success of FOSS has raised

many questions on its quality, development methodology, cost-effectiveness,

sustainability etc, and lead to the interest of academics for interdisciplinary

research (Feller et al 2005; von Krogh and von Hippel 2003).

1.2 DEFINITION OF FOSS

In the most widely accepted narrative, the origin of the present

FOSS movement is traced to Richard M. Stallman of the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (USA) who started the GNU Project in 1984 to bring

out a UNIX like powerful operating system, and also set up the Free Software

Foundation (Williams 2002). The other key event that launched the FOSS

movement is the writing of a Unix-like kernel by Linus Torvalds, a second

year graduate student at the University of Helsinki, and its wide distribution

in 1991, which went on to become the core of the GNU/Linux Operating

System -- the poster-boy of FOSS culture.By 1993, both GNU/Linux and

386BSD were reasonably stable platforms.

Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation characterise

Free Software by the following four freedoms that its receiver is entitled

to –

1. Freedom to run the program in any place, for any purpose and

forever.

2. Freedom to study how it works and to adapt it to our needs. This

requires access to the source code.

3. Freedom to redistribute copies.

4. Freedom to improve the program and to release improvements to

the public. This also requires the source code.

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There is another entity called Open Source Software (OSS) and its

associated organisation Open Source Initiative (OSI) that are closely related

to (but somewhat distinct from) the Free Software and Free Software

Foundation. Whatever differences exist between the two schools are mostly

matters of emphasis – OSS and OSI are focused more on the technical values

of making powerful, reliable software, and a little less on the moral issues as

compared to FS and FSF (Gacek and Arief 2004).

The term FOSS as used in this thesis includes both FS and OSS,

and makes no distinction between the two, except when it comes to the legal

issue of Software Licenses.

One perspective focuses on FOSS from a legal point of view where

FOSS can be used as license model for software distribution. Different FOSS

licenses provide the user with different sets of rights and permissions

(O'Sullivan 2002). The GNU General Public License (GPL) introduced by

Stallman (Stallman 1999) guarantees the user unrestricted use, access to

source code, and the right to modify and distribute the source code (the

original software or the modified source code). The free software here is “a

matter of liberty, not price” (Stallman, Lessig and Gay 2002) and to

understand the concept one must think of “free” as in “free speech” and not as

in “free beer”. While GPL is probably its best known member, the family of

FOSS Licenses indeed is very large, and it is critically important to know the

license under which a FOSS package is released before using the same . The

Table in Appendix-1 also has information on the common FOSS licenses that

govern many of the popular FOSS packages.

Following the path of Torvald, Netscape released its browser code

to the public and developers from around the world contributed to its

development and this lead to the making of famous browser Mozilla and

email client Thunderbird. At this point a group of researcher founded an

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organisation in 1998 and coined an alternative term Open Source (Perens

1999) to remove the ambiguity of the term “free” used in our walks of life.

This definition of “open source software development” is very similar to the

Stallman's definition of free software but their emphasis is more pragmatic.

They concentrated more on software development issues like quality, release,

security, performance. Free Software is considered more of a social

movement (Elliott and Scacchi 2004) and Open Source Software is a software

development methodology. Despite this philosophical difference in the two

movements, the licenses, software and most importantly the development

process are largely the same. Because of this, the all-encompassing term free

and open source software, or short, FOSS, will be used throughout this thesis.

A new terminology libre was coined (Ghosh, R. A. et al. 2002) to counter the

ambiguous English word free. Libreis a word in some European languages

which means liberty and best represents the freedom commonly referred by

free software. Thus FOSS is also referred as Free/Libre/Open Source

Software (FLOSS) in some countries.

Another perspective on FOSS focuses on the software development

process employed to create software (Raymond 1999) than the license or the

philosophical aspect of FOSS. Raymond in his book “The cathedral and

bazaar” compares the development process used to produce proprietary

software to that of building a cathedral where a group of skillful people

develop in a closed environment and the FOSS development process is more

like a bazaar style with multiple people working in an open environment. In

fact Linus Torvald had introduced this paradigm of software development

when he released the Linux kernel to the hacker community and asked people

to contribute to it. People from different parts of the world crossing various

barriers like language, culture, geographic location, and race contributed to

this kernel using this new paradigm called collaborative development. Though

most FOSS projects differ in quality assurance (Aberdour 2007), leadership

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style and other areas, they all do have common patterns. Fundamentally,

FOSS is a collaborative process in which members from across the world can

participate and contribute to the development of the software. Internet was

identified as an enabler of collaborative software development by Lerner and

Tirole (2002) since most of the members were unpaid volunteers working

together over the Internet and a large portion of Internet infrastructure itself

depends on FOSS (Mockus et al 2002).

1.3 THE FOSS DEVELOPMENT MODEL

The FOSS process and methodology was first explained by Eric

Raymond (1999) in an essay based on his observations of the Linux kernel

and an open source project, fetchmail and also introduced the metaphors the

‘cathedral’ and the ‘bazaar’. Here the traditional software development was

compared to building a cathedral where the work is done by an architect

(Crowston and Howison 2005), can be a single person or a small team,

working in isolation (Bergquist and Ljungberg 2001). FOSS development in

contrast is analogous to a bazaar that is marked by an unorganized and very

open nature in which everybody can participate. This open approach to

software development encourages users to participate and contribute in

multiple ways, such as by doing code review, adding new functionality and

submitting defect reports. This model depends on rapid prototyping, in which

development is done iteratively and is driven by the active development

community and their requirements. Raymond (1999) also refers to a number

of factors like peer review, people with best skills and motivated people

contribute to high levels of quality in FOSS projects. Senyard and Michlmayr

(2004) argue that the cathedral and bazaar are not conflicting models but

rather complementary phases of the life cycle of a product. Here all the

projects start in the cathedral phase where work is done by core people on a

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prototype in isolation, and moved to the bazaar once the prototype shows

sufficient promise, thereby establishing a large community around the project.

The onion model presented by Crowston et al. (2004) and shown in

Figure 1.0 is a theoretical model that focuses on the social structure of a

typical FOSS project. This implies that by far not all FOSS projects conform

completely to this model, since each FOSS project is unique in its structure,

governance, and its level of success in attracting contributors.

Figure 1.1 The onion model (Source: Crowston&Howison 2005)

According to the onion model, there is a relatively small team of

core developers, an increasing number of contributing developers and an even

higher number of active users who report defects (Aberdour 2007). The outer

layer is defined by those users who are not actively involved in the

development process. In the onion model, active participants become

involved in the next closest layer through a process of meritocracy (Crowston

and Howison 2005; Aberdour 2007). Users can participate in the development

by sending in defects reports and other feedback, thereby becoming active

members of the community. From this layer, participants can advance and

become contributing developers by making a substantial contribution. The

core team is reserved for the most experienced and active members of the

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community. Each role in this model is associated with a number of

responsibilities and tasks:

According to the onion model, there is a relatively small team of

core developers. There is no formal definition of the size of this core however

based on a case study of the Apache web server, Mockus et al. (2000) stated

that the core team has an upper limit of 10 to 15 members, due to

communication and coordination overhead issues. The core team members

provide most of the code, and take responsibility for overseeing the design

and evolution of the project. Around this core team, there is a group of co-

developers that is in much larger size than the core team. Co-developers

review and contribute code, as well as fixes bugs. The next layer of the onion

surrounding the layer of co-developers represents a group of active users, who

are not developers. Active users closely follow a project’s progress by

downloading and using the latest releases, reporting bugs and suggesting new

features. The outer layer of the onion represents passive users, who merely

use a product, but do not contribute anything to the FOSS project. Since it is

practically impossible to define the size of this group (since they do not

interact with the community and do not make themselves known), Figure 1.0

shows this layer with a “spiked” (undefined) outer border.

Within the onion-shaped community, members may transition from

one layer to another (Gacek and Arief, 2004). Passive users may become

more engaged with the OSS project as their interest grows, and start

submitting bug reports or feature requests, which make them “active users”.

Non-developing active users may start contributing code, either to fix a bug or

to implement a new feature; this transitions them from being non-developers

to co-developers. After submitting a certain number of high-quality code

contributions, co-developers may “earn” write-access (for instance, by being

nominated by other senior members) and become “trusted” members of the

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development community. This allows them to commit directly to the central

repository, rather than submitting contributions as patch files. Co-developers

may become increasingly involved in the development of one or more

modules of the FOSS project, and may become a member of the core team.

1.4 GLOBAL STATUS OF FOSS

FOSS because of its popularity, affordability and the freedom it

provides, its end-users has begun to get noticed by various governments

around the word and many initiatives have been launched to reap the benefits

of FOSS. Though many of these initiatives are in the early stages, but a

significant trend is seen towards incorporating FOSS into procurement and

development policies by various governments. There has been large number

of reports and white papers recommending FOSS solutions, there are

reportedly about 70 proposed laws mandating or encouraging FOSS around

the world (Miller, Robin, 2002). A few are at the national level while most

are at much lower (state or city) levels. The following are highlights of some

of the more noteworthy efforts from around the world.

European Commission

Europe has been the house of a significant number of FOSS

developers and projects (FLOSS report, 2002); it is also an area with strong

government interest in FOSS like laying FOSS procurement and development

policies, FOSS policies for IT-SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and

open standards. Strong interest in FOSS development is visible in the

European Commission, Germany, France, Spain, United Kingdom and

Finland.

The European Commission (Europa.eu, 2013) in December 2000,

defined a strategy concerning the internal use of FOSS and recognized the use

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of Apache webserver as a recommended solution on UNIX systems. The

strategy was further revised in 2003 and recommended GNU/Linux for Server

OS, the use of Apache to power the europa.eu server and the use of FOSS for

the Commissioner’s blog and public forums on europa.eu. Taking into

considerations the world-wide developments in the field of FOSS the strategy

was revised and published in 2007 that covered four years from 2007 to 2011.

During this period the European Union Public License (EUPL) was

completed and approved and is considered a milestone in the FOSS domain

and is now widely used in public organisations as well as the private sector.

The creation of EUPL paved way to the foundation of various community

platforms supporting FOSS development, such as OSOR.eu- an award

winning initiative, hosting a considerable number of FOSS projects. The

Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations

(OSOR.edu) supports and encourages the collaborative development and re-

use of publicly-financed free, libre and open source software (FLOSS)

applications for use in European public administrations. It also promotes and

links to the work of national repositories, encouraging the emergence of a

pan-European federation of open source software repositories. Since

November 2010, OSOR.eu hosts close to 200 projects and facilitates

searching for almost 2500 projects through the federated national forges.

During the 2007-2010 timeframe, the European Commission's activities in the

FOSS domain have also lead to the delivery of FOSS tools in support of e-

Government processes, such as e-Prior, a procurement tool for the exchange

of standardized electronic documents that supports purchase orders and

service catalogues, developed by the European Commission's Directorate-

General for Informatics and shared under EUPL on OSOR.eu.

The following gives a sense of the commitment of the European

Commission to FOSS which very few public administrations in the world can

match:

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The Commission runs its IT solutions on more than 350 Linux

servers.

DIGIT’s Data Centre manages more than 800 FOSS web servers.

The Flexible Platform for Internet Services, project available under

EUPL on OSOR.eu, offering a recommended set of Web 2.0 tools

for social collaboration, is entirely powered by FOSS tools; it

provides, among others, 40 blogs for Commissioners, EC

Representations and other EUROPA sites and hosts more than 400

wikis.

All new web applications at the European Commission are

protected by an FOSS-based solution for authentication, currently

serving more than 300 existing web applications, more than 60 000

users and performing more than 1 000 0000 authentications on a

yearly basis with more than 17 000 different users every day.

Several corporate solutions such as those in the area of content

management, surveys, e-invoicing and e-ordering, etc.are entirely

FOSS-based. Within the Commission’s IT network, an FOSS-based

developer collaboration platform hosts more than 770 projects

accessed by over 3000 developers.

More than 60% of the information systems developed at the

Commission are based on Java all of which development projects

including FOSS tools.

A FOSS browser is included in the desktop reference configuration

available for all PCs at the Commission.

In early 2010 the Commission performed an assessment on the use

of FOSS within the organisation and based on this drafted its latest Strategy.

This current revision of the Strategy, covering the period 2011-2013, has been

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indeed developed based on the accumulated experiences in the use of OSS in

the European Commission over the last decade.

Germany

With 12.4% of FOSS developers being German, Germany is only

second in the world behind France in terms of the nationality of FOSS

developers/contributors, and residence wise Germany has 12.6% of FOSS

developers that makes it third behind France and USA. There have been many

initiatives from Germany for using and adopting FOSS. The major being

Bundestag the legislative body in Germany that uses Linux on its 150 servers.

The city of Munich under the project LiMux has switched over 15,000

personal computers and laptops of public employees to Linux and saved over

11 million euros. Though cost was not the only reason for using FOSS, the

other major reason as stated by Germany’s Interior Minister in 2002 is

avoiding a monoculture, lowering dependence on a single supplier. The

German parliament in 2001 decided that FOSS products should be used

wherever costs could be decreased by their usage. The police force is also

transitioning 11,000 clients to Linux and the ministry of finance has an

Apache/Linux based intranet system that supports 15,000 users.

France

The largest numbers of FOSS developers are French with 16.5 %

and residence wise too France houses 15.4% FOSS developers of the world.

There have been many policies from the government to use FOSS and open

standards in the various government departments and public administrations.

The officially sanctioned Agency for Technologies of Information and

Communication in Administration (ATICA) counts as part of its mission, “to

encourage administrations to use free software and open standards”. The

authority for Customs and Indirect Taxation has also migrated to Linux citing

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security reasons. The French agency for e-governance has made the open

standards mandatory for all public administrations that will guarantee full

interoperability.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom had existing policies which were favorable

towards FOSS and recently started formulating policy regarding FOSS

procurement. One of the primary interest in FOSS is to avoid vendor lick-in

problems and UK has produced a policy to “only use products for

interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT

developments”. One of the most active proponents of FOSS is the National

Health Service, which was forced to migrate to Linux in hospitals by a

proprietary software vendor.

Spain

Spain has been one of the fastest adopter of open source in Europe

mainly due to its governments pro FOSS policies and having many key FOSS

projects to support these policies. Spain has 17 autonomous communities that

resulted in more open source adoption in the regional level projects than in

the national projects. However, there have been some policy initiatives that

have state-wide impact like the Criteria for the Security, Standardization and

Conservation of applications used by the State administration, adopted in June

2003, called for the adoption of open source software when it is available and

when is satisfactory for the task. It was reported in June 2005 that, in

assessing a Linux desktop migration project in the Ministry of Public

Administration, the Court of Accounts found that Spanish central

administrations could drastically reduce their software licensing costs by

adopting FOSS on a larger scale and published a guide providing

recommendations for FOSS adoption within public agencies. The National

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Plan (2004-2007) for Scientific Research, Development and Technological

Innovation includes a specific budget line for FOSS projects, representing 5%

of the total budget for R&D for Information Society technologies. A

unanimous resolution of the Spanish parliament urged its government to

promote FOSS and a commission in the parliament approved a law that grants

Spanish citizens the right to use software of their own choice when they

communicate electronically with the government.

There are many key projects that supported these policies and as

reported by FLOSSmetrics (2010) an early success story was the Virtual MAP

Project of the Ministerio de AdministracionesPúblicas (Ministry of Public

Administration) which implemented Linux on 220 servers. Most of the

projects are regional and Extremadura is the most famous Spanish open

source adoption project set out in 2002 to enhance its services and boost IT

literacy by making free software available to everyone and building a regional

intranet. Extremadura is deploying LinEx, its own Linux distribution designed

for use in regional administration and schools. There are many more projects

on similar lines from various regions having their own customized version of

Linux distribution. Some of these projects are Gaudalinex created in

Andalusia, Lilurex in Valencia, Molinux in Castilla-La Mancha, Max in

Madrid, Trisquel in Galacia, and Linuxglobal in Cantabria.

Many universities started promoting FOSS in their education and

the Open University of Catalonia started the first International Master’s in

Free Software. A publication by CENATEC (2009) has brought out the results

of a detailed study done on the use of FOSS in Spanish Universities.

A study of open source software in Spanish Government is

conducted by National Observatory for Open Source Software (ONSFA) that

collected data from198 public organisations and is published by CENATEC

(2011). The aim of this study is to ascertain the level of use of open source

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software in the public sector, acquisition forecasts, practices and policies

related to public procurement of software, the release and reuse of

applications, and identify barriers adoption of these technologies by agencies

of the State Administration.

The United States

There are many government users of FOSS in the United States and

a variety of related policies available but no official FOSS policy from the

federal government though attempts have been made to pass pro-FOSS

legislation at the state level in California, Texas and Oregon. A survey from

MITRE Corporation (MITRE 2003) shows that the US Department of

Defense (DOD) used a total of 115 different FOSS applications. There have

been multiple reports recommending the use of FOSS in the US Federal

government including one by the President’s Information Technology

Advisory Committee (PITAC) which recommended that the US Federal

government should encourage the development of FOSS as an alternative path

for software development for high end computing. There is a study (ICMA

2010) of local governments where in smaller public institutions have shifted

over to FOSS platforms for better performance and record keeping and lots of

IT savings both on hardware and software.

According to open source census (OSC 2008) government and

financial services companies show the highest use of FOSS per machine

scanned. Government agencies have 123 different FOSS packages installed

per machine while the financial services companies have 117 different FOSS

packages installed and overall the US averages 51 FOSS packages per

machine.

As a matter of policy the Department of Defense (DOD 2009)

issued a memo reiterating that FOSS is commercial software for procurement

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purposes and encouraged DOD branches to include FOSS when they are

picking software.

South America

Brazil is leading the way in FOSS usage, adoption and contribution

in Latin America. There have been initiatives from the government to migrate

to FOSS and in 2004 thus resulted in training of 2100 municipal, state and

federal public employees in the implementation and management of open

source platforms for government administration. Brazil has produced its own

linux version called “Conectiva” which later became part of Mandriva

distribution. The voting system is run on FOSS and the country boasts the

world’s first open source bank ATM network. SERPO the main data

processing entity and the army has adopted FOSS. The postal service, state oil

company and national statistics agency have switched to FOSS at the

government request. The reasons for the migration are low cost, increased

production of local software and ideology. Besides Brazil, there have been

other countries which too have started to look upon FOSS as a possible

alternative to proprietary software that reduces the cost drastically. The

governments in these countries have introduced legislation in support of using

FOSS in government administration. Peru is one of the first countries in the

world to have introduced legislation in favoring FOSS in government

procurement. Similarly, in Venezuela the president Hugo Chavez in 2004

passed a mandate the entire government to switch to FOSS and in Argentina a

bill calling for the use of FOSS in government was introduced in 2001.

China

FOSS usage in China is growing rapidly and it is set to be a major

stronghold for FOSS over the next few years. The government of China is a

primary driver of this massive growth and one of its goals is to create both a

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hardware and software industry that will not fall into the trap of foreign

intellectual property right trap. To avoid dependency on foreign hardware and

software vendors, China is trying to develop its local technology industry, and

FOSS fits well into its software needs. The embedded software market is

projected to be huge in China mainly due to its predominance in consumer

electronics production and Linux is the dominant platform for embedded

software development in China where in both the homegrown and standard

versions of Linux are in use. Demands for embedded software development

are growing dramatically.

Red Flag Linux (Chinese distribution of GNU/Linux) is a

government initiative that aims at developing China’s open source industry.

The Chinese Government’s interest in open source software is partly due to

lower cost and partly due to cultural and political reasons. By supporting Red

Flag Linux, the Chinese Government hopes to create and grow its own

information technology industry, along with user base that uses such Chinese

technology. Local, provincial, and national Chinese Governments have

supported the product by installing and using Red Flag Linux. Among them

are the National Ministry of Science, the Ministry of Statistics and the

National Labour Unit, the China Post, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the

National Foreign Exchange Management Bureau, the Custom General Office,

the Public Security and China Banking Regulatory Commission, and the

National Development and Reform Commission. Beijing municipality, the

Chinese capital, was also reported to have installed Linux on 2,000 desktops.

In fact, the Chinese Government has announced (Guohua Pan et al, 2007) that

all government agencies are required to use only "locally produced software"

with a goal of 100 percent compliance by 2010.Red Falg Linuxhas later

evolved into Asianux which is a joint development between Red Flag

Software of China, Miracle Linux of Japan, Haansoft of South Korea, and a

few more Asian countries

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Taiwan

In 2003, Taiwan launched its “National Open Source Plan”, a two-

year plan to build a software industry that could replace all of the proprietary

software on government and educational systems. The primary drivers for this

plan are the existing dependence on a monopoly supplier and the expected

cost savings. The Taiwan’s procurement agency, The Central Trust of China,

has brought in a procurement policy in June 2006that requires all PCs

purchased for government use to be compatible with the Linux operating

system. Taiwan is a hotbed for computer, mobile and electronics

manufacturing and with initiatives such as Android and MeeGo, Linux is the

fastest growing platform for mobile computing- on phones, laptops, mobile

internet devices (MIDs), infotainment devices and more. There are a variety

of companies in Taiwan that today are increasing their participation in the

Linux development community and initiatives such as MeeGo, Android and

Tizen.

Malaysia

The adoption of open source in Malaysia has seen a sudden rise in

the last decade with the Government of Malaysia reporting an astonishing

97% adoption rate for open source software. The Open Source Competency

Centre (OSCC) and The Malaysian Administrative Modernization and

Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) helps in guiding, facilitating,

coordinating and monitoring the implementation of OSS in the public sector.

A lot of open source products are developed and released by OSCC as

contribution to the open source world.

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Africa

Despite the fact that from a global perspective Africa lags behind in

FOSS adoption a closer look at the FOSS activities in the continent give a

more encouraging scenario. The 62% FOSS policy initiatives increase in 2008

(Karume and Mbugua 2012) is a good indication of African governments’

willingness to support the FOSS adoption agenda. Also a closer examination

of some of the initiatives and projects like FOSSFA, ict@innovation, OSISA,

AVIOR, ANLoc, OER Africa and AITI-KACE championed by Africans

demonstrates that many FOSS activities are indeed underway in Africa in

terms of capacity building, development and usage, educational and business

applications, advocacy campaigns, policy implementation, R&D, etc.

The South African government has a policy preferring FOSS

systems unless there are compelling reasons otherwise. Among the reasons

cited for this preference is that with the traditional proprietary software

model, South Africa ends up primarily being an importer of software, with

little influence over how software is developed. It is hoped that using FOSS

systems will change this. In 2007 the South African Cabinet approved a FOSS

strategy and the government would migrate its current software to FOSS.

Tanzania is also implementing FOSS systems in its government for cost

reasons and similarly other nations like Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia,

Nigeria, Botswana, and Zambia are also moving towards FOSS.

1.5 THE INDIAN FOSS SCENE

In a certain sense, many in India have seen the role and potential of

FOSS quite early on, symbolized perhaps by the open pro-FOSS position that

the then President of India Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam had taken in 2003 when he

said “In India, open-source code software will have to come and stay in a big

way for the benefit of our billion people”.

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Most people consider the following to be among the key reasons

why India should be keen about FOSS –

FOSS is low cost -- results in affordable IT tools/ solutions for govt.

departments, SME s, educational sector, non-profit entities, etc.

Design & Code are free/open in FOSS – provides the ideal

education & skill development environment for inculcating

innovativeness and creativity, critically needed in the era of global

competitiveness.

FOSS is easy to modify & customise -- ideal for Indian conditions

with its great diversity and variability in local conditions, context,

languages etc.

FOSS products are steadily getting to be more robust and superior-

- Indian SW/IT companies must have ready access to what FOSS

can offer in order for them to stay globally competitive and

innovative.

FOSS promotes open code & open standards—with large scale

FOSS adaption, there need be no fear of critical public IT

infrastructure/repositories from getting vendor-locked and possibly

compromised in a strategic sense.

FOSS can help eliminate the use of un-licensed SW—it is widely

known that very large scale use of unlicensed (‘pirated’) SW does

happen in India which is the sort of embarrassment that we can

not afford any longer. FOSS helps to remove cost as a factor from

encouraging the use of unlicensed SW.

FOSS is a major success story of how the values of ethicality,

cooperation,altruism and sharing can go hand in hand with the

development of advanced modern S&T– precisely the values that

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need to be inculcated and absorbed in a large measure for India's

development.

Despite there being awareness of these issues in certain circles, the

fact remains that India is no major player in today’s FOSS world, with

whatever is happening here being rather sporadic, unorganized, undirected,

and individual dependent. This is especially so as far as our producing

anything new in this domain, for our own use or global adoption.

In recent years however, there have been a few major initiatives in

the FOSS promotion space in our country, as listed below:

Setting up of the National Resource Centre for Free and Open

Source Software (NRCFOSS) Project by the Dept. of Electronics

and Inf. Technology (DEITy), Govt. of India in 2005 as a large

multi-institutional program with many deliverables and spin-offs

that encourage, facilitate and promote the use of FOSS in India.

Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Govt. of

India, has also initiated major FOSS promotion programs like

FOSSEE at IIT Bombay.

C-DAC’s program of developing and promoting an indigenised

GNU/Linux Operating System Distribution called “Bharat

Operating System Solutions (BOSS)” as a spin off from the

NRCFOSS project, both in the server version and the desktop

version.

Setting up of the Open Technology Centre (OTC) in 2007 with in

the National Informatics Centre (NIC) by DEITy, Govt. of India,

with a mandate to promote FOSS use within the government.

Promotion of Human Resource Development (HRD) in FOSS at

various levels in the country- through NRCFOSS of DEITy,

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through the “ICT in Education” program of Ministry of HRD,

Govt. of India etc-- the 2-year fully Online M Sc (CS-FOSS)

program of Anna University Chennai being a spin off of

NRCFOSS.

Approval of Open Standards for e-Governance implementation by

the Govt. of India in 2011, enacting of FOSS policy regimes by

state governments such as Kerala, etc .

FOSS is powering one of India’s most prestigious and mammoth e-

governance initiatives- the Aadhaar project from the Unique

Identification Authority of India. It uses FOSS solutions like

RabbitMQ, Mule, Hadoop, Hive, Pentaho, Apache Tomcat,

MongoDB, Apache Solr and MySQL besides the Spring

Framework.

State level initiatives like the “IT@Schools” in Kerala, the Institute

for Open Technologies and Applications (IOTA) in West Bengal,

bundling Linux into the millions of laptops being distributed by

states like Tamil Nadu and Assam, migration of the public libraries

to FOSS in Tamil Nadu, etc.

Increasing presence of communities, groups and publications, like

the 150-odd strong Linux User Groups, annual FOSS events in

campuses, magazines like Linux For You (LFY), greater Indian

participation in global FOSS events like Google Summer of Code,

Code Jam, etc.

Increasing presence of registered users and projects in Indian

forges, including SourceForge, shown by a study report

(FLOSSWORLD,2007)

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One of the draw backs one notices in this domain in India is the

lack of quantitative primary data concerning the extent of FOSS Adoption and

use, an issue that the present thesis attempts to address to some extent.

1.6 THE FOSS ECOSYSTEM

There is a gross misconception that prevails in many circles that

FOSS is only about writing computer codes and is a matter that essentially

concerns the computer scientists. The very fact that countries like France is

strong in the FOSS domain whereas India is not should reveal the fallacy of

this thinking since the same FOSS codes are available to both the countries!

The fact of the matter is that writing code is only one part of doing FOSS

which is essentially a movement involving different sections of the society.

FOSS is in fact an ecosystem with many connected components in it, one

view of which is as given below in Figure 1.2:

Government Academia

Industry Community

Figure 1.2 FOSS Ecosystem

Funds, resources, expertise, skills, manpower, technologies, ideas etc flow

through the links in the ecosystem which are all bidirectional, indicating the

mutual dependencies amongst the members of the ecosystem.

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Key roles that these components play in this ecosystem and their mutual

dependencies are as follows:

Governments (Central or State) -

Provide funding for FOSS support and promotion

Lay down policies supportive of FOSS

Consumes FOSS for its SW/IT own needs.

Depends on Academia to produce Trained HR, on Industry to opt for

FOSS solutions, and on Community to evangelise FOSS

Academia-

Evangelises the cause of FOSS

Generates FOSS- trained H R

Produces FOSS technologies

Depends on Government to extend funding and policy support, on

Industry to absorb the FOSS HR they generate, and on Community to

evangelise and support.

Industry ( large and small) -

Uses FOSS Technologies and Solutions

Develops and provides FOSS Technologies and solutions.

Funds FOSS promotion

Depends on Government for policy support, on Academia to generate

Trained HR, and on Community to evangelise and support

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FOSS Communities -

Evangelizes and lobbies for FOSS

Develops FOSS technologies and solutions

Supports promotional efforts

Depends on Government for policy support and funding, on Academia

to generate Trained HR, and on Industry to adopt FOSS Technologies

and solutions.

Ideally, the four entities (Government, Academia, Community, Industry)

would constitute a self-sustaining FOSS ecosystem, each meeting the needs of

the rest, and in turn being supported by them. While it is possible for each

entity to exist by itself, their growth and sustainability will be quite poor, and

their impact on society and economy rather limited. It is at the national level

that such an ecosystem can hope to take root most easily, though state level

and global level ecosystems could also play helpful roles. Whether such

FOSS ecosystems exist in a country, how do they get built, which are the

entities that take lead in this process etc. depend strongly on the larger

economic, social and political context.

What is seen in countries like France that are advanced in FOSS is that the

importance of the roles played by the four entities in the FOSS Ecosystem

occur in the following decreasing order :

Industry à Communitiesà Governments à Academia

This means that Industry plays the most central role, with Academia playing

the least important role.

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A significant observation one makes about countries like India that are not

quite strong in the FOSS space is that the order of importance of the different

players in the Ecosystem decreases as follows:

Government à Academia à Communities à Industry.

This difference between the two types of countries in terms of who the lead

players are in the FOSS domain are has considerable importance and

significance for the future of FOSS in these countries.

1.7 NEED FOR MEASURING FOSS ADOPTION

FOSS has been seeing widespread adoption in domains like E-

governance, SME s, Education and Research, etc. A survey of public

administrations of thirteen European countries done even five years ago

reported that 78% of them were using FOSS (Ghosh and Glot, 2005). Another

survey in the US conducted around the same time estimated that 87% of

organizations surveyed were using FOSS (Walli et al., 2005). One of

thesurveys of Indian IT Companies (NRCFOSS/AU, 2010) showed that all of

them (100%) were using FOSS in one form or other, and that about half of

them considered FOSS as an option while procuring new software.

While most organisations that use I.T. today are certain to be using

FOSS in some way or the other, the manner and extent to which FOSS gets

used would vary greatly across organisations. “Squirrel Mail” may be the

only FOSS product used by one organisation, where as another organisation

might have migrated its entire IT infrastructure as well as applications to

FOSS. Both the organisations can rightly claim to be using FOSS, though the

difference between them in this regard is enormous. Today there is no way of

objectively assessing and stating this difference in the ‘FOSS Maturity’ or

‘FOSS Friendliness’ of organisations in a quantified and measurable manner.,

and the aim of the present work is to fill this gap by defining a single number,

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the FOSS Adoption Index (FAI), to convey the standing of an organisation in

this regard. Such measures do exist today for many FOSS products and

technologies that convey in a quantified manner their performance, reliability

and robustness, extent of documentation and support available etc. to enable a

prospective user to assess their suitability for his/her use. Business Readiness

Rating (Wasserman et al., 2005), Navica/Golden Open Source Maturity

Model (Golden, 2004),CapGemini Open Source Maturity Model

(Duijnhouwer et al., 2003), Qualipso (Wittmann et al., 2008) are some of the

popular examples of how the maturity of open source products are assessed in

a quantitative manner in order to help organisations choose a product for their

adoption. There also exists the Open Source Potential Index (Douglas S.

Noonan et al., 2008) which has been used to rank countries on two indices

(Activity and Potential) based on their usage, adoption and support of FOSS.

The topic of FOSS usage and adoption in different classes of

organisations has also been studied earlier by different researchers. We find a

case-study presenting the experiences of migrating public administrations to

FOSS (Zuliani&Succi, 2004), while another study (Rossi et al.,2006)

compared the usage of proprietary and its equivalent FOSS application suite

in public administration. Another study (Fitzgerald, 2008) presents successful

and unsuccessful deployment of two FOSS applications in an organisation

(hospital). CENETAC (2009) and OSEPA (2012) are some of the examples

from Europe where use of FOSS have been studied in detail and published.

While these studies do reveal significant extent of information on the subject

matter, they have not addressed themselves to the task of coming up with a

single measure of the ‘FOSS Maturity level’ of the institutions they have

studied. Coming to India, even though the initiatives mentioned in section 1.5

are strongly indicative of the growing levels of FOSS awareness and adoption

in India, there doesn't exist any quantitative assessment of the extend to which

the actual use of FOSS has grown in the major application segments like

27

SW/IT Industries (small and big), Government and Public sector (Centre and

State level), Education (School and Higher levels), Research, etc. The present

study attempts to address this gap and makes two types of contributions to the

field-

1. Developing a measure and a tool for assessing the extend of

FOSS use in an organisation or entity

2. Collecting representative primary data from different classes of

organisations in India and analyzing them using our measure

and tool.

Details of this work are presented in the rest of this report.

1.8 CONCLUSION

This chapter briefly introduced the idea of Free/Open Source

Software (FOSS) and its essential characteristics, some milestones in its

dramatic growth and spread mostly coinciding with that of the Internet itself,

a few facts about its status globally and with in India, finally leading upto the

need for quantifying and measuring the adoption and use of FOSS with in

organisations and entities which is the theme of this thesis.

The rest of this report is organized as follows:

Chapter 2 - Modeling and Ranking Studies in FOSS: Describes the

different FOSS models available for rating FOSS products, as well as for

ranking counties in FOSS adoption, and brings out the need for a model to

quantify FOSS adoption in an organisation or entity.

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Chapter 3 - A Model for FOSS Adoption by Organisations: This

describes in detail the FOSS Adoption Index (FAI) Model proposed in this

thesis.

Chapter 4 - Survey and Data Collection:Describes the different

classes of organisations studied, the types of data collected, and the manner of

their collection.

Chapter 5 - Results and Discussions: The data analysis process is

described, and results obtained are discussed in detail and interpreted.

Chapter 6 - Conclusion and Suggestions for further work:Key

conclusions from the study are listed, its limitations pointed out and

suggestions for further work in this area proposed.