“Am I a geek, or a suit?” I pondered, sitting in a large hall with some thousand others in Victoria, Canada, during the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G ) conference. The question was posed to me by keynote speaker Damian Conway, PERL enthusiast, frequent speaker at FOSS conferences, and management consultant. I wondered to what extent my fellow conference-goers were pondering the same question. Looking around me at the number of bearded geography types who followed his speech with open laptops running strange Unix command lines, I concluded probably not that many. As developers, most of them self-identified with the geek label by default. The exception might have been the four obvious suits who decided to check out the conference, and perhaps some boundary cases such as myself.
Still, as a service to all of us–geeks, hybrid geek/suits, or suits–Damian Conway laid out a business case for open-source software. Contrasting the realm of the geeks with that the minds of the neoliberal “suits” (or: the ones making the actual decisions), the question Conway posed is why don’t the suits wholehearthily embrace the free software the geeks make available? Is there something fishy about open-source?
According to Conway, and taking the case of the battle of the giants, closed-source Windows operating system versus free, open-source Linux, the ten questions any open-source enthusiast geek has to come prepared with when speaking to a suit are as follows:
(Suit question 1) But SCO owns UNIX?
(Geek answer) No, that whole thing was a business play by SCO to raise the price before management dumped the stock. Oh, and if they actually did (the court said they didn’t recently) the open source community would code around it.
(Suit question 2) Open Source has a higher total cost of ownership?
(Geek answer) Yes, if you read studies funded by proprietary vendors, otherwise, it does not.
(Suit question 3) Proprietary software is easier to use.
(Geek answer) Yes, but only marginally and most of that is from familiarity.
(Suit question 4) What about compatibility/interoperability?
(Geek answer) Actually typically Open Source supports more standards and are typically better than even previous versions of proprietary software on the same document.
(Suit question 5) What about security?
(Geek answer) Open Source tends to win here because it has genetic diversity. (How many versions of UNIX are there?)
(Suit question 6) What about support?
(Geek answer) Open Source options parallel proprietary, PLUS you can have folks in house!
(Suit question 7) But what if the product goes away?
(Geek answer) There’s no single supplier, so less likely than proprietary vendors. Open Source is not cost driven and proprietary folks end products all the time.
(Suit question 8 ) Who will we sue if something goes wrong?
(Geek answer) Just like proprietary - no one. Proprietaries are too big to sue (unless you have tons of money) and with Open Source, there’s no one to sue!
(Suit question 9) How will Open Source improve customer experience?
(Geek answer) Open Source use will drop company prices, thus customer prices, scale cheaply, etc.
(Suit question 10) How will Open Source improve the company bottom line?
(Geek answer) All sorts of things will be cheaper: licensing, licensing management costs, risk, insurance, hardware, security, etc.
So, what did I learn? Governments and major corporations around the world are now moving swiftly towards wider use of Open Source software. Open Source software development and support is based on a model of collaborative interaction that is entirely different from the competitive world of commercial software. It’s not a business; it’s a culture. As a manager, to get the greatest benefit from Open Source you need to understand and engage that alien culture, to appreciate the motivations, aspirations, mindset, and limitations of its community. As a geek, you need to know how to sell it.
Alien or not, the geeks, hybrids, and four suits around me showed some serious passion to drive down the costs of software. That’s a good thing, particularly for developing nations struggling to fund their health care system. It is hard to argue with that.
Posted by
Danny de Vries on 11/6/2007 • Tags: Community, Decision-Making, Digital Divide, Events, FOSS, GIS, HRIS, Information Systems, Open Source, Software, Sustainability, Technology
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Luke, HR Information Systems (HRIS) senior developer, and myself, Geographic Information System (GIS) manager, visited the “Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial” (FOSS4G) conference in Victoria, Canada this last week. We wanted to get a better handle on how HRIS and GIS could interact within an open-source context. We walked away with some major conclusions and ideas on how to further develop GIS capabilities within and beyond HRIS. But as HRIS is built on the premise of open-source, this conference also gave us an opportunity to participate and learn from an organized community of geospatial software users which has been making progress in furthering the open-source ideal.
What we saw was a young and passionate movement not-so-subtly showcasing their dedication for open-source as a tool by which to challenge corporate, or closed-source, IT monopolies in the geospatial domain. Just like the domination of (preinstalled) corporate Windows operating system over the free and viable Linux alternative—for no reason other then “familiarity”—so is the purchase of ESRI products, the leading closed-source geospatial analysis software system, taken for granted in the geospatial realm. Sold for a hefty price and with annual update/support contracts, ESRI dominates, over the free, open-source GIS software available. Why is this? Is open-source GIS less viable then its big, corporate version?
FOSS4G challenged corporate geospatial IT by providing a different vision. As Damian Conway, PERL- enthusiast and keynote speaker emphasized: “Open Source software development and support is based on a model of collaborative interaction that is entirely different form the competitive world of commercial software. It’s not a business, it’s a culture”. A culture? In the geospatial world, this culture of open-source expresses itself, according to Paul Ramsey, Director of Refractions Research, through four largely independent development “tribes”: “within each tribe, developers cross-pollinate very heavily, contribute to multiple projects, and have high awareness of ongoing developments.”
The tribes are identified by some of their totem pole (apt Canadian analogy for the symbol that focuses their unity) software solutions. First there is the “C” tribe, including geospatial software such as MapServer, GRASS, PostGIS, QGIS. Then there is the Java tribe, building geospatial solutions from a java platform with products like GeoTools, uDig, Geoserver. Then there is .Net tribe, consisting of developers working on Worldwind, SharpMap and other software. Finally, a loose category of developers are part of the Web tribe, including various toolkits and webservices providing browser based spatial services. So when there are tribes, where is the tribal warfare (don’t tribes always do that?)? And, to extent the analogy, how does the neocolonial corporate ESRI system relate to them? Capitalist oppression and exploitation of the hobbying, tribal geeks?
One would assume that the existence of four developer community tribes in the geospatial open-source world would automatically assume a hefty competition for resources, if not all-out tribal warfare. This in fact does not seem to be the case at all. I tried myself to ask one of the tribal member to compare his Java based webmapping server with the C++ version. He smiled at me and pretty much explained that there is little difference, and what more, that in fact they would operate with pretty much any other software solution outside of their tribal clans. Reason? The interoperability principle. That, and perhaps the fact that all tribal members are united through the ambition of statehood.
What makes open-source so different from a corporate system like ESRI is its fundamental interest in building software according to universal standards. This in contrast to the strategic interest of any closed, corporate system to somehow make users reliant on their system alone. Interoperability refers to the achievement of exchange of communication and data through common standards across software platforms and databases. In the geospatial world, the Open Geospatial Consortium has been working hard to achieve these standards, and the fruits of this labor is the lack of any ethnic warfare between the open-source tribes roaming around in geoland.
Interoperability is also about synthesis, or the emergence of a larger whole out of components by allowing for free flow of information, interactivity. In the words of David Schell, CEO and Chairman of the Open Geospatial Consortium: “Interoperabiltiy seems to be about the integration of information. What it is really about is the coordination of organizational behavior.” Or, in other words, interoperability is created by organizations working together to more efficiently achieve goals.
The lessons for HRIS, Capacity building, and international development at large might be obvious: open architecture is important if not crucial because it provides free access to a diversity of information, motivates integration the coordination of organizational behavior. It is possible to develop lasting technology solutions in real-time, facilitating a common picture of reality for different organizations that all have different views of the situation collectively. Open-source is about creating community through diversity. It is the essence of democratic behavior itself. Because there is no ownership, open-source maximizes the willingness of partners to share data, ideas, and innovations, and it allows software to move beyond building stove pipes, or vendor specific solutions, and address requirements built to a standard.
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Danny de Vries on 10/17/2007 • Tags: Capacity Building, FOSS, FOSS4G, GIS, HRIS, Information Systems, Open Source, Sustainability, Technology
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