One of the more interesting opinions I read about was that closed source has better quality but they should use open source to strenghten the code base. Since the most commonly used open source license requires that the code will continue to be open source using it in a closed source application will require it to be released as open source. Poor unenlightened people, isn’t that a catch 22?

Closed source applications are produced to gain money for a company and it needs to bring in more money than it costs to develop the application to gain any profit. When a release date is set there is a deadline to keep up to for the sake of the trademark and the profit. As everyone that works with computers know it’s always something that delays everything in a project when you’re almost there and for the sake of the trademark it’s quickfixed, which doesn’t really provide any quality to the code. What’s even more terrible than the quickfixes is that in most cases they’re never fixed since they get the work done.

You may ask yourselves why companies are still using closed source if there’s quickfixes that are never fixed and maybe potentional security risks due to lack of time and/or money to keep within the deadlines and budgets, but how would you know that it could have been done better and more secure if you don’t know how it’s done now? Ofcourse the developers know about it and are able to fix it, but frankly they usually don’t bother since noone complains since the application gets the work done and they don’t use their own application in a large scale environment so they’ll never be affected by it.

Open source on the other hand is mainly developed by people that needs the applications themselves, everyone can correct someone else’s code or rewrite a function completely to fit their need better or just improve performance. Everyone I know, including myself, that contributed to open source or even developed their own applications are feeling honoured that others want to use their code. In open source it’s not about money or profit, it’s all about fast, secure and optimized code, in short good quality code.

There is one simple thing that will give the open source community the strength to defeat closed source, patents and monopoly in the IT-industry, passion!

“Het debat om stängda program” – Computer Sweden 2008-11-13

This lawyer, Malin Forsman, believes that closed source has better quality than open source even though many researches point the other way. She also praises Microsoft’s security updates as an example of great and fast resolution plans when their trademark is at stake. Her argument is that with money in the picture everyone will be pressured to deliver quality code. To that we can add that most open source developers are paid for developing open source applications which means there’s money in the picture and from her argument that would mean they’re pressured to produce quality code.

Companies like Sun and IBM who’s been on the market for longer than most companies producing closed source only are setting their focus on open source. IBM pays their own personeal to develop applications like Eclipse and Sun bought MySQL together with the open source database they develop with the same name. On top of this Sun decided to release their former closed source operating system partly as open source, did that decision result in poor code quality over night?

Back to my main question, is it really a lawyers place to decide wheter open or closed source has the better quality? What does a lawyer know about code quality, functionality and advanced applications anyway? Another concern I have about this lawyer is the fact that she used to work for Microsoft, which ofcourse wasn’t mentioned at all in the news article, does she still run their errands or is it that she just doesn’t get paid from anyone using or developing open source code since it’s pretty hard to intrude on the intellectual property when it’s given away for free?

“Bäst kvalitet på stängd kod” – Computer Sweden 2008-11-12
Malin Forsman @ LinkedIn

This first day offered a few other interesting presentations such as Alexander Schanz from DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH who talked about their open source radar data processing system PHOENIX runing on SUSE Linux and Lennart Hagberg from TetraPak who showed us and talked about the open source software behind their communications plattform for videos and documentation, an internal “YouTube”-service together with a wiki for documentation built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and WordPress.

On day two of Open Source Forum 2008 there were two tracks, one track with presentations like the day before and one track with live demonstrations of products and services. I begun day two at the live demonstrations track listening to Urban Anjar from Ubuntu Sverige talk about Ubuntu Linux and show KVM virtualization on Ubuntu. After the coffee break I ended up talking about Nagios and Op5′s Nagios-based network monitoring system with Jonas Björk and a representative from Op5.

Next up before lunch was Erik Lönroth from Scania Infomate who talked about how the use Linux in their cluster for calculations and simulations. With open standards and open source software they reduced many performance problems, but when they got here they found a new problem, no one had solved the problems they encountered before. To my surprise it would be until this point of this conferense when someone finaly said that you can get far with open source, but when you’re there it’s time to solve the problems never solved before and share them with others. At this moment I found myself thinking that with people like Erik Lönroth out there on the IT departments of the companies there’s hope for open source to survive the step into the world of business.

A presentation that surprised me during this conference was Anders Wallenquist from Vertel/Dataföreningen who talked about the CMS Drupal. I was surprised because I’ve never understood how competent Drupal acctually is and on top of this Dagens Industri, a financial newspaper, will move their webpage to Drupal instead of Escenic and Polopoly like most other newspapers in Sweden uses. To read more about di.se and Drupal IDG wrote about it at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.182311.

Back to Open Source Forum 2008, during day two there were two tracks which means a lot of presentations that you don’t have to time to see. I’ve been writing about those presentations that impressed or surprised me during these two days. For the full agenda of this conferense see http://www.opensourceforum.se/Program.htm.

So, what’s my summary of this conferense? Well, it was terribly expencive, only ~50 visitors and I had some very interesting conversations about various subjects with other visitors which would mean that since I’m not paying for it, it was totaly worth it. :)

Open source has gone into a new phase and whether we like it or not the rules have changed. Of course this didn’t happen over night, this is the result of a series of decisions a couple of companies made. Red Hat decided to release an enterprise version of their Linux distribution and begun to compete with Microsoft, Sun, HP and others about the space in the data centers and not too long ago Red Hat also bough the popular open source application server JBoss. Novell bought SUSE and pretty much replaced NetWare with SUSE Linux and joined the party in the data centers.

A company that definitely made a difference in leading open source into the next phase is Sun Microsystems. In the past few years Sun has been changing the licensing of Java to open source and also released OpenSolaris an open source version of Solaris. As another step in Sun’s open source strategy they bought two very significant open source projects, MySQL and VirtualBox. Sun isn’t the only company to buy open source projects at the moment and not to long ago Nokia bought Trolltech and Citrix bough Xen Source.

At this new playground there’s a new set of rules to live up to that the open source-community never faced before. At this playground of companies, business agreements, economics and profitability there’s no room for decisions based on ideology. We need to help these companies find ways to make their decisions so that they do not interfere with the ideology behind open source and so that these companies can benefit from their decisions.

It’s no longer the open source-community’ believe in their ideology that brings open source further, open source has silently taken the step into the commercial world and whatever you all think about that it was all of us that brought it there. We got what we asked for and now it’s time to learn to play by the new rules.

Instead all the discussions are about that Lenovo released two of their laptop modells from the IBM ThinkPad-series with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop pre-installed on the Swedish market and that HP and other computer manufactures are planning on releasing some of their models with Linux pre-installed. Two months into 2008 two huge companies bought three important and significant open source projects. Of course am I thinking about that Sun bought MySQL and VirtualBox, and that Nokia bought Trolltech including the copyright for QT.

The fact that huge companies has begun to buy open source projects is absolutely positive in my point of view and I’m not worried that these projects will be closed source or difficult to access in other ways like many others do. The companies are not going to close the source of further releases since the open source community is the worlds greatest test department free of charges. To release a product as open source for people and small businesses to download and use free of charge results in that they report bugs and literally test your product for you. When this product is considered stable the manufacturer package the product together with administration tools, security updates and patches, documentation and support to an enterprise product for companies that need these kinds of guarantees.

The benefits of big IT companies buying and developing open source softwares is that the development becomes more stable and organized since a company has to deliver a product to survive. These big IT companies also guarantees that the product is working together with different hardware and software that a non-profit open source project got a hard time to provide to the customer. The fact that big IT companies is buying open source projects makes them competitive on the market for software which will contribute to more companies taking the step to open source solutions.

Open source is also a great marketing strategy, to give your customer access to the product before it’s all done gives the customers the possibility to have all the internal testing done when the finished enterprise version of the product hits the market and the implementation can be done instantly. For all technicians that work with these products open source gives them the opportunity to run exactly the same software at home without expensive licensing models and the fact that they’re able to influence the development of the product they use.

The companies has finally accepted the challenge of open source! 2008 will certainly be an interesting year in open source history.