Just stumbled upon a fundamental talk of Michael Tiemann about quality and business model of open source software. This is a must read to anybody remotely interested in quality.
Open Source: The Only Viable Business Model
Known as a thought leader and open source pioneer, Michael Tiemann
today works as Vice President, Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. He also
currently serves as President of the Open Source Initiative and the
GNOME Foundation. In 1989, he co-founded the first profitable open
source company, Cygnus Solutions. In a recent speech, he gave detailed,
annotated support for the superiority of the open source development
model, and ended up highlighting all five development-oriented benefits
of open source on OSA's top ten list.
OSA Alert: I've
heard a lot of great things about “Exonovation – Leveraging Innovation
from the Edge,” which you gave as a keynote at the ETE2009 conference.
Can you give me a rundown?
Michael Tiemann:
Sure. The term “exonovation” corrects a misfeature of the English
language. The term “innovation” makes one think of things that happen
within the walls … inside the organization. Indeed, a lot of
organizations think of innovation as a core capability. However, in a
book that was published in 2005 by John Hagel and John Seely Brown
called “The Only Sustainable Edge,”
they argued – I think very effectively – that the real excitement in
the new world economy comes from the relationships that company build
at the edges. The real B2B relationships. The term “exonovation” makes
it clear that the interesting new comes from outside, not inside an
organization.
Let
me address the reason why we must be so mindful about how we treat the
new in the decaying context of the old. As we look at what companies
are challenged with to succeed in the new economy, people talk about
the importance of innovation, and how important it is to use technology
to cut costs and reach new markets and improve customer service et
cetera. Yet when we look at the macro perspective – and I mean the
super macro perspective – multiple industry analysts have estimated the
global spend for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at 3.4
trillion US dollars per year. A lot of money.
Yes, indeed.
The
shocking part of that number is that it can be argued that one trillion
US dollars a year are being wasted either on applications that are
abandoned before they ever go into production, or spent on applications
that are missing key features or are late to the point of interrupting
operational capability or both. Back in 2006 when I started putting
these numbers together, one of the challenges I faced was that a lot of
people were not all that concerned about the one-third of every dollar
that was being wasted on bad technology spend because they were so
happy with how fast the two-thirds was growing. That dynamic is completely gone in 2009.
The idea of spending a dollar on ICT and getting back – at best – 66
cents in value is unconscionable, especially today when you consider
how important nowadays every trillion dollars is to the global economy.
Isn't that fairly common? Aren't most industries wasteful?
If
true, that's a terrible state of affairs, and one that could be subject
to remedy. In fact, the rest of my presentation talks about
specifically how the open source model dramatically remedies this gap.
We look at the cost of the proprietary software model in terms of
duplication of effort, in terms of average software quality, in terms
of the tactics some of the top software vendors use to destroy their
competition, even harming themselves in order to do damage to other
people. This is not consonant with the idea of building value.
To
give you an example, in 2004, 2005 and 2006 a company called Coverity,
which does software defect detection, analyzed the average number of
defects per thousand lines of code in proprietary software and compared
it to open source software. The average, which has remained consistent,
is that proprietary software contains 20-30 defects per thousand lines
of code. When they first measured the Linux kernel back in 2004, the
kernel consisted of 5.3 million lines of source code. (For comparison,
Windows XP is reported to weigh in at around 35 million lines of code.)
If Linux were industry average, one would expect between 100,000 and
150,000 bugs or defects across 5.3 million lines of code, and yet the
Coverity scanners were only able to find 985. The Linux community got
the report and published a message saying, “Hey, there's only 985 bugs
to look at, let's clean this up!” Within six months, every single
defect that the community felt was legitimate was corrected. By
contrast, if Microsoft wrote industry average code, their 35 MLOC code
base would contain more than 7 million defects! You can see the problem. [Read the whole thing]
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