Work in progress

Lecture notes....
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Early thoughts on Sustainability. John Norman is asking some early questions

What needs to be sustainable?
How long does it need to be sustained?

and providing some answers

Open source projects require motivation and incentives for developers. Customer feedback loops and a sustained demand are important.

Grant funding may not be that useful because it removes the incentive to make a product / project sustainable. The result is projects that make it to the end of their grant funding and fall apart because they're not sustainable. Suggests that handing out grants to projects once they're being used and proving successful might be more useful.

James Dalziel (Macquarie University, Sydney) on why sustainability matters for open source software
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* Sustainability applies to closed source software as well as open source. Open source tends to discuss it more because of it's alternative financial model.
* TCOO is made up of many parts and acquisition costs are rarely a major part of that. The major cost is usually adapting the organisation to the software.
* We don't know what unsures the sustainability of software? - We don't know. Companies fail, communities fall apart. There are no guarantees. However levels of risk and type of risk varies between open source and closed source.

Closed source can be unattractive because your vendor holds the whip hand. They might withdraw support for the project, change direction or abandon R&D for the software. They might go bankrupt.

Open source offers several models for making a project sustainable, but there are multi-model projects possible.

* Direct government support and large levels of adoption. This is like making a strategic commitment, by betting so heavily on a project you create an environment in which the stakeholders cannot allow a project to fail. (See Shibboleth in the UK)
* Charitable giving and donations (see Sakai)
* Revenue splits with partner organisations and income from specific feature development (see Moodle)
* Dual licensing - release under the GPL but charge for those who don't want to be under the GPL (see MySQL) who are not attracting VC funding
* Firefox have a deal with Google for revenue splits based on the pages served using google as the default search page...

Case study on LAMS

* Being open source and free from the start (speech, beer) encouraged people to adopt early
* Being open source encourages other projects to get involved
* Makes contributing to standards bodies easier

Made sustainable through an Open Source Foundation that is able to act as a route into charitable donations etc. while a related commercial company offers consulting etc. to those willing to pay for it. Profits go back into the software. Have gone with the GPL so that there is the possibility of doing dual licensing in the future which would allow them to charge for the software.

>> Open Source can be a profitable business, but you have to be good at running a business, but the profits may not be of interest to most VCs. Also, if you are successful you can expect competition to arrive.

Rebecca Grifiths (Ithaka) on the OOSS project
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Considering whether there is a need for an organisation to support Open Source Software for Higher Eduction in the USA.

Ithaka were established to accelerate the productive uses of IT for the benefit of higher eduction institutions around the world. Act as an incubator for Open Source projects in the classic sense (facilities, admin support, community etc). The OOSS project is about establishing whether there is a need for a co-ordinating body at the national level within the USA - backed by a number of big universities.

* Define OS as free (beer and speech) and community development
* Higher education in the US spend a lot on IT and aren't happy with the results (is any *sector* happy with the return on their spending on IT? (ML)). Usual problems of flexibility, control and cost.

One of the interesting risks to Open Source as a strategy is that there aren't OS projects for many requirements. Things like payroll software etc. These just aren't things people want to do in their spare time - you're not going to see 'spontaneous generation' of projects in these areas. So an institution might do this kind of thing deliberately.

Another is buy vs build - build is much more risky so people decide not to. An institution could bear some of that risk.

Successful projects at one institution sometimes just fail to get migrated to other institutions. An institution might be able to find and publicise these.

There is a significant risk in OSS projects not reaching sustainability. You don't want to be the organisation left holding the baby... If you see the solution to this as the emergence of community driven software then there are some things that you need. You need a large enough community of volunteers with appropriate incentives and motivation, you need a vision about what the software should do and how it should do it, you need the major customers to make long term commitments to guarantee the ongoing use of the software.

License terms are problematic for HE insitutions, apparently much more so than for commercial operations adopting open source software. Perhaps an insititution could drive the creation of a standard set of licenses.

Requirement to stand up to FUD from commercial organisations. In mega litigious US of A there is plenty of room for commercial organisations to threaten legal action against anyone accidently finding someone elses code in their OS deployment.