Issue Summary
The move towards Free and Open source software (hereafter open source) is the most important industry trend in the last 25 year, and is on the political agenda in many parts of the world at the regional, national and supra-national levels. There are several reasons for this, including the effect of open source in lowering the costs of producing software, in lowering the cost of consuming software and in reducing the dependency of the user of software on any one particular IT vendor.
"Open source" is the practice of making freely available the source code to a software program (i.e. the software that a developer writes, rather than that which a machine executes) under a license that allows anyone to use, modify and reproduce that software. Open source communities are groups defined by a shared interest in a source code commons. They typically work in a collaborative fashion and may comprise both private individuals and employees of technology companies.
Worldwide, there are an estimated one million software developers (and rising) who contribute to open source projects, and there are open source products available in almost every software market. Open source is a key accelerator for the IT business, and the sharing of software source code can lead to the creation of new markets and new opportunities as existing software is further developed and/or used for different purposes. Unsurprisingly, there is great interest in open source in the fast-developing economies of China, Brazil, India and Russia.
Once software is open source, potentially any organisation or individual may develop and redistribute the software. This fact alone immediately allows regions whose IT sectors are lagging to develop more quickly by using existing, freely available and, frequently, best-of-breed code to build competitive software products.
Once developed, open source software may be freely reused by other organisations, and governments may even develop their own software based on existing projects. As code is entirely visible, governments are also able to assess for themselves the security of their software infrastructure.
Sun's position
- Open source software is typically free at the point of acquisition, lowering the barrier to adoption and making the evaluation and deployment of multiple solutions easier and less costly for the user.
- Governments investing in an open source solution may better serve their own interests. Rather than a proprietary model which might involve the payment of substantial royalties to overseas suppliers, governments are able to source what services they require from where they choose, assess the security of their software infrastructure for themselves, and reuse investments they make throughout their organisation.
- Sun considers that the coming software market will be based upon value, rather than access. Instead of charging customers for the right to use a particular technology, software revenues will be based upon value-added services. This will lead to a more stable and sustainable IT market, and one where IT suppliers make money based upon competitively delivering added value to their customers, rather than by exploiting entrenched market positions.
- A mounting problem is that of license proliferation, which can cause legal incompatibilities and may confuse developers (confusion about the legal status of code can be a serious inhibitor to open source adoption). For this reason, the creation of new licenses should be avoided when possible, and the most popular and best known licenses, such as the GPL (General Public Licence), CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) or the new BSDL (Berkeley Software Distribution License) should be used.
Recommendations
- Sun recommends that no change be made to current copyright, trademark or intellectual property laws that would affect the ability of companies to offer products built on open source technology, or to distribute their software under an open source license.
- In addition, governments should not proliferate open source licenses, but try, wherever possible, to work within the existing licensing landscape.
- Sun encourages governments to review procurement policies at regional, national, state and local levels to ensure that, as users, they are able to realise the full benefit of open source software. This means ensuring that requirements for specific technologies or requirements on the license under which software is procured do not conflict with the ability to use open source software without good reason. This is especially important within the education sector.
- We recommend that economic development initiatives consider the use of open source software as a way to invigorate both a region's IT sector (i.e. software development) and its IT market (i.e. the commercial use of software). Regions which aspire to developing a true "information society" should consider the liberating potential of open source as an accelerant for such change within policy initiatives.
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