Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Black Duck just released new data on the impressive growth of open source projects for mobile platforms. The data provides quantification for the highly reported battle between Apple and Google (see this past Sunday’s New York Times).  Our analysis shows that new open source projects for Android were 3X those of the iPhone in 2009. While to some extent this is a brawl between two Silicon Valley heavyweights, at a more macro level it’s a showdown between the OSS community and proprietary development (with Apple as the poster child).

Apple with the iPhone created a new paradigm for the mobile experience. It combined top notch UI design, touch screen technology, with the app store that leveraged their iPod experience, and combined it all with mobile 3G network capability and GPS. The result was a hit and a meteoric rise in adoption and market share. The iPhone has about 25% share of the 43 million smartphone subscribers in the US, even though it is still offered by only one operator, AT&T. Imagine what iPhone share would be if it were offered by Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint? (BTW, AT&T recently reported record 2009 results in their wireless business, much of which I’d attribute to the iPhone).

The Android platform is a breakthrough in mobile software platforms, built entirely on open source. It has received a tremendous amount of attention and attracted thousands of developers. It’s important to note that Apple’s iPhone benefitted significantly from OSS integrated with proprietary code (like many software platforms today, we’d characterize it as a “multi-source” platform). Apple ported much of its core FreeBSD-based operating system to the iPhone, uses the Safari browser which is built on OSS, plus incorporated many other OSS elements and libraries (e.g., zlib, libgcc, ncurses, etc.).

In this showdown, the question is: does the introduction of an open-source mobile platform change the mobile app landscape, and are OSS apps a leading indicator of market change? Time will tell but the near term results are promising for Android. It’s gaining market share and winning support from the OSS community (as well as commercial developers). While Android admittedly is still young, the combination of an open platform, attractive UI, and great hardware with support from multiple handset manufacturers and from multiple operators seems to bode well for its future. What do you think?

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
How does a Norwich VT farmer named Raymond and Free Code relate? Phil Odence, Vice President of Business Development here at Black Duck, connects the two concepts in his latest blog post on Network World, entitled “Free code comes with burdens, just like Raymond’s dirt.” 

Phil tells the tale about a farmer named Raymond and the issues he runs into when given a “truckload of free topsoil.” Those issues are similar to the same problems and burdens that come with free code. “Some of them may be quickly obvious, like big rocks, and others might take a little more time to find, like smaller rocks. The most insidious are the latent ones, lurking like germinating weeds…” To read the full posting click here.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Bob Sutor’s discourse on the three types of software is interesting both for its lucid, calm explanation of the three types, and also for its guidance on the advantages of leveraging open source to build what he calls ‘hybrid’ software. That’s a term we’ve used a bit, although we use ‘multi-source’ more. The terms mean the same thing, and point to the validity of Bob’s observation that “while there is a growing amount of pure open source software (#1), there is a significantly growing amount of hybrid software (#3).”  Why? Because it makes sense to re-use software components that meet your development needs. Who wants to rewrite compilers? Why write utilities, libraries or parsers? There are hundreds of thousands of available open source building blocks, so many in fact that the act of choosing among the abundance becomes a challenge.

Bob also wisely avoids the difficult discussion of licensing issues with open source. Most developers aren’t lawyers, as he points out. Fortunately you don’t have to be – there are plenty of tools out there to uncover and easily manage the legal obligations (including Black Duck’s).  And with the abundance of open source projects to choose from, there’s a wealth of options with more permissive licenses like Apache, BSD, MIT, and others that simplify the issues around their use and integration.

When we think about open source software, we think about two things: pragmatism and abundance. It’s pragmatic to use multi-source development. It shortens time to solution, increases flexibility, saves money and lets developers do more interesting work. Abundance, a topic which Matt Asay has written about, is the secret weapon of open source: there’s lots of open source code available that meets commercial development needs.

Companies are using more of OSS all the time.  And companies are joining the OSS trend because the benefits and the resulting competitive advantages can be seen in the growing number of success stories. They aren’t so worried about the three types of software – they’re committed to getting results. Here’s to innovation through multisource (hybrid) development using open source. It’s something we can all support.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Yesterday I delivered a training on open source and compliance management with the Intellectual Property Owner’s Association and Pamela Sherrid who hosts their “IP Chat Channel.” I was joined by two other panelists Aaron Williamson, legal counsel at the SFLC, and Jeffrey Osterman, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

The training attendees were lawyers interested in open source and compliance. We covered the major IP issues with open source, covered the GPL at length, but also how development organizations can easily automate and ‘design in’ compliance to existing development processes. It was interesting that most of the questions from the audience were on what I’d characterize as ‘advanced’ licensing and GPL issues, e.g., what constitutes a derivative work.  However, Aaron made the point a number of times that the law suits involving the GPL are mostly about not adhering to the most basic requirement of the GPL to make source code available to users.

A few other takeaways from the training, based on a survey of the attendees, include 20% of the attendees have no open source compliance practices and 37% require vendors to provide assurances/indemnification of their code. This last point reinforces a trend we’ve seen on the part of suppliers being more pro-active to analyze their code and clean up any issues rather than relying on manual methods of verification (or doing nothing).  Pamela started the training off describing the recent Microsoft Windows 7 GPL issue where code from an outsourced developer had GPL in it that was discovered after the product shipped.  It certainly highlights the need for automated methods of checking and verification.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Mobile is the sandbox for usability. Apple has demonstrated this with the iPhone largely because it adds not only a layer of abstraction over the OS, but also because it is friendly, easy-to-use, with useful applications. In the mobile world, no one has to look at the OS – it’s the application, and its utility, that matters.

Matt Asay has taken this observation a step beyond, hazarding that ‘The application is the new operating system’ – and updating Scott McNealy’s famous quip ‘The network is the computer’ comment for the mobile age.

While we know many people who care deeply about operating systems – especially open source operating systems – we have come to agree with the perspective that operating systems are necessary but not sufficient. Today’s users have no interest in the command line – they want instant utility, 24/7 access and an application for everything. In mobile, they get all this and more.

We see evidence of this shift in computing usability in the data on mobile projects in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase (KB). There is an abundance of development in open-source for mobile – more than 6,500 releases last year involving 2,300 projects in the KB supported mobile platforms – and a quick analysis reveals that the amount of code released in projects targeting mobile platforms has grown at a rate of over 55 percent annually (compound annual growth rate (CAGR)) over the years 2005-2008.

Perhaps, as Matt suggests, this is because developers have turned their focus to the user. But while many pay lip service to the hypothetical user, mobile companies and developers are setting the pace in understanding how to meet – even create – user needs. After all, a lot is at stake. It’s not too much of a stretch to think the future of end-user computing is being defined by the mobile ecosystem.

Welcome to the new world of application development, where open source developers are poised for success, and where every idea has an audience. It’s a world of abundance, one in which the real challenge won’t be coming up with ideas, but rather managing the implementation of those ideas using open source.