2008: The year of open source

BANGALORE, INIDA: The three major trends for 2008 are Open Standards, Open Source and Open Access to Content. We are entering an era of seamless interoperability and this is what is driving change in these three areas. Old proprietary models of creating knowledge, vendor lock-in to software platforms, and file formats that are tightly attached to a specific application are all huge hurdles in this world of seamless interoperability. The balance of power is therefore shifting from proprietary models to open source models.

Open Standards:

Customers are realizing that saving data in proprietary file formats means voluntarily surrendering their rights to encode and decode their data. Many governments now realize that as custodian of citizen's data, they have a special responsibility to ensure that this data can be accessed for posterity and the only way to do this is by mandating usage of open standards. Take the case of land records, which need to be preserved for 400 years or more. If land records are stored in a proprietary format, there is no guarantee that it can be retrieved a few hundred years later because the only one who can unlock the file is the organization that created the format. The only way to assure that data can be stored and retrieved freely is to use published standards that have been built through collaboration and consensus and have multiple third party implementations.

The Internet is one of the finest examples of true open standards because anybody can create web browsers and e-mail clients by following the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This is no coincidence because the founding fathers of today's Internet visualized it as a vast, global platform where people can collaborate, share and mingle with each other. Open standards are important to mankind as it ensures that the wealth of knowledge we are creating today can be preserved for future generations.

Open Source:

 In Silicon Valley, open source software has become the technology platform for Internet startups. The LAMP architecture (Linux operating system, Apache web server, PHP and Perl scripting languages) mean that entrepreneurs can quickly assemble the technology components and build the platforms for their startups. It is estimated that around $1.3 billion was invested in open source startups until December 2006. In 2007, and early 2008, many of these startups sold at significant valuations. JBoss was sold to Red Hat for $420 million, Zimbra was sold to Yahoo for $450 million, XenSource was sold to Citrix for Scalix for $500 million and MySQL was sold to Sun for $1 billion. By 2011, Gartner predicts that at least 80 percent of all commercial software solutions will be based on open source software.

This shows that the open source business model of charging for value-added services rather than proprietary software licenses is gaining ground. In fact, for many venture capitalists, open source has become the baseline for investing in software product companies. Open Source is a significant opportunity for Indian startups because we have great depth in services but have not succeeded with software products. The success of Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL and other open source software companies demonstrates that there is value to be created by giving source code away and charging for value-added services like support, customization, training etc.

At the enterprise level, studies show that the operating systems race has narrowed down to Linux and Windows. These are the only two operating systems that are gaining market share while the share of Unix is declining. IDC figures show that Linux has 22.8 percent market share in Linux servers and is steadily gaining.

The rapidly growing community around Linux and open source software is accelerating the pace of innovation in open source. Leading commercial distributions of Linux today ship with high end features like virtualization, clustering, security etc. built in as a standard offering. The collective innovation that is possible through the efforts of millions of people collaborating on the Linux source code is a powerful (and constantly growing) advantage for open source software. In the next few years, we may see the pace of innovation in open source outstrip anything that proprietary vendors and their huge armies of programmers can produce.

In terms of usage, 2008 will see several large enterprises in India, make open source the cornerstone of their IT strategies. In the area of e-governance, we have executed more than 70 e-gov projects across India. At least eight state governments run their treasury operations on Red Hat. We are involved in mission mode projects like National ID, ePost, Income Tax, Land Records, Municipalities, Commercial Tax and many others. In the last six years that we have been in India, we have overcome doubts over the business model of open source, doubts over the scalability and robustness of open source and reached a point where enterprises like LIC, Axis Bank, Canara Bank, Airtel and others trust their mission critical applications with us.

On the desktop side, Linux and OpenOffice have matured to a point where companies are now taking a very close look at replacing their expensive stack of proprietary OS and office suites. The Red Hat Desktop supports open standards like Open Document Format (ODF) which ensure that users data remains accessible forever. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop is available in 11 Indian languages which are Bengali, Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu and we are working on adding more Indian languages. This will help the government by enabling it to speak to citizens in their own languages.

For the adoption of any technology, the availability of skill-sets is absolutely essential. To create the skill-sets around Linux and open source, we have partnered with training institutes across the country. Today, there are around 400 centers across India that provide training on Red Hat. We have more than 10,000 Red Hat Certified Engineers(RHCE's) across India and are talking to the government to make open source a part of the curriculum in schools and colleges.

Open Access:

Science and knowledge have always thrived in a culture of collaboration. Some of the urgent challenges we face like climate change, and combating the spread of the AIDS virus, require global, interdisciplinary collaborations that compel us to rethink notions of “intellectual property” and secrecy in science. Even lawyers now agree that the trend of patenting ideas and extracting monopolistic rent on these patented ideas has gone too far. Science cannot survive in an atmosphere of secrecy.  Some recent examples point to an alternate way. The Human Genome project which sequenced the human gene and placed the resulting knowledge in the public domain is a good example. Scientists involved in the project point out that it was the strong emphasis placed on the sharing of all genomics data that enabled scientists to harness the power of genomics. The data generated by this project was made freely available to scientists around the world, with no restrictions on its use or redistribution.

An article in Indian Express reports that, “It is subsequent to this that companies have started using this decoding of genes to tailor-make this information into patentable products. Yes, the final medication or formulation will be patented but not the basic science. In fact, this led to costs coming down drastically for what was once called an expensive science. Despite this, genetics continues to remain an attractive option for private pharma companies.”

Recently, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) unveiled a Rs 150 crore Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project that will invite collaboration from across the world and place the resulting knowledge in the public domain. Initially, OSDD will concentrate on finding drugs for tuberculosis, which has an estimated marked size of $300 million and is therefore deemed unattractive for R&D investment.

At a different level, we have seen the success of Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia that is now bigger than the Encyclopedia Brittanica with two million entries in English and more than 250 different languages.

Open standards frees data from proprietary lock-in. Open Source Software gives users the freedom to modify and shape the source code to meet their needs. Open Access unfolds new horizons of knowledge. Together, these three trends herald the arrival of an Age of Collaboration driven by seamless interoperability and open source is right in the middle of this trend.