Paul Ramsey lit up the FOSS4G conference in Sydney this morning (21 October) with a rousing talk on the near-term future of free and open source software, especially geo-information software. His argument: there is less difference between free and proprietary software than you think.
The Free and Open Source for Geospatial conference is the annual meeting of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. OSGeo is an association of developers of free and open source geospatial software.
So what is FOSS? Ramsey's answer: 'Its the future'. His argument is that familiar proprietary software is not software - it's a product. By this he means that when someone buys a proprietary product, they buy the software, but they also buy a raft of services - user manuals, training courses, help desks, developers, perhaps even the aura of the company founder.
His deeper point is that it's not clear exactly what the customer is paying for. How much of the price is for the provision of manuals, for integration by developers, for user conference, and how much for the software.
Increasingly it is the case that revenue from software is declining as a proportion of the total take for the IT industry. In the geospatial industry in particular, integration costs, staff training and other add-ons consume far larger proportions of the total budget than the cost of developing the software.
Considered in this light, free software is not such a radical step. In fact, the business model for open source software development is really quite conservative. If you give away the software, customers have more money to spend on training, and integration and so on.
But, Ramsey continued, if one looks at this from the point of view, not of the customer, or of the vendor, but of the program itself, what determines the health of a program? It is, he suggests, the number of developers feeding it.
A program without developers dies, no matter how much users like it. A program that is attractive to developers grows and wins new costumers and gets bigger and stronger.
This is the real strength of open source. The number of developers in proprietary software is obviously constrained. In free software, it's limitless.
This will matter more and more in new computing environments. Cloud computing, and the whole world of software as a service lend themselves easily to FOSS. For vendors of proprietary software, the future is more problematic.
