Stakeholders in the Open Source Software Industry: Transformation of the Enterprise at Port 80: Boardwalk

Introducing Our Complete Linux Distribution Guide. If you ever needed confirmation regarding the ongoing vitality of the Linux world, look no farther than this exhaustive listing of major and minor Linux distributions. We're calling our coverage DistributionWatch, and this listing is only the beginning. Over the next month we'll be introducing exhaustive reviews of the major distributions, as well as setting up easy-to-read charts detailing the specifics of each distribution.

Popular Linux distributions

SuSE Linux
Most recent release: April 22, 2002
LinuxWorld stories about SuSE Linux

Established software companies

Larry Ellison outlines Oracle's Unbreakable Software Infrastructure for Linux, and demonstrates Oracle's database, Application Server and Java/Web services development technology optimized for Linux.

Hewlett-Packard believes in providing its customers with choice. We realize that customers operate in heterogeneous environments and we provide solutions across platforms of choice. Linux is the right choice in particular application environments - especially web and infrastructure services, as well as e-commerce application development and digital content creation. Linux will also be an operating system of choice for the emerging server appliances market.

Hewlett-Packard is moving forward with the most comprehensive Linux and open source strategy in the industry, covering systems, software, services and peripherals business units. Hewlett-Packard has formed the Linux Systems Operation (LSO) to lead Hewlett-Packard's company-wide Linux strategy.

the community

The free software (or open source) "community" is much talked about, though little hard data on this community and its activities is available. Here, for the first time, Orbiten Research provides a body of empirical data and analysis to explain and describe this community.

Simple facts, such as the number of developers contributing to free software projects, the number of such projects, and their size, have been until now unknown. The Orbiten Free Software Survey answers some of these questions, and aims to provide a foundation for empirical research on the free software community.

OSDN brings many of the Open Source community's favorite gathering places together and makes it easier to move between them. SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, Themes.org, Slashdot, and our other Web sites will stay as independent as ever, but now you'll be able to access all of them -- and other useful Open Source sites -- from a central entry point.

Open source isn't just a bunch of kids and geeky idealists. It's also 40,032 hosted projects and 425,727 registered users many of whom are high-paid geeks from large companies sharing what would have been corporate secrets in the old world:

The world's largest Open Source development website, with the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet. SourceForge.net provides free services to Open Source developers, including project hosting, version control, bug and issue tracking, project management, backups and archives, and communication and collaboration resources.

Source Forge even has an Enterprise Edition for corporations. Note the different look and feel for essentially the same information.

Extra | The most popular open source server-side scripting language is Larry Wall's Perl. The Ground Zero Bistro runs on Perl scripts. See the .pl in the URL's?

OpenSource Directory - verify software packages as open-source distributions and find those that are stable.

professional organizations

a non-profit association of groups, corporations and others that work towards the promotion of growth of the Linux operating system and the Linux community.

conferences

newsgroups

At Google's Advanced Groups Search, you can also get an individual's posting history. It's interesting to see what collection of newsgroups an individual has expressed himself or herself on over the years. Check out your friends! Your boss! Your employees!

mailing lists

Request an "info" file to the server address, majordomo@csl.sri.com. Put this single line in the mail message:

info open-source

Apache Week

Request an "info" file from the server address, majordomo@www.ukweb.com. Put this single line in the mail message:

info apacheweek-html

applications

an open source e-commerce solution under on going development by the open source community. Its feature packed out-of-the-box installation allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs involved.

OpenOffice
StarOffice
KOffice
AbiWord
Applix
WordPerfect (for Linux)
vi/emacs/LaTex (traditional Linux text editors)

What is free, easy to learn and manage, and compatible with other file formats and every major platform? (Hint: It also represents one less tie to Microsoft.) The answer is OpenOffice.org, according to the creators, managers and evangelists of this open source office productivity suite.

OpenOffice.org is a two-year-old project, the result of more than a dozen volunteers' efforts to create a software suite that contains a word processor , spreadsheet, presentation program, graphics app and database.

In addition to Sun's Star Office, many other software applications work with Linux, such as Gnome. To find more:

The first stop for Linux users hunting for the software they need for work or play. It is continuously updated with the latest developments from the "release early, release often" community. In addition to providing news on new releases, freshmeat offers a variety of original content on technical, political, and social aspects of software and programming, written by both freshmeat readers and Free Software luminaries.

Licenses

Copyleft is a general method for making a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as well.

Developer support

The high performance web development site from the O'Reilly Network offering comprehensive Lamp developer information and resources. O'Reilly Network's ONLamp site features original articles, news and commentary.

What's LAMP mean? How a database is used with an operating system to tell a web server what to send to the user. In this case, the operating system is Linux, the web server is Apache, and the database is MySQL. You tell the web server what to do with the stuff in the database in one of these scripting "languages": Perl, Python, or PHP.

to track the various technical contributions IBM as a whole is making to Linux and related development communities and to work directly with the Linux development community with a shared vision of making Linux succeed.

an interactive environment for coordination and support of peer-directed projects, including those of free and open source software.

To serve as a community resource for free software developers around the world, as well as a research testbed for work on group trust metrics.

This document briefly describes the technical details of Advogato's trust metric.

The basic trust metric evaluates a set of peer certificates, resulting in a set of accounts accepted. These certificates are represented as a graph, with each account as a node, and each certificate as a directed edge. The goal of the trust metric is to accept as many valid accounts as possible, while also reducing the impact of attackers.

Advogato performs certification to three different levels: Apprentice, Journeyer, and Master.

other "open" initiatives

Open Archives

In Oldenburg�s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing
by Jean-Claude Gu�don
May 2001

In the last 50 years, publishers have managed to transform scholarly journals�traditionally, a secondary, unpromising publishing venture at best�into big business. ...

[Will] the results of fundamental research in science, technology, and medicine ... remain part of humanity�s knowledge commons, or will they be gradually confiscated for the benefit of smaller and smaller scientific and business elites?

Open eBook

The Open eBook Initiative specifies eBook file format and structure. It ensures that content can be viewed on any reading system which is OEB-compliant. The specification is based on open and public domain specifications, for example HTML and XML that are the core languages used on the Internet and the World Wide Web.

There is no cost, expense or fee associated with obtaining a copy of the specification or using it. If you write documents that conform to the specification you can be assured that these documents can be rendered on all OEB-compliant devices.

Ricci Street's Apache server runs on the Linux operating system, both open source. Most of you using Netscape browsed this page with Netscape's Navigator 4. Its successor, now called Gecko and marketed as Netscape 6, was written from scratch by volunteers and is a big improvement. In December, ZDNet announced:

When it arrives, it [Gecko] will be the first major consumer software product to have been built on open-source development principles, which favor unveiling the innards of a program for developers worldwide to extend, debug, and modify.

MIT

a superarchive of MIT faculty esearch in digital form -- including preprints, technical reports, working papers, conference papers, images, and more -- as well as software tools for creating and maintaining the repository. The tools will be offered to other colleges that want to use them.

other

Open Directory Project - human-edited directory of the Web - over 3.8 million sites - 51,935 volunteer editors - over 460,000 categories

EPrints.org, University of Southampton, U.K.

Dedicated to opening access to the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving.

Free software to help individual scholars, departments, or universities create archives of research papers online.

PLoS is committed to open access to the scientific literature, by which we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Online collections by institutions may challenge the role of journal publishers.

Professors' office computers hold a wealth of original content: research articles, data sets, field notes, images, and the like. Some of the material will be published in journals months or years after it is created, but even then it will probably be available only to the journals' subscribers. The rest will never see the light of day.

Several colleges are now looking to share more of that work by building "institutional repositories" online and inviting their professors to upload copies of their research papers, data sets, and other work. The idea is to gather as much of the intellectual output of an institution as possible in an easy-to-search online collection.

An independent, non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the use and acceptance of open source technologies through the development, application and promotion of standards.

The Free Standards Group fulfills a critical need in the open source development community to have common behavioral specifications, tools and APIs, making development across Linux distributions easier.

The Open Source movement has established over the last decade a new collaborative approach, uniquely adapted to the Internet, to developing high-quality informational products. Initially, its exclusive application was the development of software (GNU/Linux and Apache are among the most prominent projects), but increasingly we can observe this collaborative approach being applied to areas beyond the coding of software. One such area is the collaborative gathering and analysis of information, a practice we term "Open Source Intelligence". In this article, we use three case studies - the nettime mailing list, the Wikipedia project and the NoLogo Web site - to show some the breadth of contexts and analyze the variety of socio-technical approaches that make up this emerging phenomenon.

A not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. OASIS produces worldwide standards for security, Web services, XML conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing, topic maps and interoperability within and between marketplaces.

Stakeholder Relationships

customer / consumer

Hospitals, courts, and universities. All three of these institutions are highly successful because they are so customer-focused.

Who are the customers at the hospital? The doctors. Who are the customers at the courthouse? The lawyers (including the judges). Who are the customers at the university? The faculty.

Don't confuse the customer, the person the institution centers around and must please, with the product, the thing that must be improved and have value added to it by the institution. As with any production process, the failures validate the successes. The patient can recover or die, the criminal can go free or go to jail, and the student can graduate or flunk out. A university is still an institution and students are institutionalized, as are patients and convicts.

You go to a hospital when you're sick. You go to a court when you did wrong. You go to a school when you ____ ? How would you finish that sentence? At the Bistro, you can talk about it.

In private-enterprise retail business models, the customer pays. In public-enterprise, government-subsidized business models, the customer doesn't necessarily pay. Nor does the revenue come from the customer, though the value added by the doctor, lawyer, and teacher is important "income" in the nebulous sense of expertise or intellectual capital.

In higher education, don't think that the student is the customer just because the student pays tuition.

Higher Ed, Inc. : The Rise of the For-Profit University
by Richard S. Ruch
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001

Lack of clarity about who is the customer continues to be a fundamental challenge for many colleges and universities. ... In contrast, the for-profits do not struggle with the question of who the customer is. The customer is the student, and everyone -- from the faculty to the librarians to the financial aid office to the students themselves -- is clear about it.


people and communities on the Web


Customhouse concepts and buzzwords	Charthouse trends and currents	Boardwalk people and communities
Lighthouse information and research	Shoreline issues and policies	Docks systems and processes


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modified: April 5, 2003 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/boardwalk/open/stakeholders.htm

Stakeholders

Open Source: Where Software Makers Meet

the industry