Open Source Initiative

As families go, the Linux operating system family has become the family among the Top500 supercomputers, running on 89.20% of all systems. Proprietary Unix, which used to the the preferred OS for these supercomputers in the 1990s is down to 5% share, and Windows is reported to be running on exactly 5 systems, for a 1% share.

Here are some stunning facts that were published at the end of July in Malaysia:

More than 70 percent of Malaysian government offices are running open source software, according to figures released by the country's Open Source Competency Centre.

The centre was established as part of the 2004 Malaysian Public Sector OSS Master Plan, to guide and co-ordinate the implementation of OSS in the public sector.

The Open Source movement is consistent with a larger democratic proposition that the more that we can all be involved in affairs that concern them, the better off we'll all be. But sometimes the involvement of some people, whose concern is the maintenance of monopoly and control, doesn't serve the great good. Glynn Moody uncovers the sinister results that are threatening to emerge from a committee in Europe in a blog posting titled EU Wants to Re-define "Closed" as "Nearly Open".

I think the EU got it right the first time in 2004, when they said this about open systems:

When I was invited to speak at the STS Forum in Kyoto in 2006, I thought it would be a good idea to write an extremely concise white paper-3 pages total-comparing and contrasting open source software and proprietary software. Since then I have been invited to speak about, defend, and expand upon that paper. Now it's time to give it an update.

By now you may have read that www.whitehouse.gov is now running Drupal, the open source content management system. So, too, does the OSI itself. So first I'd like to say "welcome to the club!"

But the open source wins don't stop there.

The Blender Foundation just posted news of two e-books issued by the government of Thailand, one covering the 3d content creation suite Blender and one covering the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP. I have a special affection for both of these programs, for several reasons.

I read Sun Tzu's The Art of War more than 10 years ago, and there is one bit of advice that I still use daily in my business dealings. It can be paraphrased as "when attacking an entrenched competitor, you need four times the force. Ten times the force is better." Thus, when Red Hat was building its enterprise business, I made sure that our sales people were focused on customers who could immediately measure 2x the performance at 1/2 the cost (yielding a 4x performance/cost advantage), although 10x performance/cost was more advantageous. It seems that Sun Tzu's math has been understood by the London Stock Exchange, who are seeing a more than 6x improvement in the all-important measure of latency, whilst gaining an impressive 2x cost advantage. No wonder they are switching from a proprietary platform to one based on open source software!

This week I'm speaking at Open World Forum in Paris on the subject of open source and the digital recovery (la relance numérique), and for a change I'm going to try writing down all my references before my talk rather than after it.

According to a new article in the Business Standard, Open Source software can save India $2 BN per year. Based on my experiences and discussions with Indian IT executives, that number is both accurate and low.

Of the people, for the people, by the people. These three ideals were framed in the Constitution adopted in 1789, but according to 21st-century Pamphleteer Carl Malamud, the actual history of America shows that they were adopted in three distinct phases spanning three centuries in time. Malamud explains all at the O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit in the 2nd day keynote, and in work he shares with CC0, "no rights reserved"...