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Thomas getting a nice move in

Of course, Anne, Paul and myself were cheering on from the sidelines with all the other parents. It didn’t feel like we were being the over-bearing parents who want their child to win at any price, but I was really happy & proud when Thomas did a really nice wasari on a young girl in his weight class.

As companies start to integrate free software components into their products, they discover the value of these freedoms one by one.

Use

The first thing that people see about free software is FREE! As in zero cost. The days when companies reject a product out of hand because they don’t have to pay for it are gone – Linux, OpenOffice.org, Apache, Red Hat and a plethora of other “free” products have proven themselves in the marketplace, and companies are now prepared to allow free software components into their solutions, after appropriate consideration of the licences involved.

To quote one attendee at MAPOS 08, “why would I want to write a compression library, when I can download the best one in the world from zlib.org?” In the area of specialised components for secure communications, compression/decompression, a commodity kernel, and a bunch of other situations, it is appropriate to use free software components off-the-shelf. We expect them to work, and we don’t expect to ever need to talk to the maintainer.

Free software components are in use like this in thousands of systems solutions and commercial products, often without their authors even being aware of it. The main advantage of this for a systems or product company is a saving of time and money, through having a fully functional component without having to go through a purchasing process, and a reduced software bill of materials. An additional advantage is the simplification of your licensing due diligence, thanks to the relatively well-understood consequences of the various popular free software licences.

The difficulty arises when the software doesn’t meet your needs. In many cases, libraries are written by an individual to scratch an itch – it works for him, but is not quite up to your requirements. As one friend of mine put it: “Open Source: 80% as good as the last guy needed it to be”.

Perhaps it’s software that works on 32 bit platforms, but has never been tested for 64 bit. Perhaps it has not been ported to ARM or MIPS. Or perhaps the author simply never imagined that anyone would want the feature which you find indispensable.

In this situation, you can always ask the software author to write the feature or fix the bug for you – but since there is no client/supplier relationship between you, it is entirely reasonable for a volunteer to put your request on the long finger, or reject it outright.

At this point, you realise the value of having the source code – you can modify the software to meet your needs, or pay someone else to do it for you.

Modify

Being able to modify software that doesn’t quite meet your needs is amazing. This is the way things used to work by default, but the shrink-wrapped software revolution of the 1980s got everyone used to the idea that software was a valuable asset to be protected from public view at all costs. When I worked for Informix in the late ’90s, we used to refer to the source code of our leading product as “the crown jewels”.

With the widespread acceptance of free software as an alternative, developers are no longer surprised when they may see how a program works, and change its behaviour. This ability brings two important and immediate benefits – you have control of the behaviour of the software, and you can adapt it to suit exactly your needs. The old choice of build vs buy has become: build vs buy vs extend.

This situation is common in software services companies which provide vertically integrated “solutions” to corporate clients. You take components where you can find them to speed up initial development, stick everything together with duct-tape, hack whatever you need in whatever libraries you’re using to make everything pass the client’s integration tests, and then publish a set of .tar.gz files somewhere on the website of the company to fulfil any licensing requirements.

This control and ability to tailor a solution comes at a price, however. Over and above the cost of making the changes, your team is lumbered with a maintenance problem. Let’s say that implementing the features you need on top of a component the first time round takes a month. Fixing bugs in the features when it has been rolled out can take another few weeks. A few months later, the upstream product you’re based on goes and releases a shiny new version, with lots of compelling new features that you really want.

The cost of integrating your features into the newer version, and doing extensive regression testing before rolling out the new version, might take you another 6 weeks. It is not unusual for time spent integrating your work into later versions to quickly outweigh initial development time and investment. Inconveniently, this is typically effort which is not budgeted for beforehand.

After a company has run into this problem a couple of times, over the course of a year or two, someone will usually suggest that you propose that the features you have developed be sen