Eco-system over code
by stephane ribas (inria)
for fOSSa 2013.

Thanks!

TOC TOC TOC !

IntroductionGoal of my talkWhy such a talkLyon silk factoryOpennessConclusion

Who am i

Inria?

1 The French Institute for Research in ICST

Information and Communication Science and Technologies

RESEARCH

TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AND
EXPERIMENTATION

EDUCATION
AND
TRAINING

TRANSFER
AND
INNOVATION

A scientific and technological public institution under the dual authority of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Industry

Applied Mathematics, Computation and Simulation

1

Algorithmics, Programming, Software and Architecture

Networks, Systems and Services, Distributed Computing

Perception, Cognition, Interaction

Computational Sciences for Biology, Medicine and Environment

5 Main research topics

2

3

4

5

I am a thief !

Community over code
by Ross Gardler,
Apache Community VP

fOSSa conference
http://fOSSa.inria.fr

A comet in Open Source conferences A humble (and free) conference that attracts insiders, opinion makers & mainstream users A forum where people meet, talk, share Partners? major Open source actors The speakers? Open Source leaders 2013 topics?Open Education, Flow Computing, Open Art, Open Source Journalism & Open Intelligence, Eco- Systems , Eco- Trust, Eco- Nomy20, 21 and 22 november 2013 in Lille, France, nearby Paris, London, Brussels, etc.

Goal of my talk?

Why such message?

Ecosystem definition
(wikipedia)

[] An ecosystem is a community in which components are interacting as a system. We can figure it as a network of interactions []

Ecosystem definition
(moore)

An economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individualsthe organisms of the business world. The economic community produces goods & services of value to customers, who are themselves members of the ecosystem.

The member organisms also include suppliers, lead producers, competitors, and other stakeholders. Over time, they coevolve their capabilities & roles, tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more central companies.

Those companies holding leadership roles may change over time, but the function of ecosystem leader is valued by the community because it enables members to move toward shared visions to align their investments (some of them could be activities), and to find mutually supportive roles.

Lyon silk factory

Once upon a time

1800-1900, Lyon was famous for its loom eco system, silk factories & open attitude governance. Demands from North America,

Major competitors in Italy and in England.

Patent! oooh my patent !

middle of the 18th century, english government adopted a patent system to protect their innovation and production of goods.

No patent system did exist in France.

The town of Lyon adopted an open attitude governance in order to drive their innovations.

Momentum

The town of Lyon set up & organised public meetings where...inventors came & presented new technologies, new methods & possible improvements for the loom industry.

Industrials were invited to the public meetings.

Incentives

Companies that integrated the technologies presented were persuaded to document and disseminate the nature of the integrations, and any improvements they noticed

The number of machines or processes which has been impacted by the innovation were traced. The knowledge based upon research and industrials where then put back into the public domain, people were then encouraged to present the new modifications, and so on.

Monitoring

The town of Lyon carefully monitored

the presentation of novelties

the adoption of those new technologies by the industrials.

Rewarding

Inventors were remunerated by the town accordingly to the estimated value of their invention and accordingly to the usage popularity in the silk factories.

grants were based on the nature of the invention, the effort made by the inventor to share his knowledge & the effectiveness of the results.

Leadership

In 1814, we could count 14,500 loom in Lyon versus 12,000 in London.

In 1853, they were only 5,000 looms left in London versus 30000 looms in Lyon.

Lyon won the battle against the silk factory of London.

Open governance

The open attitude governance of the city of Lyon enabled the creation of an important loom ecosystem which pushed the town of Lyon as the leader of the silk market.

Are you okay?

Why such a success?

- creation of new technologies by building new components above existing innovations

- diversity in the production of goods,

- peer-to-peer collaboration network that added flexibility in the production of silk goods.

- promote inventions while making them public and open,

- leverage motivations by rewarding smartly inventors.

- relationship and collaboration between the different factories and looms.

Classical model
speculation, anticipation, storing

Distributors build the ecosystem on providing funds to silk factories, facilitated speculations, and creating stocks to decrease prices, thus undermining the responsiveness of the supply chain.

The english silk factories were forced to reduced their prizes in order to sell their goods to distributors.

An important impact of reducing their revenue was that silk factories were afraid to invest in new silk machines, buy new equipment (and more innovating equipment).

Classical model
why so many economists & politics are taking it for granted?

By imposing their own rules of the game the distributors & banks killed the english loom.

this model has already showed its inferiority against openness two century ago, we can ask ourselves why does this mode prevails nowadays?

Standardisation

the town of lyon decided to establish standards for the loom industry.

facilitate the maintenance of the machines,

ensure a certain level of interoperability between machine/components

stimulate a normalization of the user interface

New market

Thanks to this standardization, a new market appearedthe market of spare parts.

Manufacturers, resellers, technicians had access to a widely open market in which monopoly situations where virtually nonexistent which brought cheaper goods & cheaper services.

I hope that the air
is not patented

Openness

[my definition of Openness]The concept of Openness can be defined as the attitude to systematically freely distribute, freely share, freely disseminate knowledge

Openness

Knowledge is a special kind of good that you do not loose when you give it away.

If you are participating in a system where knowledge is freely shared, you will get far more knowledge from peers than you may give them.

We participate to a smart win-win system.

Paul David

If science is driven in an open manner, if the information starts to be freely (freedom) distributed-disseminated-shared, then, scientists, artists, inventors interact, study, modify & redistribute new technologies.

Naturally, an organization emerges at an increased pace: everyone can take & understand any novelty, improve it, give it back to the community.

Paul David

There is a causality between opening technologies & the rapid growth of the production of knowledge.

The rapid dissemination of the knowledge produced creates new standards, new technologies that can be freely modified & redistributed.

Openness accelerate the production & dissemination of knowledge. It boosts significantly innovation.

The open-something movements!

3D printers, fablabs & techshops

Open Hardware eco system

It produces new communities, we can named Arduino, Linaros, RaspBerry pi, Diydrones.

13 companies were sharing a turnover of 50 millions of dollars.

Economists forecasts a turnover of 1 billion of dollars in 2015.

What are the roles of research in this success?

Arduino co founder are working in an university in sweden and in Italy, Linaros founders were PhD students,

RepRap was born in an University,

etc.

Arduino

dissemination

Arduino founders have opened their designs and their codes, facilitating the dissemination of the project word wide,.

it increased widely the usage of Arduino electronic cards by a large audience

facilitated the creation of a large ecosystem.

Results?

In 2012, 1 million of dollars based on its 100% open design hardware and software catalog.

The economic impacts, the indirect financial revenues induced by the ecosystem prevailed on classical business model that many economist & politics take mistakenly for granted.

why open source software took off before the Open Source hardware?

I guess that Open source is based solely on sequences of symbols, hence reproducible to infinity. Open source is a cumulative phenomenon that enable the production of new digital infrastructure for the society.

Are you okay?

VOIP monopoly

OSS is particularly active in areas where monopolies exist. OSS is particularly efficient when it answers a need widely shared.

Mark Spencer founded Digium in 1999. His idea was to spread alternative solutions at very low cost on the closed PBX market.

The Asterisk user friendly phenomena

Some companies started to clone their hardware at low cost and Digium been hard making money

Mark decided to redesign the Asterisk user interface to make it very friendly so any IT people can install their own phone system.

Results?

Now Asterisk as became a standard for open source PBX, covering the full spectrum of hardware equipments & a wide base of users.

8,000 active developers. Asterisk forums cover 35,000 topics with more than 120,000 posts.Asterisk solutions are supported in over 170 countries.

Community management

Strong community and a large ecosystem based on a free software project that provides an answer to a widely shared problem.Good governance and relevant choices.

Future of VOIP eco system?

Recently we witnessed the arrival in the ecosystem of an actor offering openhardware solution (XiVO PBX) dedicated to telecommunications & capable of handling more than one thousand simultaneous calls.

Eclipse IDE eco system

IBM strategy?

The strategy for IBM includes different aspects:- By offering a free integrated development environment on GNU/linux system, IBM wanted to increase the usage of GNU/Linux system,- competing versus the Microsoft & Sun Solaris.- create an eco system to indirectly get its investment back

Results?

IBM fostered the creation of a strong dynamic eco system (huge network of companies)platform valued at more than $ 40 million10,000 daily downloads today,

Eclipse is nowadays known as a commodity

Control vs Neutrality?
would you dare loosing control?

IBM's controlled more & more the ecosystem, external contributors felt like if they were working for IBM and not for Eclipse.

The stagnation of the community has pushed the Eclipse Foundation to divorce & restore some neutrality in the eyes of community members.

Nokia &
Symbian OS

(bonus) Scoffoni

When an open source software reaches a certain level of maturity and popularity, when this open software may be considered as a commodity... any single company, any single institution can maintain it, that's the role of a consortium...

Conclusion(s)

People who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it

Living on the shoulders of the giants !

Don't loose your time and your money in trying to sell code

Rock around the clock,
Rock around the code!

Openness is a freedom we have to struggle for!

What about the
Gross Domestic Product ?

stephane.ribas@inria.fr@stephaneribashttp://fossa.inria.fr

Thanks, and,have a nice conference!

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