Companies Using Open Source as Business Strategy

Case study about three companies

Companies with open source business strategy take use of open source products and either gain their profit by providing the software and side services or using it as a part of their business. Using this strategy reduces research and development costs while the open source community does a lot of work that the company can use. The company wins from using open source products and the community whereas the clients profit from the cooperation between open source product and the service provider. This kind of companies have strong belief into open source communities.

Acquia is a company providing its clients with technical support and site monitoring for sites built upon open source platform Drupal. Acquia is not building the sites but helps to get started with Drupal. Drupal is an open source content management platform that allows its users to easily manage all sorts of web sites including community sites, e-commerce applications, blogs, personal sites and many more. Acquia uses Drupal in its business and needs it to be excellent, so they also give back to Drupal through fixing bugs, implementing missing features and writing documentation. Acquia works with the community of Drupal to solve variety of problems and therefore does not need to have all the resources inside the company.

Red Hat is the best known company using open source as its main business strategy. With being a strong competitor for proprietary software providers Red Hat has gained lots of critique but also fought aggressively against software patenting. Red Hat is world's leading open source and Linux provider. Its Open Source strategy provides customers with plan for building infrastructures that are based on open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management.

Another company using free software and commecial know-how is Canonical - the commercial sponsor for Ubuntu. Its mission lies in realising the potential of free software and supporting it through high quality professional services, input to its further development and community. Canonical offers full scale of commercial services to help businesses benefit from Ubuntu and Free Software. Among all services there is custom engineering, support, training and certification.

All above-mentioned companies use open source products for their business, they also carry the mission to support and develop open source software and contribute to the communities. On the same time they make profit, help other businesses profit from their services and also work for the ongoing innovation and free development of software as they find patenting slowing down the process.

Copyleft

What is copyleft and its variants?

Copyleft is characteristic of some free licencies for software, art, music or other creations. Copyleft has different versions according to the distribution and freedom terms attached to it. The types are strong, weak and non-copyleft. Work under strong copyleft license may not be used as a part of a project or work with other type of license that is not compatible with the strong copyleft. Weak copyleft on the other hand, allows linked works be licensed under other types of licenses whereas the changes made to the work under weak copyleft must be licensed as weak copyleft. Non-copyleft free licenses allow producing proprietary work.

The best known real-life example of strong copyleft is GNU Public License. Weak copyleft licensed example is GNU Lesser General Public License and also Mozilla Public License. The first use of non-copyleft license was with Berkeley Software Distribution for the first free Unix. From there on the license is often named BSD-like free license. Under this category is also Apache License.

The Battle for Westnoth first review

As asked in the Open Source Management course I have started to play The Battle for Westnoth a bit. I have got acquainted to it through the tutorials and also tried out some campaigns. The beginning was rather rough but I guess it is normal for an unexperienced player.

My first impression was not very positive as I am not a great fan of games like that at all. But what I was wrong about, was the way it really works. The idea that you can take as much time to think through your next step as you need was surprising. I thought that time matters. So I discovered that it gives a great challenge to strategical thinking.

The game has a set of characters and settings that form the whole thing and I need some more time to realise the possibilities and complexity of it. I will go on discovering the strategy and the possibilities in the game. After making bigger efforts to playing, I will try out some simple modifications in code and also designing new maps.

Even if not being such a fan of playing games, I am excited about the outcome of our team work as well as the whole course. The game and the additions or modifications to be done will surely be teaching us the OSM through a very realistic experience.

FSF vs OSI

Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiation - the two terms have evolved from the same principle - being against the proprietary software. While being on the same side in this matter, the two movements differ in basic principles. The FSF stresses the freedom and is therefore not willing to be connected to OSI from which mentioning freedom has dropped out.

There has been a lot of buzz around the terms used. Both movements question the choice of the other's name as they were confusing and not clearly presenting the main idea of the movement. "Open source" initiators proposed to replace free software with open source everywhere but Richard Stallman has been against it and insists on standing for the concept of freedom.

A difference also lies in the use of licenses - OSI has accepted some licenses that FSF would not approve. Nevertheless, the main contradiction is in the philosophy and other values besides the question which should the software development really look like.

All in all my opinion is that the movements aimed the same until one started fighting/standing for the idea of freedom and the other went more realistic and practical way to support the same type of software development. Free software is a social movement, open source is a development methodology and this makes the change between the way those movements act and which are their aims.