Podcast 6 - Open Source Software

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A full transcript of this podcast is reproduced below.

This is Michael Tiemann, I am President of the Open Source Initiative and Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat.

The IT industry is headed for its own crisis, with plenty of red flags visible if you bother to look, as well as a clear and simple plan to avert the hard landing. But, in an industry famously long on ego and short on humility, can we really hope for a change before these CEOs destroy their companies and the assets of their customers?

Consider: global ICT spending tops $3.4 trillion per year; 18 per cent of all applications developed every year are abandoned before reaching production; 55 per cent are challenged, meaning that they are late, broken, or both.

If we are generous and imagine that 80 per cent of a challenged application can be salvaged, leaving 20 per cent waste, we're losing 38 per cent of all ICT spending - hardware, software, services, and support - to waste every year. More than $1 trillion per year.

Since publishing these results back in 2006, when the global ICT spend was estimated at $1 trillion per year and I estimated only $386 billion a year of waste, not one CIO (chief information officer) has told me my estimate is high.

It is no wonder that 90 per cent of IT vendors are judged to be poor by the CIO community. Nine out of ten fail to deliver good value as judged by at least 80 per cent of the CIOs surveyed.

How did they get it so wrong? Perhaps because the industry is organised around the control of software rather than the service of software.

The principle difference between the crisis of the automotive industry today and the IT industry is that the former had a fifty year head start on the latter.

Back in the 1940s, when General Motors was seen by many as the most successful and powerful post-war company, Alfred P. Sloan invited the innovative W. Edwards Deming up to Detroit to see if things could be done better.

Deming's report thrashed every aspect of GMs process, culture, and especially management, who treated the factory workers like nothing more than machine parts and labour as a whole as if it were the enemy.

Deming was kicked so far out of Sloan's office that he landed in Japan, where he taught a humbled Japanese workforce how to transform Made In Japan from a warning label to a world standard for excellence.

Twenty years after that the success of Deming's transformational thinking was obvious, and thirty years after his initial work he wrote Out of the Crisis. And today we see the difference between those companies who truly adopted these teachings versus those who merely pretended to.

Open Source software gives users control and allows vendors to compete on service. If you examine the 14 points of Deming's transformational model - breaking down barriers, driving out fear, investing in training, etc. - you find that these become powerful operative ideas in the context where users have control over their software, not the other way around.

The concept of exonovation, that is, innovation that comes from the outside, is central to the theme of open source software. When users and vendors can collaborate and innovate together they can out perform what a single vendor, worried only about profits and control, can do.

The greatest objection raised by software industry participants about Open Source software is that if users are free to read, modify, and share software, then it's not possible to extract monopoly rents. Based on what we have seen from the monopoly these past 10 years, I'm not really sure that is such a problem.

Michael Tiemann is an open source software pioneer. The author of the GNU C++ compiler and founder of the world's first open source company (Cygnus Solutions in 1989), he is now President of the Open Source Initiative and Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, where he integrates and informs technology and open source strategies for the company, its partners, and customers. Tiemann is also a keen supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the GNOME foundation, the Free Software Foundation, and other organisations that further the cause of programming freedom.

www.redhat.com
www.opensource.org