What does the word ‘freedom’ mean to you? Why is ‘freedom’ a business imperative? How can you achieve ‘freedom’ for your organisation through IT?When these questions were put recently to a group of CIOs, their answers were interesting. Here are just a few of those responses:
- Freedom is a competitive landscape offering real choice of systems and suppliers.
- Freedom is escape from vendor lock-in and mitigating the risk of vendor capture.
- Freedom is flexibility to make a choice today that doesn’t remove our ability to make a choice tomorrow.
- Freedom is control over software – the ability to share our experiences and adapt software to our needs.
Free and open source software (FOSS) seeks to encapsulate those sorts of freedoms, not through technology but through software licences, such as the General Public Licence (GPL) which guarantee these freedoms to users of the software. In other words, they free users from the artificial constraints and obligations that many software vendors seek to impose on their clients.As well as being built on FOSS, the internet is full of examples of organisations, such as Google and Amazon, that have used FOSS-licensed technology to build billion-dollar organisations. This has allowed them to maintain a remarkable pace of development, agility and robustness – all at a low cost that would have been unthinkable had they had to pay licence fees for every server or software component used to build their systems. Indeed, for very rapidly expanding companies, so-called ‘super scaled’, the use of FOSS would seem to be the only choice.There are not many companies turning over huge profits from providing FOSS services and software. This is because the value in FOSS is not in the sale of the software, but rather in the value derived from its use. In other words, the economic benefits of FOSS are spread across all users who would otherwise be obligated to purchase commercial software.So how is a small country, miles from anywhere with limited resources, making use of the opportunities that FOSS can bring? Given all the above, it seems inevitable that responsible CIOs, business owners, politicians and educationalists would be rushing to increase their use of FOSS. On one level the uptake is amazing, if unintentional. Every internet user benefits from FOSS, simply through the fact that the internet is largely built on a FOSS stack. This is hardly surprising given the open philosophy behind the development of Internet Protocols (IPs). Every ‘.nz’ domain name is held in a FOSS registry whose source code is available on sourceforge.net. Many server rooms are full of GNU/Linux servers, and many enterprises use Java, which Sun Microsystems released under FOSS not so long ago. Indeed, the biggest eCommerce site in New Zealand, Air New Zealand, runs on GNU/Linux.New Zealand IT companies that are making money through FOSS include Silverstripe, Egressive, OSS and my own Catalyst IT Limited. Many of us have gained global renown for our contributions to FOSS and expertise in that software. Silverstripe developed a content management system of the same name and released it under a FOSS licence. The resulting worldwide uptake and interest has ensured that their skills and services are in wide demand. Catalyst, through its association with FOSS projects including the learning management system, Moodle, has also been able to export its services. Another e-learning company, Flexible Learning Networks, has been instrumental in managing the Mahara e-portfolio project. The project’s site records that about 3000 copies of the software are being downloaded per month – a number unthinkable had Mahara used a proprietary licence.Finally, a large part of the development team behind the FOSS web browser, Firefox, works in Auckland and is lead by a Kiwi, Robert O'Callaghan.However, the level of interest in FOSS shown by those charged with using IT to deliver benefits to business and government, is minimal. That is despite these and many other successes, and despite the obvious capability of FOSS software to deliver ‘enterprise’ solutions. Many, if not most, CIOs and enterprise architects see FOSS as something to be avoided; an annoyance and a risk – too hard. Other than through Firefox, most end users never see FOSS software either. Hardware vendors are constantly failing to give us the choice and resulting price savings that are available elsewhere in the world – by simply having GNU/Linux or OpenOffice available on netbooks, laptops and PCs.This blinkered attitude is crippling our competitiveness and condemning our businesses to a period in the technology wilderness. In government it is creating dependencies on overseas monopolies and other vendors, which is not only costly but, some have said, disloyal. This is the same negative, distrusting attitude that many organisations had towards the internet 10 years ago, and as a result many opportunities for smart growth and smart productivity are going begging. New Zealand as a country simply cannot afford to be a laggard adopter. The country is in an IT hole and the first thing we need to do is stop digging! We need to stop buying software we have no need for, and we need to change procurement processes that were developed in the 1980s in a pre-internet era. We also need to adopt more open, collaborative and enabling approaches for our organisations. This can start with IT, where small investments can have a profound impact.Other countries, such as the UK, Denmark and Malaysia, recognise that FOSS and the accompanying philosophies are driving innovation. They see a highly engaged community of intelligent, thoughtful and motivated participants who take considerable pride in the values or ‘freedoms’ of FOSS and the opportunities it confers to improve the common wealth of our society. Those countries are very keen for their governments and societies to harness this, and are developing and adopting policies to make sure they do not miss out.We need to look at what those countries are doing, and also look to history to learn about change and what it can mean for us. I recently found some old newspaper clippings from 1980 about a workers’ revolt in Gdansk, Poland. As a teenager in Western Europe I remembered the early ‘Solidarity’ days very clearly. The Red Army was expected to roll in to suppress these calls for freedom of association and it was also expected that there would be resulting escalation, possibly nuclear. But Polish workers kept up their demands for freedom despite attempts to cow them into submission. Nine years later a new philosophy for the Soviet Union, Glasnost, prevailed and the Berlin Wall came down. And now, 20 years after the Cold War ended, I ‘follow’ Mikhail Gorbachev on Twitter.There are two lessons we can take from this history: we should never accept the status quo when it is wrong; and the status quo is only temporary.
