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On 1st December Olswang held their third and final Open Source Summit in London. For one reason or another I'd been unable to attend the 2007 and 2008 events, and was glad that I was last week finally able to make it along.

Olswang are a law firm and so as you would expect the summit focused on open source legal matters. We were treated to a keynote from Bruce Perens and the overall quality of the event was very high. Numerous topics were covered over the course of the morning and a few notes follow.

Due diligence

This week, I will have the opportunity to meet in-person with many others who have focused attention on legal aspects of FOSS. The European OpenSource & Free Software Law Event will be held in Brussels on December 9, 2009 (http://www.eolevent.eu/). 

My presentation at that event is titled "Current trends in the Hardware sector: HP Experience". In looking back over the more than 15 years that HP has been involved in FOSS, I conclude that, what has changed is that licenses are no longer the hard part.

Free and Open Source Software is about sharing.  The idea is that by working together everyone benefits.  This concept does not stop with code.  For businesses there is also value in sharing best practice information to raise the bar on the market as a whole.  

At Opendawn we understand this.  We've been working in this field for a while, and we have seen open collaboration drive forward solutions to complex issues time and time again.  Sharing has contributed to our bottom line through direct resources, establishing new relationships, and by providing us with fresh perspectives.  

If you manage a large software organization, should code reduction be the first bullet in your 2010 strategy?

According to Finnish computer scientist Jussi Koskinen, the cost of software maintenance can account for >50 to >90% of an overall software development budget.  With code bases doubling every seven years, maintenance is the budget buster of software development.

So a 200 person software organization, that pays developers $100,000 per year, is spending $20M annually on software development.   $10M to $18M of this is devoted to code maintenance.  Each 1% reduction in the size of the code base represents $100,000 to $180,000 of resources that you can reassign to tasks that create greater business value.

How is it we can know the weight of a person's soul* but not be able to measure the success of a piece of individual FOSS software with the truly compelling metrics needed to satisfy and influence enterprise adopters and governments.

 A recent report (26th August 2009) by IDC indicates that worldwide revenue from Linux operating systems software grew by 23.4% from 2007 to 2008 and by projecting a 16.9% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) over the period 2008-13 the market size will cross $1 billion for the first time in 2012, growing to $1.2 billion by 2013 (www.idc.com).

Whilst this is a useful figure it doesn't enable us to generate a market share figure for an individual application. Yet metrics are valuable in understanding where a particular product sits in its marketplace, its rate of adoption, its market share, growth or decline, where it sits in a Gartner Magic Quadrant and so on.