Open Source Software and Innovation

From the Fujitsu Labs Innovation Forum, June 4th, 2014, Mountain View, CA

 

 

Ryan Singer, CryptoCorp

Avery Ching, Facebook

Andreas Gal, Mozilla.org

Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation

 

“We are moving from a product-based world to a services-based world.” – Jim Zemlin. This is primarily due to:

 

 

Much innovation in software comes from external R&D. Large organizations are moving to the strategic use of open source from a 30% average to 80% for best in class (telecoms, networking, etc.) Examples include Sony Mobile: “over 80% of the software in our handsets is open source”, and Samsung: “we couldn’t build all our products without open source.”

 

Open Source As A Collaboration Tool

• Strategic Analysis: which open source projects work best?
• Intellectual Property: license managment, trademarks, etc.
• Development Process: social coding style, GIT, etc.
• Business Process: downstream code integration 

 

Managing External Open Source R&D:

• Compete with peers
• Align with cutting-edge and get ‘early peek’
• Recruit OS talent
• Contribute code, get fixes, enhancements, build innovation communities

 

Security & Privacy Issues with OS

• Recent revelations have put concerns in key OS technologies like https
• In general OS is very secure as weaknesses can be patched/fixed very quickly
• Transparency at the byte level (compiling source code) allows binary matching to ensure fidelity

 

The Future – Open Source Hardware? 

• Facebook data servers
• Google Android stack
• Mozilla OS
• Other?