March 1999

Open Source Software Infuses CTI

BY BROUGH TURNER

While the idea of "open source" software has been evolving for decades, the term itself is scarcely a year old. It applies to a transition, still underway, by which academic practices toward source code are adapted for commercial purposes. In the past year, the open source idea has quickly gained currency, and has even gone mainstream, as demonstrated by Netscape's release of source code for their Web browser.

The open source transition has not escaped notice. It has attracted mainstream media attention, inspiring stories in publications such as Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, which now devote coverage to such topics as Linux. As the trend toward open source software continues, it promises, as this article will argue, to facilitate the growth of the CTI industry.

EARLY OPEN SOURCE ACTIVITIES
In the early days of computing, software was merely an adjunct to computer sales, so software source code was provided with most programs, or was routinely available for the asking. But in the 1970s, actual software products, and even a software business model, began to emerge. By 1980, there was a distinct split between commercial and academic software.

Increasing restrictions on source code provoked a response. In 1983, dissatisfied with how these restrictions complicated his day-to-day programming, Richard Stallman started the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org). Stallman's goal for GNU was to "develop a completely free UNIX-like operating system."

Here free doesn't refer to the price. Free means the source code is available and can be modified or extended by anyone. To promote his views, Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL provides the freedoms of reuse, modification, and reproduction of a work, or its derivatives, as long as all derivative works are also available under the GPL. As such, the GPL is also a virus! Any larger work that includes GPL-related code must also fall under GPL.

With contributions from many individuals, the GNU Project has created an enormous body of UNIX-related software, much of which is provided with Linux, BSD UNIX, and other versions of UNIX. More significantly, the GPL is now used with at least several tens of millions of lines of useful source code, from more than a thousand independent software projects.

By instigating all these developments, Stallman has accomplished something that may even surpass, in significance, his enormous software contributions - which is to say, in the long term, Stallman's greatest legacy may be his legal document. On the other hand, the GPL has had limited success in the business world, since GPL code cannot be included in larger works where traditional software business models apply. In the business world, other licensing schemes, that is, schemes more consistent with prevalent business models, have evolved. Ultimately, in 1998, these new schemes gave rise to a new term - Open Source. As defined (see www.opensource.org), the term applies to Stallman's GPL, but also to many other licensing arrangements.

OPEN SOURCE AND THE INTERNET
While Richard Stallman was working on the GNU project, a larger phenomenon was underway - the Internet. Until recently, the Internet was funded with government money and developed mostly within academia, following academic models. In the academic community, there is great prestige for priority, for being first. But being first in academia means being first to publish. And, since knowledge is published, new work builds on earlier work - similar to the open source model. So, while licensing terms vary, the guts of the Internet runs on open source software.

For example, Domain Name Services, which interpret the names you use to access the Web, are provided by the BIND utility - the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon. Originally, BIND was funded by the government. It is now open source software supported by the non-profit Internet Software Consortium (www.isc.org).

Similarly, the Internet e-mail infrastructure was based on Sendmail. While there are commercial equivalents, the bulk of Internet e-mail is still carried by Sendmail, which is run as an open source project (www.sendmail.org), funded in part by Sendmail, Inc., a commercial company selling support and premium versions such as "Sendmail Pro."

And, finally, there is the most widely used Web server software. No, it's not from Microsoft or Netscape. It is an open source package called Apache. Apache comes from the Apache Group, a loose amalgam of individuals, many with corporate backing, who run the Apache Project (www.apache.org).

ADVANTAGES OF OPEN SOURCE
With an enormous base of open source software in service, experience demonstrates some advantages of open source development. When programmers can read, modify, and redistribute the source code for a piece of software, that software evolves. Of course, it has to be interesting enough to attract a following. But if it does something useful, that's usually enough. Once these conditions are met, people find and fix bugs, they adapt software to new environments, and they improve it.

With today's Internet, this distributed development process can be astonishingly rapid compared to traditional commercial software development. And because errors and bugs are exposed and fixed more rapidly, open source software is frequently more robust than commercial counterparts - just consider the reliability of the Internet despite years of unprecedented growth.

While most Internet-related open source developments follow an academic model, there are also viable business models based on open source software. The most obvious are found in companies that sell documentation and support services for otherwise free software. Other companies provide open source software while selling more feature-rich or specially packaged versions. Or an open source product helps the sale of other more profitable products - the model Netscape adopted in 1998.

NETSCAPE GOES OPEN SOURCE
Netscape's original business model did not involve open source. But Netscape did recognize from the start that they could give away one version of their software while simultaneously selling other versions at a profit. The product was Netscape Navigator, and the model was wildly successful for a few years. However, Microsoft's counteroffer of a browser at no cost for any version, plus Microsoft's ability to bundle their browser with Windows, was too compelling an alternative for Netscape to leave unanswered. Netscape had to acknowledge its original business model had to change.

During 1997, Netscape Navigator lost market share to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Netscape managed to transition most of their revenue to their server business, but they still couldn't afford to let Microsoft dominate the client end of the business. If one company were to control the majority of clients, that company could extend the underlying protocols, offer servers to handle their extensions, and end up dominating the server business as well.

In January of 1998, Netscape announced they would release the source code for the Netscape Communicator (a superset of Netscape Navigator) as open source. On March 31, they provided a Web site (www.mozilla.org) with the source code of Communicator 5.0, a work in progress. Communicator represents over 3 million lines of code - the result of hundreds of programmers frantically scrambling to add ever more features over a period of several years.

Within a week, some major "stunts" appeared, including a port of the Navigator core to a new multi-lingual graphical user interface. And over the next few months, a large distributed community of developers joined the project. Netscape (and now AOL) continue to fund the core developers at mozilla.org, but the open source community is contributing to its development and taking the code base into new applications and new environments. Now, one year later, it appears the Netscape Communicator's market share has stopped declining and may even be creeping up again.

LINUX REACHES CRITICAL MASS
Another example of an open source success is Linux, which is an open source version of UNIX (see www.linux.org). Linux has recently gotten mainstream coverage, and for good reason. A recent IDG survey indicated that for 1998, NT represented the largest unit volume in the sale of server operating systems (about 36 percent), followed by NetWare (24 percent). But Linux unit shipments were 17 percent of the total server operating system shipments, equal to the total shipments of all other flavors of UNIX combined.

Linux might be doing even better than these figures would suggest, for they account for only those copies of Linux that were purchased from companies such as Red Hat, which offers Linux on CD with documentation for $49. The IDG survey does not include the copies that were downloaded for free over the Internet.

Linux is the only operating system besides NT whose market share is growing - from 7 percent in 1997 to 17 percent in 1998. As a result, companies like Corel, Oracle, IBM, and Informix are porting their software to Linux. Intel and Netscape have made a big investment in Red Hat. And even Microsoft is paying attention, as evidenced by internal memos that were leaked in late October 1998 and are now referred to as the Halloween documents (www.opensource.org/halloween.html).

One of the main reasons that Linux is so popular - and one of the arguments in favor of the open source model - is that it is reliable. ISPs can load Linux on a server, stick it in a corner, and leave it for years. No reboots and no maintenance. Basically, the box continues to run until the fan fails. This is in sharp contrast to the typical NT server where you expect the see the "blue screen of death" every so often, and you reboot the server on a regular basis just as a safety measure.

But, as can be seen by the Netscape example, building a better software product is not the only reason to go open source. Gaining market share can be another strong motivator and may have been the motivation for the CTI market's first major open source release - Erlang, which originates from the telecom equipment giant, Ericsson.

OPEN SOURCE IMPACTS CTI
In the late 1980s, Ericsson began developing a functional programming language and software platform for building fault-tolerant distributed applications. Ericsson recognized, however, that the costs of maintaining this software for their own internal use would not bring them a good return on their investment. Their work needed wider support if it was to be viable for the long term.

So, in 1993, they formed a separate organization, under the name Erlang, to market and support their software and get it into widespread use. This effort was somewhat successful, but apparently failed to garner the market share that Ericsson wanted. In December of 1998, Ericsson went one step further and adopted an open source model for the Erlang software using a license based on the Netscape source code license.

This move appears to be a good business decision by Ericsson. First, Ericsson is making money by selling its premium version of Erlang, as well as by selling the support services required by major corporations that want to implement this environment. In addition, this source code has been adopted by portions of the Linux community and is being used, with Erlang applications (available at www.eddieware.org), to build fault-tolerant distributed Web servers (DNS and HTTP). This combination of Erlang and Linux promises systems more scalable than those available from commercial UNIX vendors or from Microsoft.

ONLY THE BEGINNING
In 1998, commercial software development models were called into question and the open source movement made inroads into industry. Open source has affected operating systems with the advent of Linux, affected the Web browser market with the open release of Netscape, and is now beginning to touch the telecommunications market. Erlang is just the beginning. The future should be very interesting.

Brough Turner is senior vice president of technology at Natural MicroSystems, a leading provider of hardware and software technologies for developers of high-value telecommunications solutions. For more information, call Natural MicroSystems at 508-620-9300 or visit the company's Web site at www.nmss.com. E-mail to the author ([email protected]) is also welcome.