This paper (and its supporting database) provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using open source software / free software (abbreviated as OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS) is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures. This paper’s goal is to show that you should consider using OSS/FS when acquiring software. This paper examines popularity, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, governments and OSS/FS, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions. An appendix gives more background information about OSS/FS. You can view this paper at http://dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html (HTML format). A short presentation (briefing) based on this paper is also available. Palm PDA users may wish to use Plucker to view this longer report. Old archived copies and a list of changes are also available.

1. Introduction

Open Source Software / Free Software (aka OSS/FS), also described as Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), has risen to great prominence. Briefly, FLOSS programs are programs whose licenses give users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program, and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified program (without having to pay royalties to previous developers).

The goal of this paper is to convince you to consider using FLOSS when you’re looking for software, using quantitive measures. Some sites provide a few anecdotes on why you should use FLOSS, but for many that’s not enough information to justify using FLOSS. Instead, this paper emphasizes quantitative measures (such as experiments and market studies) to justify why using FLOSS products is in many circumstances a reasonable or even superior approach. I should note that while I find much to like about FLOSS, I’m not a rabid advocate; I use both proprietary and FLOSS products myself. Vendors of proprietary products often work hard to find numbers to support their claims; this page provides a useful antidote of hard figures to aid in comparing proprietary products to FLOSS. Others have come to the same conclusions, for example, Forrester Research concluded in September 2006 that “Firms should consider open source options for mission-critical applications”.

I believe that this paper has met its goal; others seem to think so too. The 2004 report of the California Performance Review, a report from the state of California, urges that “the state should more extensively consider use of open source software”, and specifically references this paper. A review at the Canadian Open Source Education and Research (CanOpenER) site stated “This is an excellent look at the some of the reasons why any [organization] should consider the use of [FLOSS]... [it] does a wonderful job of bringing the facts and figures of real usage comparisons and how the figures are arrived at. No FUD or paid for industry reports here, just the facts”. This paper been referenced by many other works, too. It’s my hope that you’ll find it useful as well.

The following subsections describe the paper’s scope, challenges in creating it, the paper’s terminology, and the bigger picture. This is followed by a description of the rest of the paper’s organization (listing the sections such as popularity, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership). Those who find this paper interesting may also be interested in the other documents available on David A. Wheeler’s personal home page. A short presentation (briefing) based on this paper is also available.

This paper has become long, there is now a supporting database of OSS/FS (FLOSS) quantitative studies that you may find easier to use. You may also be interested in the discussion group for quantitative numbers about free / libre / open source software.

1.1 Scope

As noted above, the goal of this paper is to convince you to consider using FLOSS when you’re looking for software, using quantitive measures. Note that this paper’s goal is not to show that all FLOSS is better than all proprietary software. Certainly, there are many who believe this is true from ethical, moral, or social grounds. It’s true that FLOSS users have fundamental control and flexibility advantages, since they can modify and maintain their own software to their liking. And some countries perceive advantages to not being dependent on a sole-source company based in another country. However, no numbers could prove the broad claim that FLOSS is always “better” (indeed you cannot reasonably use the term “better” until you determine what you mean by it). Instead, I’ll simply compare commonly-used FLOSS software with commonly-used proprietary software, to show that at least in certain situations and by certain measures, some FLOSS software is at least as good or better than its proprietary competition. Of course, some FLOSS software is technically poor, just as some proprietary software is technically poor. And remember -- even very good software may not fit your specific needs. But although most people understand the need to compare proprietary products before using them, many people fail to even consider FLOSS products, or they create policies that unnecessarily inhibit their use; those are errors this paper tries to correct.

This paper doesn’t describe how to evaluate particular FLOSS programs; a companion paper describes how to evaluate FLOSS programs. This paper also doesn’t explain how an organization would transition to an FLOSS approach if one is selected. Other documents cover transition issues, such as The Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) Open Source Migration Guidelines (November 2003) and the German KBSt’s Open Source Migration Guide (July 2003) (though both are somewhat dated). Organizations can transition to FLOSS in part or in stages, which for many is a more practical transition approach.

I’ll emphasize the operating system (OS) known as GNU/Linux (which many abbreviate as “Linux”), the Apache web server, the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and the OpenOffice.org office suite, since these are some of the most visible FLOSS projects. I’ll also primarily compare FLOSS software to Microsoft’s products (such as Windows and IIS), since Microsoft Windows is widely used and Microsoft is one of proprietary software’s strongest proponents. Note, however, that even Microsoft makes and uses FLOSS themselves (they have even sold software using the GNU GPL license, as discussed below).

I’ll mention Unix systems as well, though the situation with Unix is more complex; today’s Unix systems include many FLOSS components or software primarily derived from FLOSS components. Thus, comparing proprietary Unix systems to FLOSS systems (when examined as whole systems) is often not as clear-cut. This paper uses the term “Unix-like” to mean systems intentionally similar to Unix; both Unix and GNU/Linux are “Unix-like” systems. The most recent Apple Macintosh OS (MacOS OS X) presents the same kind of complications; older versions of MacOS were wholly proprietary, but Apple’s OS has been redesigned so that it’s now based on a Unix system with substantial contributions from FLOSS programs. Indeed, Apple is now openly encouraging collaboration with FLOSS developers.

1.2 Challenges

It’s a challenge to write any paper like this; measuring anything is always difficult, for example. Most of these figures are from other works, and it was difficult to find many of them. But there are some special challenges that you should be aware of: legal problems in publishing data, the reluctance of many FLOSS users to publicly admit it (for fear of retribution), and dubious studies (typically those funded by a product vendor).

Many proprietary software product licenses include clauses that forbid public criticism of the product without the vendor’s permission. Obviously, there’s no reason that such permission would be granted if a review is negative -- such vendors can ensure that any negative comments are reduced and that harsh critiques, regardless of their truth, are never published. This significantly reduces the amount of information available for unbiased comparisons. Reviewers may choose to change their report so it can be published (omitting important negative information), or not report at all -- in fact, they might not even start the evaluation. Some laws, such as UCITA (a law in Maryland and Virginia), specifically enforce these clauses forbidding free speech, and in many other locations the law is unclear -- making researchers bear substantial legal risk that these clauses might be enforced. These legal risks have a chilling effect on researchers, and thus makes it much harder for customers to receive complete unbiased information. This is not merely a theoretical problem; these license clauses have already prevented some public critique, e.g., Cambridge researchers reported that they were forbidden to publish some of their benchmarked results of VMWare ESX Server and Connectix/Microsoft Virtual PC. Oracle has had such clauses for years. Hopefully these unwarranted restraints of free speech will be removed in the future. But in spite of these legal tactics to prevent disclosure of unbiased data, there is still some publicly available data, as this paper shows.

Another problem is that many users of FLOSS are reluctant to admit it. ZDNet UK’s November 25, 2005 article “Why open source projects are not publicised” by Ingrid Marson examines this. For example, it notes that many are afraid of retribution. Obviously, this makes some data more difficult to obtain.

This paper omits or at least tries to warn about studies funded by a product’s vendor, which have a fundamentally damaging conflict of interest. Remember that vendor-sponsored studies are often rigged (no matter who the vendor is) to make the vendor look good instead of being fair comparisons. Todd Bishop’s January 27, 2004 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter discusses the serious problems when a vendor funds published research about itself. A study funder could directly pay someone and ask them to directly lie, but it’s not necessary; a smart study funder can produce the results they wish without, strictly speaking, lying. For example, a study funder can make sure that the evaluation carefully defines a specific environment or extremely narrow question that shows a positive trait of their product (ignoring other, probably more important factors), require an odd measurement process that happens show off their product, seek unqualified or unscrupulous reviewers who will create positive results (without careful controls or even without doing the work!), create an unfairly different environment between the compared products (and not say so or obfuscate the point), require the reporter to omit any especially negative results, or even fund a large number of different studies and only allow the positive reports to appear in public. Microsoft's James Plamodon urged Microsoft employees to perform various manipulative practices, recommending that during "the Slog" of competition they “[work] behind the scenes to orchestrate “Independent” praise of our technology, and damnation of the enemy's.... “Independent” analysts' report should be issued... “Independent” consultants should write columns and articles, give conference presentations and moderate stacked panels, all on our behalf (and setting themselves up as experts in the new technology, available for [lucratively high prices])... “Independent” academic sources should be cultivated and quoted (and research money granted)”. The song “Meat the Press” by Steve Taylor eloquently expresses this kind of deception: “They can state the facts while telling a lie”.

This doesn’t mean that all vendor-funded studies are misleading, but many are, and there’s no way to be sure which studies (if any) are actually valid. For example, Microsoft’s “get the facts” campaign identifies many studies, but nearly every study is entirely vendor-funded, and I have no way to determine if any of them are valid. After a pair of vendor-funded studies were publicly lambasted, Forrester Research announced that it will no longer accept projects that involve paid-for, publicized product comparisons. One ad, based on a vendor-sponsored study, was found to be misleading by the UK Advertising Standards Authority (an independent, self-regulatory body), who formally adjudicated against the vendor. This example is important because the study was touted as being fair by an “independent” group, yet it was found unfair by an organization who examines advertisements; failing to meeting the standard for truth for an advertisement is a very low bar.

Steve Hamm’s BusinessWeek article “The Truth about Linux and Windows” (April 22, 2005) noted that far too many reports are simply funded by one side or another, and even when they say they aren’t, it’s difficult to take some seriously. In particular, he analyzed a report by the Yankee Group’s Laura DiDio, asking deeper questions about the data, and found many serious problems. His article explained why he just doesn’t “trust its conclusions” because “the work seems sloppy [and] not reliable” ( a Groklaw article also discussed these problems).

Many companies fund studies that place their products in a good light, not just Microsoft, and the concerns about vendor-funded studies apply equally to vendors of FLOSS products. I’m independent; I have received no funding of any kind to write this paper, and I have no financial reason to prefer either FLOSS or proprietary software. I recommend that you prefer studies that do not have financial incentives for any particular outcome.

This paper includes data over a series of years, not just the past year; all relevant data should be considered when making a decision, instead of arbitrarily ignoring older data. Note that the older data shows that FLOSS has a history of many positive traits, as opposed to being a temporary phenomenon.

1.3 Terminology and Conventions

You can see more detailed explanation of the terms “open source software” and “Free Software”, as well as related information, in the appendix and my list of Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS or FLOSS) references at http://dwheeler.com/oss_fs_refs.html. Note that those who use the term “open source software” tend to emphasize technical advantages of such software (such as better reliability and security), while those who use the term “Free Software” tend to emphasize freedom from control by another and/or ethical issues. The opposite of FLOSS is “closed” or “proprietary” software.

Other alternative terms for FLOSS, besides either of those terms alone, include “libre software” (where libre means free as in freedom), “livre software” (same thing), free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS), open source / Free Software (OS/FS), free / open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), open-source software (indeed, “open-source” is often used as a general adjective), “freed software,” and even “public service software” (since often these software projects are designed to serve the public at large). I recommend the term “FLOSS” because it is easy to say and directly counters the problem that “free” is often misunderstood as “no cost”. There are other ways to expand FLOSS, including Free-Libre and Open Source Software and Free/Libre/Open Source Software.

Software that cannot be modified and redistributed without further limitation, but whose source code is visible (e.g., “source viewable” or “open box” software, including “shared source” and “community” licenses), is not considered here since such software doesn’t meet the definition of FLOSS. FLOSS is not “freeware”; freeware is usually defined as proprietary software given away without cost, and does not provide the basic FLOSS rights to examine, modify, and redistribute the program’s source code.

A few writers still make the mistake of saying that FLOSS is “non-commercial” or “public domain”, or they mistakenly contrast FLOSS with “commercial” products. However, today many FLOSS programs are commercial programs, supported by one or many for-profit companies, so this designation is quite wrong. Don’t make the mistake of thinking FLOSS is equivalent to “non-commercial” software! Also, nearly all FLOSS programs are not in the public domain. the term “public domain software” has a specific legal meaning -- software that has no copyright owner -- and that’s not true in most cases. In short, don’t use the terms “public domain” or “non-commercial” as synonyms for FLOSS.

An FLOSS program must be released under some license giving its users a certain set of rights; the most popular FLOSS license is the GNU General Public License (GPL). All software released under the GPL is FLOSS, but not all FLOSS software uses the GPL; nevertheless, some people do inaccurately use the term “GPL software” when they mean FLOSS software. Given the GPL’s dominance, however, it would be fair to say that any policy that discriminates against the GPL discriminates against FLOSS.

This is a large paper, with many acronyms. A few of the most common acronyms are:

Acronym	Meaning
GNU	GNU’s Not Unix (a project to create an FLOSS operating system)
GPL	GNU General Public License (the most common FLOSS license)
OS, OSes	Operating System, Operating Systems
FLOSS	Open Source Software/Free Software

This paper uses logical style quoting (as defined by Hart’s Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors); quotations do not include extraneous punctuation.

1.4 Bigger Picture

Typical FLOSS projects are, in fact, an example of something much larger: commons-based peer-production. The fundamental characteristic of FLOSS is its licensing, and an FLOSS project that meets at least one customer’s need can be considered a success, However, larger FLOSS projects are typically developed by many people from different organizations working together for a common goal. As the declaration Free Software Leaders Stand Together states, the business model of FLOSS “is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators”. Yochai Benkler’s 2002 Yale Law Journal article, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm” argues that FLOSS development is only one example of the broader emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. He calls this approach “commons-based peer-production” (to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets).

Many have noted that FLOSS approaches can be applied to many other areas, not just software. The Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, and works created using Creative Commons licenses (Yahoo! can search for these), are other examples of this development approach. Wide Open: Open source methods and their future potential by Geoff Mulgan (who once ran the policy unit at 10 Downing Street), Tom Steinberg, and with Omar Salem, discusses this wider potential. Many have observed that the process of creating scientific knowledge has worked in a similar way for centuries.

FLOSS is also an example of the incredible value that can result when users have the freedom to tinker (the freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices they own). Innovations are often created by combining pre-existing components in novel ways, which generally requires that users be able to modify those components. This freedom is, unfortunately, threatened by various laws and regulations such as the U.S. DMCA, and the FCC “broadcast flag”. It’s also threatened by efforts such as “trusted computing” (often called “treacherous computing”), whose goal is to create systems in which external organizations, not computer users, command complete control over a user’s computer (BBC News among others is concerned about this).

Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace argues that software code has the same role in cyberspace as law does in real space. In fact, he simply argues that “code is law”, that is, that as computers are becoming increasingly embedded in our world, what the code does, allows, and prohibits, controls what we may or may not do in a powerful way. In particular he discusses the implications of “open code”.

All of these issues are beyond the scope of this paper, but the referenced materials may help you find more information if you’re interested.

1.5 Organization of this Paper

Below is data discussing popularity, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. I close with a brief discussion of non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, FLOSS on the desktop, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and conclusions. A closing appendix gives more background information about FLOSS. Each section has many subsections or points. The non-quantitative issues section includes discussions about freedom from control by another (especially a single source), protection from licensing litigation, flexibility, social / moral / ethical issues, and innovation. The unnecessary fears section discusses issues such as support, legal rights, copyright infringement, abandonment, license unenforceability, GPL “infection”, economic non-viability, starving programmers (i.e., the rising commercialization of FLOSS), compatibility with capitalism, elimination of competition, elimination of “intellectual property”, unavailability of software, importance of source code access, an anti-Microsoft campaign, and what’s the catch. And the appendix discusses definitions of FLOSS, motivations of developers and developing companies, history, licenses, FLOSS project management approaches, and forking.

2. Popularity

Many people think that a product is only a winner if it is popular. This is lemming-like, but there’s some rationale for this: products that have many users get applications built on top of them, trained users, and momentum that reduces future risk. Some writers argue against FLOSS or GNU/Linux as “not being mainstream”, but if their use is widespread then such statements reflect the past, not the present. There’s excellent evidence that many FLOSS products are popular:

1. The most popular web server has always been FLOSS since such data have been collected. For example, Apache is the current #1 web server. Netcraft’s statistics on web servers have consistently shown Apache (an FLOSS web server) is the most popular web server ever since Apache grew into the #1 web server in April 1996. Before that time (from August 1995 through March 1996) the most popular web server was the NCSA web server (Apache’s ancestor), and it is also FLOSS.

   Netcraft’s survey published May 2011 polled all the web sites they could find (totaling 324,697,205 sites), and found that of all the sites they could find, counting by name, 62.71% of web server ran Apache, while 18.37% using the Microsoft web server (these were the top two).

   However, many web sites have been created that are simply “placeholder” sites (i.e., their domain names have been reserved but they are not being used); such sites are termed “inactive.” This means that just tracking the names can be misleading, and somewhat vulnerable to rigging. This eventually happened. In April 2006 there was a one-time significant increase in IIS sites (versus Apache) among inactive sites, entirely due to a single company (Go Daddy) switching from Apache to IIS when serving inactive sites. While it is more difficult for a single active site to switch web servers, it is trivial for a hosting organization to switch all its inactive sites. Go Daddy’s president and COO, Warren Adelman, refused to discuss whether or not Microsoft paid or gave other incentives to move its inactive (parked) domains to Windows, leading a vast number of people to suspect that Go Daddy was paid by Microsoft to make this change, just to try to make Microsoft’s popularity figures look better than they really were.

   Thus, since 2000, Netcraft has been separately counting “active” web sites. Netcraft’s count of only the active sites is arguably a more relevant figure than counting all web sites, since the count of active sites shows the web server selected by those who choose to actually develop a web site. Apache does extremely well when counting active sites; in the May 2011 results, Apache had 57.52% of the web server market and Microsoft had 15.41%.

   Netcraft’s latest public SSL survey (Jan 2009) surveyed the number of web servers that encrypted their information using TLS/SSL. In short, "Netscape once dominated... Microsoft soon caught up and passed... [and now the] most popular choice of SSL web servers is the open source Apache server." Apache had about 45% of the market, and Microsoft had about 43%, and Microsoft's market share was clearly trending down.

   Years ago, Netcraft’s September 2002 survey reported on websites based on their “IP address” instead of the host name; this has the effect of removing computers used to serve multiple sites and sites with multiple names. When counting by IP address, Apache has shown a slow increase from 51% at the start of 2001 to 54%, while Microsoft has been unchanged at 35%. Again, a clear majority.

   CNet’s ”Apache zooms away from Microsoft’s Web server” summed up the year 2003 noting that “Apache grew far more rapidly in 2003 than its nearest rival, Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS), according to a new survey--meaning that the open-source software remains by far the most widely used Web server on the Internet.” The same happened in 2004, in fact, in just December 2004 Apache gained a full percentage point over Microsoft’s IIS among the total number of all web sites.

   Apache’s popularity in the web server market has been independently confirmed by E-Soft’s Security Space - their report on web server market share published April 1st, 2007 surveyed 23,331,627 web servers in March 2007 and found that Apache was #1 (73.29%), with Microsoft IIS being #2 (20.01%). E-soft also reports specifically on secure servers (web servers supporting SSL/TLS, such as e-commerce sites); Apache leads there too, with 52.49% of web servers using Apache, as compared to Microsoft’s 39.32%. You can go to http://www.securityspace.com for more information.

   Netcraft has noted that by April 2007 some domains appear to be running lighthttpd, but claim to be running Apache instead. For this paper’s purpose a lighttpd server claiming to be Apache does not harm the validity of the result, though. Both lighttpd and Apache are FLOSS, so the popularity of FLOSS web servers would be the sum of them (and other FLOSS web servers) anyway.

   Obviously these figures fluctuate monthly; see Netcraft and E-soft for their latest survey figures.

2. Internet Explorer has been losing popularity to FLOSS web browsers (such as Mozilla Firefox) since mid-2004, a trend especially obvious in leading indicators such as technology sites, web development sites, and bloggers. PC World found that in July 2004, Internet Explorer began to become measurably less popular compared to to FLOSS browsers. According to PC World, IE lost 1% of its popularity in a single month, July 2004. In the same time period Mozilla-based browser use increased by 26%. IE was still far more widely used at this time according to this July 2004 poll (94.73%), but IE hadn’t lost market share for many years, and it takes a significant event for that many people to change browsers. This was probably at least in part due to repeated security problems (though its poor support of web standards and lack of features may also have had a role). Note that the major Mozilla rewrite of its web browser, Mozilla Firefox, wasn’t even officially available at time; Firefox wasn’t officially released until November 9, 2004.

   A multitude of studies show that IE is losing popularity, while FLOSS web browsers (particularly Firefox and Chrome) are gaining popularity. The figure above shows web browser market share over time; the red squares are Internet Explorer’s market share (all versions), and the blue circles are the combination of the older Mozilla suite and the newer Mozilla Firefox web browser (both of which are FLOSS).

   FLOSS web browsers (particularly Firefox) are gradually gaining market share among the general population of web users. By November 1, 2004, Ziff Davis revealed that IE had lost about another percent of the market in only 7 weeks. Chuck Upsdell has combined many data sources and estimates that, as of September 2004, IE has decreased from 94% to 84%, as users switch to other browser families (mainly Gecko); he also believes this downward trend is likely to continue. Information Week reported in March 18, 2005, some results from Net Applications (a maker of Web-monitoring software). Net Applications found that Firefox use rose to 6.17% of the market in February 2005, compared to 5.59% in January 2005. WebSideStory reported in February 2005 that Firefox’s general market share was 5.69% as of February 18, 2005, compared to IE’s 89.85%. OneStat reported on February 28, 2005, that Mozilla-based browsers’ global usage share (or at least Firefox’s) is 8.45%, compared to IE’s 87.28%. Co-founder Niels Brinkman suspects that IE 5 users were upgrading to Firefox, not IE 6, as at least one reason why “global usage share of Mozilla’s Firefox is still increasing and the total global usage share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still decreasing.” The site TheCounter.com reports global statistics about web browsers; February 2005 shows Mozilla-based browsers (including Firefox, but not Netscape) had 6%, while IE 6 had 81% and IE 5 had 8% (89% total for IE). This is a significant growth; the August 2004 study of 6 months earlier had Mozilla 2%, IE 6 with 79%, and IE 5 with 13% (92% for IE). The website quotationspage.com is a popular general-use website; quotationspage statistics of February 2004 and 2005 show a marked rise in the use of FLOSS browsers. In February 2004, IE had 89.93% while Mozilla-based browsers accounted for 5.29% of browser users; by February 2005, IE had dropped to 76.47% while Mozilla-based browsers (including Firefox) had risen to 14.11%. Janco Associates also reported Firefox market share data; comparing January 2005 to April 2005, Firefox had jumped from 4.23% to 10.28% of the market (IE dropped from 84.85% to 83.07% in that time, and Mozilla, Netscape, and AOL all lost market share in this time as well according to this survey).

   Nielsen/NetRatings’ survey of site visitors found that in June 2004, 795,000 people visited the Firefox website (this was the minimum for their tracking system). There were 2.2 million in January 2005, 1.6 million in February, and 2.6 million people who visited the Firefox web site in March 2005. The numbers were also up for Mozilla.org, the Web site of the Mozilla Foundation (FireFox’s developer).

   In October 2006, TechWeb noted that Firefox was continuing to grow, citing MarketShare’s report Firefox had continued to grow - it was now at 12.46% market share as of September 2006 among all browsers for general-purpose browsing (up from 11.84% the previous month). InformationWeek reported on January 16, 2007 that Firefox’s market share was continuing to climb after IE 7’s release.

   The growth of FLOSS web browsers becomes even more impressive when home users are specifically studied. Home users can choose which browser to use, while many businesses users cannot choose their web browser (it’s selected by the company, and companies are often slow to change). XitiMonitor surveyed a sample of websites used on a Sunday (March 6, 2005), totalling 16,650,993 visits. By surveying Sunday, they intended to primarily find out what people choose to use. Of the German users, an astonishing 21.4% were using Firefox. The other countries surveyed were France (12.2%), England (10.9%), Spain (9%), and Italy (8.6%). Here is the original XitiMonitor study of 2005-03-06, an automated translation of the XitiMonitor study, and a blog summary of the XitiMonitor study observing that, “Web sites aiming at the consumer have [no] other choice but [to make] sure that they are compatible with Firefox ... Ignoring compatibility with Firefox and other modern browsers does not make sense business-wise.”

   Using this data, we can determine that 13.3% of European home users were using Firefox on this date in March 2005. How do can get such a figure? Well, we can use these major European countries as representatives of Europe as a whole; they’re certainly representative of western Europe, since they’re the most populous countries. Presuming that the vast majority of Sunday users are home users is quite reasonable for Europe. We can then make the reasonable presumption that the number of web browser users is proportional to the general population. Then we just need to get the countries’ populations; I used the CIA World Fact Book updated to 2005-02-10. These countries’ populations (in millions) are, in the same order as above, 82, 60, 60, 40, and 58; calculating (21.4%*82 + 12.2%*60 + 10.9%*60 + 9%*40 + 8.6%*58) / (82+60+60+40+58) yields 13.3%.

   Among leading-edge indicators such as the technically savvy and web developers, the market penetration has been even more rapid and widespread. In one case (Ars Technica), Firefox has become the leading web browser! This is a leading indicator because these are the people developing the web sites you’ll see tomorrow; in many cases, they’ve already switched to FLOSS web browsers such as Firefox. W3schools is a site dedicated to aiding web developers, and as part of their role track the browsers that web developers use. W3schools found a dramatic shift from July 2003 to September 2004, with IE dropping from 87.2% to 74.8% while Gecko-based browsers (including Netscape 7, Mozilla, and Firefox) rising from 7.2% to 19%. ( W3Schools’ current statistics are available). This trend has continued; as of March 2005 Firefox was still growing in market share, having grown to 21.5% (with an increase every month), while IE was shrinking quickly (IE 6 was down to 64.0% and decreasing every month). CNN found that among its CNET News.com readers, site visitors with FLOSS browsers jumped up from 8% in January 2004 to 18% by September 2004. Statistics for Engadget.com, which has a technical audience, found that as of September 2004, only 57% used a MS browser and Firefox had rapidly risen to 18%. IT pundits such as PC Magazine’s John C. Dvorak reported even more dramatic slides, with IE dropping to 50% share. InformationWeek reported that on March 30, 2005, 22% of visitors used Firefox, versus 69% who used Internet Explorer. The technical website Ars Technica reported on March 27, 2005, that Firefox was now their #1 browser at 40%, while IE was down to #2 at 30% (vs. 38% in September 2004).

   Bloggers, another group of especially active web users (and thus, I believe, another leading indicator) also suggest this is a trend. InformationWeek’s March 30, 2005 article “Firefox Thrives Among Bloggers” specifically discussed this point. InformationWeek reported that on Boing Boing, one of the most popular blog sites, March 2005 statistics show that more of their users use Firefox than Internet Explorer: 35.9% of its visitors use Firefox, compared with 34.5% using Internet Explorer. I checked Boing Boing’s April 2, 2004 statistics; they reported Firefox at 39.1%, IE at 33.8%, Safari at 8.8%, and Mozilla at 4.1%; this means that Firefox plus Mozilla was at 43.2%, significantly beyond IE’s 33.8%. Between January 1 though March 9, the Technometria blog found that “Firefox accounted for 28% of browsers compared with 58% for Internet Explorer.” Kottke.org reported on February 27 that 41% of visitors used Mozilla-based browsers (such as Firefox), while 31% used Internet Explorer.

   Net Applications’ tracking of web browser market share found that Firefox’ market share has been growing, reaching 10.05% by March 2006. News sources, such as ComputerWorld and InformationWeek, trumpeted this news; 10% of all web browsers (and growing) is such a large market that it’s now considered risky for developers to ignore Firefox.

   OneStat.com’s statistics of July 9, 2006 show increasing Firefox use. They found that global Firefox market share had stabilized for a little while, and then rapidly grown again. Their statistics found that globally Mozilla Firefox had 12.93% (compared to IE’s 83.05%), and that it varied considerably by country. In the U.S., Firefox was at 15.82% (compared to IE 79.78%), while in Germany Firefox had 39.02% (compared to IE’s 55.99%).

   These increasing market share statistics are in spite of data-gathering problems that under-report FLOSS browsers. Some non-IE browsers are configured to lie and use the same identification string as Internet Explorer, even though they aren’t actually IE. Thus, all of these studies are almost certainly understating the actual share of non-IE browsers, though the amount of understatement is generally unknown.

   In short, efforts such as the grassroots Spread Firefox marketing group seem to have been very effective at convincing people to try out the FLOSS web browser Firefox. Once people try it, they appear to like it enough to continue using it. Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox by David H. Freedman (Inc.com magazine) reviews the history and context of Firefox. They had set the absurdly ambitious goal of a million downloads within 10 days of release in November 2004; they reached that in only 4 days, and had 10 million downloads within 30 days. In only a year, Firefox was being downloaded an average of 250,000 times per day. He concludes that Mozilla “may be the hottest tech company in America.”

   The Wikipedia article on usage share of web browsers (May 30, 2011 version) summarizes web browser market share data from a variety of sources, specifically Net Applications, StatCounter, W3Counter, and Wikipedia itself. They found that the shares, averaged worldwide, were Internet Explorer 43.2%, Mozilla Firefox 28.6%, Google Chrome 14.6%, Safari 6.3%, Opera 2.6%, and other Mobile browsers 4.7%; both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are FLOSS, so at least 43.2% of web browser users are using FLOSS tools. This varies by region, for example, in Europe Firefox is the most popular web browser, and FLOSS as a whole has a commanding lead.

3. Linux-based Android smart phones have become a powerful market force. In a 3-month period ending November 2010 in the U.S., the market shares were RIM 33.5% (fell 4.1%), Android 26% (grew 6.4%), Apple 25% (grew less than 1%), Microsoft 9% (fell 1.8%), Palm 3.9% (fell 0.7%), per Comscore as reported by InformationWeek 2011. Gartner and Nielson have also posted market share data showing the growth of Android.

4. GNU/Linux is the #2 web serving OS on the public Internet (counting by physical machine), according to a study by Netcraft surveying March and June 2001. Some of Netcraft’s surveys have also included data on OSes; two 2001 surveys (their June 2001 and September 2001 surveys) found that GNU/Linux is the #2 OS for web servers when counting physical machines (and has been consistently gaining market share since February 1999). As Netcraft themselves point out, the usual Netcraft web server survey (discussed above) counts web server host names rather than physical computers, and so it doesn’t measure such things as the installed hardware base. Companies can run several thousand web sites on one computer, and most of the world’s web sites are located at hosting and co-location companies.

   Therefore, Netcraft developed a technique that indicates the number of actual computers being used as Web servers, together with the OS and web server software used (by arranging many IP addresses to reply to Netcraft simultaneously and then analyzing the responses). This is a statistical approach, so many visits to the site are used over a month to build up sufficient certainty. In some cases, the OS detected is that of a “front” device rather than the web server actually performing the task. Still, Netcraft believes that the error margins world-wide are well within the order of plus or minus 10%, and this is in any case the best available data.

   Before presenting the data, it’s important to explain Netcraft’s system for dating the data. Netcraft dates their information based on the web server surveys (not the publication date), and they only report OS summaries from an earlier month. Thus, the survey dated “June 2001” was published in July and covers OS survey results of March 2001, while the survey dated “September 2001” was published in October and covers the operating system survey results of June 2001.

   Here’s a summary of Netcraft’s study results:

   OS group	Percentage (March)	Percentage (June)	Composition
   Windows	49.2%	49.6%	Windows 2000, NT4, NT3, Windows 95, Windows 98
   [GNU/]Linux	28.5%	29.6%	[GNU/]Linux
   Solaris	7.6%	7.1%	Solaris 2, Solaris 7, Solaris 8
   BSD	6.3%	6.1%	BSDI BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
   Other Unix	2.4%	2.2%	AIX, Compaq Tru64, HP-UX, IRIX, SCO Unix, SunOS 4 and others
   Other non-Unix	2.5%	2.4%	MacOS, NetWare, proprietary IBM OSes
   Unknown	3.6%	3.0%	not identified by Netcraft OS detector

   Much depends on what you want to measure. Several of the BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD) are FLOSS as well; so at least a part of the 6.1% for BSD should be added to GNU/Linux’s 29.6% to determine the percentage of FLOSS OSes being used as web servers. Thus, it’s likely that approximately one-third of web serving computers use FLOSS OSes. There are also regional differences, for example, GNU/Linux leads Windows in Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

   Well-known web sites using FLOSS include Google (GNU/Linux) and Yahoo (FreeBSD).

   If you really want to know about the web server market breakdown of “Unix vs. Windows,” you can find that also in this study. All of the various Windows OSes are rolled into a single number (even Windows 95/98 and Windows 2000/NT4/NT3 are merged, although they are fundamentally very different systems). Merging all the Unix-like systems in a similar way produces a total of 44.8% for Unix-like systems (compared to Windows’ 49.2%) in March 2001.

   Note that these figures would probably be quite different if they were based on web addresses instead of physical computers; in such a case, the clear majority of web sites are hosted by Unix-like systems. As stated by Netcraft, “Although Apache running on various Unix systems runs more sites than Windows, Apache is heavily deployed at hosting companies and ISPs who strive to run as many sites as possible on one computer to save costs.”

5. GNU/Linux is the #1 server OS on the public Internet (counting by domain name), according to a 1999 survey of primarily European and educational sites. The first study that I’ve found that examined GNU/Linux’s market penetration is a survey by Zoebelein in April 1999. This survey found that, of the total number of servers deployed on the Internet in 1999 (running at least ftp, news, or http (WWW)) in a database of names they used, the #1 OS was GNU/Linux (at 28.5%), with others trailing. It’s important to note that this survey, which is the first one that I’ve found to try to answer questions of market share, used existing databases of servers from the .edu (educational domain) and the RIPE database (which covers Europe , the Middle East, parts of Asia, and parts of Africa), so this isn’t really a survey of “the whole Internet” (e.g., it omits “.com” and “.net”). This is a count by domain name (e.g., the text name you would type into a web browser for a location) instead of by physical computer, so what it’s counting is different than the Netcraft June 2001 OS study. Also, this study counted servers providing ftp and news services (not just web servers).

   Here’s how the various OSes fared in the study:

   Operating System	Market Share	Composition
   GNU/Linux	28.5%	GNU/Linux
   Windows	24.4%	All Windows combined (including 95, 98, NT)
   Sun	17.7%	Sun Solaris or SunOS
   BSD	15.0%	BSD Family (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDI, ...)
   IRIX	5.3%	SGI IRIX

   A part of the BSD family is also FLOSS, so the FLOSS OS total is even higher; if over 2/3 of the BSDs are FLOSS, then the total share of FLOSS would be about 40%. Advocates of Unix-like systems will notice that the majority (around 66%) were running Unix-like systems, while only around 24% ran a Microsoft Windows variant.

6. GNU/Linux was the #2 server OS sold in 1999, 2000, and 2001. According to a June 2000 IDC survey of 1999 licenses, 24% of all servers (counting both Internet and intranet servers) installed in 1999 ran GNU/Linux. Windows NT came in first with 36%; all Unixes combined totaled 15%. Again, since some of the Unixes are FLOSS systems (e.g., FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD), the number of FLOSS systems is actually larger than the GNU/Linux figures. Note that it all depends on what you want to count; 39% of all servers installed from this survey were Unix-like (that’s 24%+15%), so “Unix-like” servers were actually #1 in installed market share once you count GNU/Linux and Unix together.

   IDC released a similar study on January 17, 2001 titled “Server Operating Environments: 2000 Year in Review”. On the server, Windows accounted for 41% of new server OS sales in 2000, growing by 20% - but GNU/Linux accounted for 27% and grew even faster, by 24%. Other major Unixes had 13%.

   IDC’s 2002 report found that Linux held its own in 2001 at 25%. All of this is especially intriguing since GNU/Linux had 0.5% of the market in 1995, according to a Forbes quote of IDC. Data such as these (and the TCO data shown later) have inspired statements such as this one from IT-Director on November 12, 2001: “Linux on the desktop is still too early to call, but on the server it now looks to be unstoppable.”

   These measures do not measure all server systems installed that year; some Windows systems are copies that have not been paid for (sometimes called pirated software), and FLOSS OSes such as GNU/Linux and the BSDs are often downloaded and installed on multiple systems (since it’s legal and free to do so).

   Note that a study published October 28, 2002 by the IT analyst company Butler Group concluded that on or before 2009, Linux and Microsoft’s .Net will have fully penetrated the server OS market from file and print servers through to the mainframe.

7. GNU/Linux and Windows systems (when Windows CE and XP are combined) are the leaders and essentially even in terms of developer use for future embedded projects, according to Evans Data Corporation (EDC). Their Embedded Systems Developer Survey, fielded in July 2002, asked developers “For each of the following operating systems, please indicate whether you are targeting the OS on your current project or your next project.” They collected data from 444 developers. Their results: 30.2% of embedded developers use or expect to use Linux, while 16.2% say they will use Windows CE and another 14.4% say they will use Windows XP Embedded. If the two Windows systems are combined, this gives Windows Embedded operating systems a statistically insignificant edge over Embedded Linux (at 30.6% vs. 30.2%). However, Embedded Linux has nearly double the growth rate, and combining two different Windows systems into a single value is somewhat misleading. Wind River’s VxWorks embedded OS, the current embedded software market leader, “trails slightly behind Embedded Linux for current project use, and VxWorks’ modest gain of just 2.9% for expected use in future projects drops it to a distant third place position, ending up with less than half the usage rate of the two neck-and-neck future project usage leaders (Windows Embedded and Embedded Linux).”

8. An Evans Data survey published in November 2001 found that 48.1% of international developers and 39.6% of North Americans plan to target most of their applications to GNU/Linux. In October 2002, they found that 59% of developers expect to write Linux applications in the next year. The November 2001 edition of the Evans Data International Developer Survey Series reported on in-depth interviews with over 400 developers representing over 70 countries, and found that when asked which OS they plan to target with most of their applications next year, 48.1% of international developers and 39.6% of North Americans stated that they plan to target most of their applications to GNU/Linux. This is surprising since only a year earlier less than a third of the international development community was writing GNU/Linux applications. The survey also found that 37.8% of the international development community and 33.7% of North American developers have already written applications for GNU/Linux, and that over half of those surveyed have enough confidence in GNU/Linux to use it for mission-critical applications.

   Evans Data conducted a survey in October 2002. In this survey, they reported “Linux continues to expand its user base. 59% of survey respondents expect to write Linux applications in the next year.”

9. An IBM-sponsored study on Linux suggested that GNU/Linux has “won” the server war as of 2006, as 83% were using GNU/Linux to deploy new systems versus only 23% for Windows. The November 9, 2006 article The war is over and Linux won by Dana Blankenhorn summarizes a new IBM-sponsored study. IBM determined that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux next year, against 23% for Windows. He noted, “Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.”

10. Half of all mission-critical business applications are expected to run on GNU/Linux by 2012 A survey of IT directors, vice presidents and CIOs carried out by Saugatuck Research, reported in January 2007, suggests that nearly half of all companies will be running mission-critical business applications on Linux in five years’ time.

11. An Evans Data survey made public in February 2004 found that 1.1 million developers in North America were working on FLOSS projects. Evans Data’s North American Developer Population Study examined the number of software developers using various approaches. It found that more than 1.1 million developers in North America were spending at least some of their time working on Open Source development projects. That’s an extraordinarily large number of people, and it doesn’t even account for developers in other countries. Many only develop part-time, but that many people can develop a lot of software, and having a large number of people increases the likelihood of helpful insights and innovations in various FLOSS projects.

12. A 2004 InformationWeek survey found that 67% of companies use FLOSS products, with another 16% expecting to use it in 2005; only 17% have no near-term plans to support FLOSS products. The November 1, 2004 InformationWeek article Open-Source Software Use Joins The Mix by Helen D’Antoni reported the results from InformationWeek Research, which measured adoption of “open-source architecture” and found that adoption is widespread. The survey also found other interesting results: “In general, companies don’t view open-source software as risky. It often functions alongside [proprietary] and internally developed software, and because of this acceptance, open-source code is being used more broadly. Its use is evolving as companies look for cost-effective ways to manage software expenses.” Of those companies using FLOSS, they found that 42% of companies implement production database operations using FLOSS, with 33% more considering it; only 25% are not using or considering FLOSS for production database use.

13. A Japanese survey found widespread use and support for GNU/Linux; overall use of GNU/Linux jumped from 35.5% in 2001 to 64.3% in 2002 of Japanese corporations, and GNU/Linux was the most popular platform for small projects. The book Linux White Paper 2003 (published by Impress Corporation) surveys the use of GNU/Linux in Japan (it is an update to an earlier book, “Linux White Paper 2001-2002”). This is written in Japanese; here is a brief summary of its contents.

    The survey has two parts, user and vendor. In “Part I : User enterprise”, they surveyed 729 enterprises that use servers. In “Part II : Vendor enterprise”, they surveyed 276 vendor enterprises who supply server computers, including system integrators, software developers, IT service suppliers, and hardware resellers. The most interesting results are those that discuss the use of Linux servers in user enterprises, the support of Linux servers by vendors, and Linux server adoption in system integration projects.

    First, the use of Linux servers in user enterprises:

    System	2002	2001
    Linux server	64.3%	35.5%
    Windows 2000 Server	59.9%	37.0%
    Windows NT Server	64.3%	74.2%
    Commercial Unix server	37.7%	31.2%

    And specifically, here’s the average use in 2002:

    System	Ave. units	# samples
    Linux server	13.4	N=429 (5.3 in 2001)
    Windows 2000 Server	24.6	N=380
    Windows NT Server	4.5	N=413
    Commercial Unix server	6.9	N=233

    Linux servers are the fastest growing category from last year. The average units of server per enterprise increased by 2.5-fold from 5.3 units to 13.4 units.

    Second, note the support of GNU/Linux servers by vendors:

    System	Year 2002 Support
    Windows NT/2000 Server	66.7%
    Linux server	49.3%
    Commercial Unix server	38.0%

    This is the rate of vendors that develop or sale products supporting Linux server; note that Linux is already a major OS when compared with its competitors. The reasons for supporting Linux server were also surveyed, which turn out to be different than the reasons in some other counties (for a contrast, see the European FLOSS report):

    Increase of importance in the future	44.1%
    Requirement from their customers	41.2%
    Major OS in their market	38.2%
    Free of licence fee	37.5%
    Most reasonable OS for their purpose	36.0%
    Open source	34.6%
    High reliability	27.2%

    Third, note the rate of Linux server adoption in system integration projects:

    Project Size (Million Yen)	Linux		Win2000	Unix
    	2002	2001	2002	2002
    0-3	62.7%	65.7%	53.8%	15.4%
    3-10	51.5%	53.7%	56.3%	37.1%
    10-50	38.3%	48.9%	55.8%	55.8%
    50-100	39.0%	20.0%	45.8%	74.6%
    100+	24.4%	9.1%	51.1%	80.0%

    Where 1 Million Yen = $8,000 US. GNU/Linux servers are No.1 (62.5%) in small projects less than 3,000,000 Yen ($24,000 US), and GNU/Linux has grown in larger projects more than 50,000,000 Yen ($400,000 US) from 20.0% to 39.0%. In projects over 100,000,000 Yen ($800,000 US), Linux is adopted by 24.4% of the projects (mainly as a substitute for proprietary Unix systems). Note that many projects (especially large ones) use multiple platforms simultaneously, so the values need not total 100%.

    Note that the Japanese Linux white paper 2003 found that 49.3% of IT solution vendors support Linux in Japan.

14. The European FLOSS study found significant use of FLOSS. The large report Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS): Survey and Study, published in June 2002, examined many issues including the use of FLOSS. This study found significant variance in the use of FLOSS; 43.7% of German establishments reported using FLOSS, 31.5% of British establishments reported using FLOSS, while only 17.7% of Swedish establishments reported using FLOSS. In addition, they found that OSS usage rates of larger establishments were larger than smaller establishments, and that OSS usage rates in the public sector were above average.

15. Microsoft sponsored its own research to “prove” that GNU/Linux is not as widely used, but this research has been shown to be seriously flawed. Microsoft sponsored a Gartner Dataquest report claiming only 8.6% of servers shipped in the U.S. during the third quarter of 2000 were Linux-based. However, it’s worth noting that Microsoft (as the research sponsor) has every incentive to create low numbers, and these numbers are quite different from IDC’s research in the same subject. IDC’s Kusnetzky commented that the likely explanation is that Gartner used a very narrow definition of “shipped”; he thought the number was “quite reasonable” if it only surveyed new servers with Linux, “But our research is that this is not how most users get their Linux. We found that just 10 to 15 percent of Linux adoption comes from pre-installed machines... for every paid copy of Linux, there is a free copy that can be replicated 15 times.” Note that it’s quite difficult to buy a new x86 computer without a Microsoft OS (Microsoft’s contracts with computer makers ensure this), but that doesn’t mean that these OSes are used. Gartner claimed that it used interviews to counter this problem, but its final research results (when compared to known facts) suggest that Gartner did not really counter this effect. For example, Gartner states that Linux shipments in the supercomputer field were zero. In fact, Linux is widely used on commodity parallel clusters at many scientific sites, including many high-profile sites. Many of these systems were assembled in-house, showing that Gartner’s method of defining a “shipment” does not appear to correlate to working installations. The Register’s article, “No one’s using Linux” (with its companion article “90% Windows..”) discusses this further. In short, Microsoft-sponsored research has reported low numbers, but these numbers are quite suspect.

16. Businesses plan to increase their use of GNU/Linux. A Zona Research study found that over half of the large enterprise respondents expected increases of up to 25% in the number of GNU/Linux users in their firm, while nearly 20% expected increases of over 50%. In small companies, over one third felt that GNU/Linux usage would expand by 50%. The most important factors identified that drove these decisions were reliability, lower price, speed of applications, and scalability. Here are the numbers:

    Expected GNU/Linux Use	Small Business	Midsize Business	Large Business	Total
    50% increase	21.0%	16%	19.0%	19%
    10-25% increase	30.5%	42%	56.5%	44%
    No growth	45.5%	42%	24.5%	36%
    Reduction	3.0%	0%	0%	1%

    You can see more about this study in “The New Religion: Linux and Open Source” (ZDNet) and in InfoWorld’s February 5, 2001 article “Linux lights up enterprise: But concerns loom about OS vendor profitability.”

17. The global top 1000 Internet Service Providers expect GNU/Linux use to increase by 154%, according to Idaya’s survey conducted January through March 2001. A survey conducted by Idaya of the global top 1000 ISPs found that they expected GNU/Linux to grow a further 154% in 2001. Also, almost two thirds (64%) of ISPs consider the leading open source software meets the standard required for enterprise level applications, comparable with proprietary software. Idaya produces FLOSS software, so keep that in mind as a potential bias.

18. A 2002 European survey found that 49% of CIOs in financial services, retail, and the public sector expect to be using FLOSS. OpenForum Europe published in February 2002 a survey titled Market Opportunity Analysis For Open Source Software. Over three months CIOs and financial directors in financial services, retail and public sector were interviewed for this survey. In this survey, 37% of the CIOs stated that they were already using FLOSS, and 49% expected to be using FLOSS in the future. It is quite likely that even more companies are using FLOSS but their CIOs are not aware of it. Perceived benefits cited included decreased costs in general (54%), lower software license cost (24%), better control over development (22%), and improved security (22%).

19. IBM found a 30% growth in the number of enterprise-level applications for GNU/Linux in the six month period ending June 2001. At one time, it was common to claim that “Not enough applications run under GNU/Linux” for enterprise-level use. However, IBM found there are over 2,300 GNU/Linux applications (an increase in 30% over 6 months) available from IBM and the industry’s top independent software vendors (ISVs). A Special report by Network Computing on Linux for the Enterprise discusses some of the strengths and weaknesses of GNU/Linux, and found many positive things to say about GNU/Linux for enterprise-class applications.

20. Morgan Stanley found significant and growing use of GNU/Linux. They surveyed 225 CIOs on August 2002, and among the respondents, 29% said they owned GNU/Linux servers, 8% did not but are formally considering buying them, and 17% of the CIOs said they neither owned nor were formally considering GNU/Linux servers but that they were informally considering them. The remainder (slightly less than half, or 46%) noted they didn’t own and weren’t considering GNU/Linux. For those that have recently purchased new GNU/Linux servers, 31% were adding capacity, 31% were replacing Windows systems, 24% were replacing Unix and 14% were replacing other OSes. It’s easier to transition to GNU/Linux from Unix than from Windows, so it’s intriguing that Windows was being replaced more often than Unix. CNet news commented on this study with additional commentary about open source vs. Microsoft.

21. Revenue from sales of GNU/Linux-based server systems increased 90% in the fourth quarter of 2002 compared to the fourth quarter of 2001. This 90% increase compared sharply with the 5% increase of server market revenue overall. This data was determined by Gartner Dataquest, and reported in C|Net.

    Sales of GNU/Linux servers increased 63% from 2001 to 2002. This is an increase from $1.3 billion to $2 billion, according to Gartner.

22. In a survey of business users by Forrester Research Inc., 52% said they are now replacing Windows servers with Linux. Business Week quoted this survey in a January 2005 article, noting that GNU/Linux is forcing Microsoft to offer discounts to avoid losing even more sales.

23. A 2001 survey found that 46.6% of IT professionals were confident that their organizations could support GNU/Linux, a figure larger than any OS except Windows. A TechRepublic Research survey titled Benchmarks, Trends, and Forecasts: Linux Report found that “support for Linux runs surprisingly deep” when it surveyed IT professionals and asked them how confidently their organizations could support various OSes. Given Windows’ market dominance on the desktop, it’s not surprising that most were confident that their organizations could support various versions of Windows (for Windows NT the figure was 90.6%; for Windows 2000, 81.6%). However, GNU/Linux came in third, at 46.4%; about half of those surveyed responded that their organizations were already confident in their ability to support GNU/Linux! This is especially shocking because GNU/Linux beat other well-known products with longer histories including Unix (42.1%), Novell Netware (39.5%), Sun Solaris (25.7%), and Apple (13.6%). TechRepublic suggested that there are several possible reasons for this surprisingly large result:
    • GNU/Linux is considered to be a rising technology; many IT professionals are already studying it and learning how to use it, assuming that it will be a marketable skill in the near future.
    • Many IT professionals already use GNU/Linux at home, giving GNU/Linux an entree into professional organizations.
    • Since GNU/Linux is similar to Unix, IT professionals who are proficient in Unix can easily pick up GNU/Linux.
    TechRepublic suggests that IT executives should inventory their staff’s skill sets, because they may discover that their organization can already support GNU/Linux if they aren’t currently using it.

24. Sendmail, an FLOSS program, is the leading email server, per surveys by D.J. Bernstein. A survey between 2001-09-27 and 2001-10-03 by D.J. Bernstein of one million random IP addresses successfully connected to 958 SMTP (email) servers (such servers are also called mail transport agents, or MTAs). Bernstein found that Unix Sendmail had the largest market share (42% of all email servers), followed by Windows Microsoft Exchange (18%), Unix qmail (17%), Windows Ipswitch IMail (6%), Unix smap (2%), UNIX Postfix (formerly VMailer, 2%) and Unix Exim (1%). Note that Bernstein implements one of Sendmail’s competitors (qmail), so he has a disincentive to identify Sendmail’s large market share. At the time qmail was not FLOSS, because modified derivatives of Qmail could not be freely redistributed (without express permission by the author). Qmail was “source viewable,”, so some people were confused into believing that Qmail was FLOSS. Since then, qmail has been released to the public domain and thus FLOSS. However, Sendmail, Postfix, and Exim were all FLOSS at the time. Indeed, not only is the leading program (Sendmail) FLOSS, but that FLOSS program has more than twice the installations of its nearest competition.
25. MailChannel’s survey (published 2007) showed that the top two email servers (Sendmail and Postfix) are FLOSS programs. Fingerprinting the World’s Mail Servers described a different survey approach: To avoid including spammers, they first started with a list of 400,000 companies worldwide, and then determined what their external email server software was. They even sent erroneous commands to double-check their results (different servers produced different results). The most popular two email servers were Sendmail (12.3%) and Postfix (8.6%). This was followed by Postini (8.5%), Microsoft Exchange (7.6%), MXLogic (6.0%), qmail (5.3%), and Exim (5.0%).

26. A survey in the second quarter of 2000 found that 95% of all reverse-lookup domain name servers (DNS) used bind, an FLOSS product. The Internet is built from many mostly-invisible infrastructure components. This includes domain name servers (DNSs), which take human-readable machine names (like “yahoo.com”) and translate them into numeric addresses. Publicly accessible machines also generally support “reverse lookups”, which convert the numbers back to names; for historical reasons, this is implemented using the hidden “in-addr.arpa” domain. By surveying the in-addr domain, you can gain insight into how the whole Internet is supported. Bill Manning has surveyed the in-addr domain and found that 95% of all name servers (in 2q2000) performing this important Internet infrastructure task are some version of “bind.” This includes all of the DNS root servers, which are critical for keeping the Internet functioning. Bind is an FLOSS program.

27. A survey in May 2004 found that over 75% of all DNS domains are serviced by an FLOSS program. Don Moore’s DNS Server Survey completed May 23, 2004 surveyed DNS servers. He found that BIND (an FLOSS program) serviced 70.105% of all domains, followed by TinyDNS (15.571%), Microsoft DNS Server (6.237%), MyDNS (2.792%), PowerDNS (1.964%), SimpleDNS Plus (1.25%), unknown (1.138%), and the Pliant DNS Server (0.277%), with many others trailing. Since BIND, MyDNS, PowerDNS, and Pliant are all FLOSS, FLOSS programs service 75.138% of all DNS domains. The figures are different if you count per-installation instead of per-domain, but FLOSS still dominates. Counting per-platform, we have BIND (72.598%), Microsoft (21.711%), TinyDNS (2.587%), unknown (1.041%), Simple DNS Plus (0.922%), MyDNS (0.314%), PowerDNS (0.26%). Totalling BIND, MyDNS, and PowerDNS produces the trivially smaller figure of 73.172% supported by DNS. This difference in figures shows that about 3 out of 4 organizations choose the FLOSS BIND when installing a DNS server, and the 1 in 4 who don’t and then choose Microsoft tend to be those supporting fewer domains (otherwise the Microsoft count of domains would be larger). In any case, given the critical nature of DNS to the Internet, it’s clear that FLOSS is a critical part of it.

28. PHP is the web’s #1 Server-side Scripting Language. PHP, a recursive acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”, is an open source server-side scripting language designed for creating dynamic Web pages (e.g., such as e-commerce). As noted in a June 3, 2002 article, PHP recently surpassed Microsoft’s ASP to become the most popular server-side Web scripting technology on the Internet, and was used by over 24% of the sites on the Internet. Of the 37.6 million web sites surveyed worldwide, PHP is running on over 9 million sites, and over the years 2000 through 2002 PHP has averaged a 6.5% monthly growth rate. Since that time, PHP has continued to be widely used. (The rates increased through 2003-2003, and then declined slightly, though this is probably due to the many alternative technologies available, such as Python and Ruby.)

29. OpenSSH is the Internet’s #1 implementation of the SSH security protocol. The Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is widely used to securely connect to computers and control them remotely (using either a text or X-Windows graphical interface). On April 2002, a survey of 2.4 million Internet addresses found that OpenSSH, an FLOSS implementation of SSH, was the #1 implementation, with 66.8% of the market; the proprietary “SSH” had 28.1%, Cisco had 0.4%, and others totaled 4.7%. By September 2004, OpenSSH had grown to a dominant 87.9% share. You can see general information about the survey, the specific SSH statistics for April 2002, and specific SSH statistics for September 2004. It’s also interesting to note that OpenSSH had less than 5% of the market in the third quarter of 2000, but its use steadily grew. By the fourth quarter of 2001, over half of all users of the SSH protocol were using OpenSSH, and its market share has continued to grow since.

30. CMP TSG/Insight found that 41% of application development tools were FLOSS, and VARBusiness found 20% of all companies using GNU/Linux. VARBusiness reported in September 2003 on “The Rise of Linux”. In the article, it reports a finding of CMP TSG/Insight: 41% of application development tools in use were FLOSS, second only to Microsoft (76%) and leading Oracle (35%), IBM (26%), Sun (21%), and Borland (18%). They also reported their own finding that 20% of all companies they surveyed were GNU/Linux, presumably less than that of Microsoft, but twice that of Netware and Unix. Indeed, they note that GNU/Linux has transformed “from a curiosity to a core competency.”

31. MySQL’s market share is growing faster than Windows’. An Evans Data survey released in January 2004 found that the use of FLOSS database MySQL grew 30% over the year, vs. 6% for Microsoft’s SQL Server and Access databases, according to a survey of 550 developers. Microsoft still has a far greater total market share in the database development market, but Evans Data reported that FLOSS’s “price and its ability to integrate with other software mesh well with the priorities of application developers” and that “Concerns over stability, expense and how well a database plays with others are leading a quickly growing number of...companies to seriously consider and implement an open source database solution.” Evans Data noted that “We expect this trend to continue as the open source offerings are continually improved upon.”

32. As of 2004, a CSC study determined that an astonishing 14% of the large enterprise office systems market are using FLOSS OpenOffice.org. Consulting firm Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) unsurprisingly found that Microsoft dominates the office suite market, with 95% of the overall share and more than 300 million users worldwide. But surprisingly, they found that the FLOSS OpenOffice.org has secured 14% of the large enterprise office systems market, with over 16 million downloads and countless CD installations.

33. A February 2005 survey of developers and database administrators found that 64% use an Open Source database. Evans Data Corp.’s “Winter 2005 Database Development Survey” of developers and database administrators (DBAs), released February 2005, found a strong increase in use of a variety of FLOSS databases throughout corporate U.S. Evans found 64% (about two-thirds) use Open Source databases (up from 58% the previous year), and over 50% use (or plan to use) XQuery and other open web services standards with their data -- Open Source or proprietary.

    Two key factors seem to driving this rise: survey respondents indicated that FLOSS databases are increasing their performance and scalability to the point where they are acceptable for use in corporate enterprise environments, and many organizations have tight IT and database development budgets. Evans found that MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Firebird were popular FLOSS databases. Evans found FireBird is the most used database among all database programs for ‘edge’ applications, with Microsoft Access as a close second (at 21%). In addition, MySQL and FireBird are locked in a virtual tie in the FLOSS database space; each are used by just over half of database developers who use FLOSS databases.

34. BusinessWeek reports that hardware companies are selling more than $1 billion in servers to run Linux every quarter. BusinessWeek’s article “Torvalds’ Baby Comes of Age” (October 3, 2005) reports that hardware companies are selling “more than $1 billion in servers to run Linux every quarter, while sales of servers running proprietary software continue to fall.” They note that, according to market research company IDC, “Linux is now commonplace on big corporate servers -- posting 11 consecutive quarters of growth.” They also quote IBM stating that 10 million desktops ran Linux in 2004, by their figures a 40% jump from a year ago.

35. InformationWeek’s February 2005 survey reported significant use of GNU/Linux, and that that 90% of companies anticipate a jump in server licenses for GNU/Linux. InformationWeek Research Brief “Linux Outlook” published February 2005 found that the “open-source movement is growing” and that, given the trends, the expected outcome is “Increased use of Linux and open-source software [and] a decline in the use of Windows NT, 2000, and XP. Two years ago a major hurdle in the use of Linux was reliable support and service, but no more.” Their survey was conducted in January 2005, surveying 439 business technology professionals. They found that “Open-source products are most commonly deployed on server operating systems, Web server applications, application development tools, and application servers.” Four out of five sites use GNU/Linux on Web or Intranet servers. More specifically, when asked “In what areas is your organization using Linux”, the the top areas where GNU/Linux is used include server operating systems (75%), web server applications (75%), application development tools (68%), application server (56%), and desktop/laptop operating system (47%). In the next 12 months, Linux is expected to replace Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers at nearly half of the sites we surveyed. Three in five sites expect to use Linux on servers instead of Windows NT or Windows 2000, and in fact, “nearly 90% of companies surveyed anticipate a jump in server licenses for Linux. No other product comes close to these expectations -- not Windows, Macintosh or Unix.” The top Linux distributions (in order) were Red Hat, Novell/SuSE, and Debian.

    Why so much use? “Low cost and the lack of licensing fees are the primary reasons [77%] why companies deploy Linux on PCs and servers... However, concern about the vulnerability of Microsoft products is also speeding up Linux adoption. Of the sites using Linux on PCs, 73% are doing so in response to Windows security issues while 69% seek an alternative to Windows. Two-thirds of sites state that Windows security concerns are driving Linux adoption on servers while nearly three in five server users want another option to Windows... Linux has its edge on Windows, with low cost, reliable performance, secure environment, expected future innovation and confidence in open-source development model.” Looking at their numbers in more detail bears this out. For servers, the primary reasons for using Linux were relatively low cost (77%), reliability (74%), performance (73%), Windows security issues (65%), needing an alternative to Windows (59%), recommendations by technical staff (59%), development tools widely available (46%), ability to modify source code to meet needs (45%), fast software patches and bug fixes (41%), and fulfills company requirements or standards (40%). The primary reasons for using Linux on PCs were similar though with different relative weights: relatively low cost (75%), Windows security issues (73%), need an alternative to Windows (69%), reliability (60%), performance (52%), recommendations by technical staff (45%), fast software patches and bug fixed (44%), development tools widely available (42%), ability to modify source code to meet needs (36%), fulfills company requirements or standards (34%).

    InformationWeek does not predict that everyone will be using GNU/Linux in all circumstances within a few years; instead, they believe their data suggests that “A myriad of operating system platforms will continue to typify IT architecture in 2005 and beyond.” And the report certainly does not have rose-colored sunglasses; it discusses some of the challenges that some users have had, too. But the report notes that in spite of this, “Linux is fulfilling the expectations of most users. Eighty-four percent of sites say they are highly satisfied with Linux-server performance [, and half of the sites reported] the same level of satisfaction on PCs.” (my emphasis.)

36. A 2007 survey claims that around half of all companies making embedded products are using Linux in them, with an increasing trend. LinuxDevice.com's 2007 survey of companies creating embedded systems, 47% were using Linux and 3.6% were using eCos in at least some of those products in the past 2 years. Both are FLOSS, so that's barely over half of all. The next largest was MS Windows at 12.3%, so Linux was clearly the leader. Even more interestingly, the developers expected that of the OSs in their companies embedded designs in the next 2 years, Linux would be used by 59.3% and eCos 3.7%, so the trend is clearly up for FLOSS use. This survey is from LinuxDevice.com, so there's the risk of number-fudging, but their readership is actually broader than their name might suggest; in much earlier surveys, only a minority of companies were even considering using Linux in 2 years. Still, that's an important caveat, and the the respondents are self-selected (which can often skew surveys). Still, it's of interest in showing that there is a growing trend of use, and it has other interesting results about embedded environments.

37. Optaros, a consulting firm, reports that 87% of organizations are now using open-source software; BusinessWeek claims that this demonstrates that FLOSS has greatly expanded into businesses. BusinessWeek’s December 2005 article “A Watershed for Open Source” reported that in 2005 “open source was the word on the lips of not just early adopters but of an early majority.” In particular, the article noted that “CIOs signed off on open-source projects [and not just] low-level engineers... on their own initiative [, and] venture capitalists woke up to the new business opportunities of open source.” They claimed the major events of 2005 were that Red Hat made lots of money from free software (this “observation” ignores the fact that one of the companies Red Hat bought, Cygnus, had been doing that for many years), Sun Microsystems’ opening much of its software, Motorola bets big on mobile Linux, Firefox went mainstream, and venture capitalists invest in FLOSS (they estimate $400 million was invested in FLOSS startups in 2005). BusinessWeek used as one of its supports a study by Optaros, who reports that 87% of organizations are now using FLOSS. This estimate may be low; many FLOSS deployments are made by lower-level people solving specific problems. Since there’s usually no requirement to report FLOSS use (there’s no particular reason to do so in many cases), upper management is often not aware when they’re using it... they just know that problems are getting solved.

38. IDC’s Spring 2006 survey found that developers around the world are increasing their use of FLOSS. As reported in It’s not just Linux: Open Source has arrived, IDC surveyed over 5,000 developers from 116 countries in the spring of 2006. They found that FLOSS is “being used by 71% of the developers in the world and is in production at 54 percent of their organizations. In addition, half of the global developers claim that the use of open source is increasing in their organizations.” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols added that this report showed that “One way or the other, open-source methods and software are used almost everywhere... Open source is so pervasive that IDC declares in this study that open-source software represents the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s. IDC analysts also believe that open source will eventually play a role in the life-cycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers.”

    Dr. Anthony Picardi, IDC’s senior vice president of global software research, made some very interesting statements based on this study: “The use of open source beyond Linux is pervasive, used by almost three-quarters of organizations and spanning hundreds of thousands of projects... The real impact of open source is to sustain innovations in mature software markets, thus extending the useful life of software assets and saving customers money... As business requirements shift from acquiring new customers to sustaining existing ones, the competitive landscape will move towards costs savings and serving up sustaining innovations to savvy customers, along with providing mainstream software to new market segments that are willing to pay only a fraction of conventional software license fees,” Picardi added. “Open source software is ultimately a resource for sustaining innovators.”

Perhaps the simplest argument that GNU/Linux has a significant market share (and that it’s increasing) is that Sun is modifying its Solaris product to run GNU/Linux applications, and IBM has already announced that GNU/Linux will be the successor of IBM’s own AIX.

3. Reliability

There are a lot of anecdotal stories that FLOSS is more reliable, but finally there is quantitative data confirming that mature FLOSS programs are often more reliable:

1. Equivalent FLOSS applications are more reliable, according to the Fuzz study. The paper “Fuzz Revisited” paper measured reliability by feeding programs random characters and determining which ones resisted crashing and freeze-ups. This approach is unlikely to find subtle failures, yet the study authors found that their approach still manages to find many errors in production software and is a useful tool for finding software flaws. What’s more, this approach is extremely fair and can be broadly applied to any program, making it possible to compare different programs fairly.
   Failure Rates as Measured by Fuzz Tests
   

   FLOSS had higher reliability by this measure. It states in section 2.3.1 that:

   It is also interesting to compare results of testing the commercial systems to the results from testing “freeware” GNU and Linux. The seven commercial systems in the 1995 study have an average failure rate of 23%, while Linux has a failure rate of 9% and the GNU utilities have a failure rate of only 6%. It is reasonable to ask why a globally scattered group of programmers, with no formal testing support or software engineering standards can produce code that is more reliable (at least, by our measure) than commercially produced code. Even if you consider only the utilities that were available from GNU or Linux, the failure rates for these two systems are better than the other systems.

   There is evidence that Windows applications have even less reliability than the proprietary Unix software (e.g., less reliable than the FLOSS software). A later paper published in 2000, “An Empirical Study of the Robustness of Windows NT Applications Using Random Testing”, found that with Windows NT GUI applications, they could crash 21% of the applications they tested, hang an additional 24% of the applications, and could crash or hang all the tested applications when subjecting them to random Win32 messages. Indeed, to get less than 100% of the Windows applications to crash, they had to change the conditions of the test so that certain test patterns were not sent. Thus, there’s no evidence that proprietary Windows software is more reliable than FLOSS by this measure. Yes, Windows has progressed since that time - but so have the FLOSS programs.

   Although the FLOSS experiment was done in 1995, and the Windows tests were done in 2000, nothing that’s happened since suggests that proprietary software has become much better than FLOSS programs since then. Indeed, since 1995 there’s been an increased interest and participation in FLOSS, resulting in far more “eyeballs” examining and improving the reliability of FLOSS programs.

   The fuzz paper’s authors also found that proprietary software vendors generally didn’t fix the problems identified in an earlier version of their paper (from 1990), and they found that concerning. There was a slight decrease in failure rates between their 1990 and 1995 paper, but many of the flaws they found (and reported) in the proprietary Unix programs were still not fixed 5 years later. In contrast, Scott Maxwell led an effort to remove every flaw identified in the FLOSS software in the 1995 fuzz paper, and eventually fixed every flaw. Thus, the FLOSS community’s response shows why, at least in part, FLOSS programs have such an edge in reliability; if problems are found, they’re often fixed. Even more intriguingly, the person who spearheaded ensuring that these problems were fixed wasn’t an original developer of the programs - a situation only possible with FLOSS.

   Now be careful: FLOSS is not magic pixie dust; beta software of any kind is still buggy! However, the 1995 experiment measured mature FLOSS to mature proprietary software, and the FLOSS software was more reliable under this measure.

2. IBM studies found GNU/Linux highly reliable. IBM ran a series of extremely stressful tests for 30 and 60 days, and found that the Linux kernel and other core OS components -- including libraries, device drivers, file systems, networking, IPC, and memory management -- operated consistently and completed all the expected durations of runs with zero critical system failures. Linux system performance was not degraded during the long duration of the run, the Linux kernel properly scaled to use hardware resources (CPU, memory, disk) on SMP systems, the Linux system handled continuous full CPU load (over 99%) and high memory stress well, and the Linux system handled overloaded circumstances correctly. IBM declared that these tests demonstrate that “the Linux kernel and other core OS components are reliable and stable ... and can provide a robust, enterprise-level environment for customers over long periods of time.”

3. GNU/Linux is more reliable than Windows NT, according to a 10-month ZDnet experiment. ZDnet ran a 10-month test for reliability to compare Caldera Systems OpenLinux, Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft’s Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 3. All three used identical (single-CPU) hardware, and network requests were sent to each server in parallel for standard Internet, file, and print services. The result: NT crashed an average of once every six weeks, each taking about 30 minutes to fix; that’s not bad, but neither GNU/Linux server ever went down. This ZDnet article also does a good job of identifying GNU/Linux weaknesses (e.g., desktop applications and massive SMP). Hopefully Windows has made improvements since this study - but the FLOSS have certainly made improvements as well.

4. GNU/Linux is more reliable than Windows NT, according to a one-year Bloor Research experiment. Bloor Research had both OSes running on relatively old Pentium machines. During the one year test, GNU/Linux crashed once due to a hardware fault (disk problems), which took 4 hours to fix, giving it a measured availability of 99.95 percent. Windows NT crashed 68 times, caused by hardware problems (disk), memory (26 times), file management (8 times), and various odd problems (33 times). All this took 65 hours to fix, giving an availability of 99.26 percent. It’s intriguing that the only GNU/Linux problem and many of the Windows problems were hardware-related; it could be argued that the Windows hardware was worse, or it could be argued that GNU/Linux did a better job of avoiding and containing hardware failures. The file management failure is due to Windows, and the odd problems appear due to Windows too, indicating that GNU/Linux is far more reliable than Windows. GNet summarized this as saying “the winner here is clearly Linux.”

5. A study by Reasoning found that the Linux kernel’s implementation of the TCP/IP Internet protocol stack had fewer defects than the equivalent stacks of several proprietary general-purpose operating systems, and equalled the best of the embedded operating systems. As noted in their press release and C|Net, Reasoning’s study compared six implementations of TCP/IP, the fundamental protocols underlying the Internet. Besides the Linux kernel, three of the implementations were part of commercial general-purpose operating systems, and two were embedded in commercial telecommunications equipment. The Linux kernel primarily used as the kernel of a general-purpose operating system; it would be reasonable to expect that the embedded operating systems would have better reliability because of the need for reliability in that market. The study was not commissioned by any of the GNU/Linux vendors or companies who might be competing with GNU/Linux, and thus should be free of bias.

   The company used automated tools to look five kinds of defects in code: Memory leaks, null pointer dereferences, bad deallocations, out of bounds array access and uninitialized variables. Reasoning found 8 defects in 81,852 lines of Linux kernel source lines of code (SLOC), resulting in a defect density rate of 0.1 defects per KSLOC. In contrast, the three proprietary general-purpose operating systems (two of them versions of Unix) had between 0.6 and 0.7 defects/KSLOC; thus the Linux kernel had a smaller defect rate than all the competing general-purpose operating systems examined. The rates of the two embedded operating systems were 0.1 and 0.3 defects/KSLOC, thus, the Linux kernel had an defect rate better than one embedded operating system, and equivalent to another.

   One issue is that the tool detects issues that may not be true problems. For example, of those 8 defects, one was clearly a bug and had been separately detected and fixed by the developers, and 4 defects clearly had no effect on the running code. None of the defects found were security flaws. To counter this, they also tracked which problems were repaired by the developers of the various products. The Linux kernel did quite well by this measure as well: the Linux kernel had 1 repaired defect out of 81.9 KSLOC, while the proprietary implementations had 235 repaired defects out of 568 KSLOC. This means the Linux kernel had a repair defect rate of 0.013 defects/KSLOC, while the proprietary implementations had a repair defect rate of 0.41 defects/KSLOC.

   CEO Scott Trappe explained this result by noting that the open source model encourages several behaviors that are uncommon in the development of commercial code. First, many users don’t just report bugs, as they would do with [proprietary] software, but actually track them down to their root causes and fix them. Second, many developers are reviewing each other’s code, if only because it is important to understand code before it can be changed or extended. It has long been known that peer review is the most effective way to find defects. Third, the open source model seems to encourage a meritocracy, in which programmers organize themselves around a project based on their contributions. The most effective programmers write the most crucial code, review the contributions of others, and decide which of these contributions make it into the next release. Fourth, open source projects don’t face the same type of resource and time pressures that [proprietary] projects do. Open source projects are rarely developed against a fixed time-line, affording more opportunity for peer review and extensive beta testing before release.

   This certainly doesn’t prove that FLOSS will always be the highest quality, but it clearly shows that FLOSS can be of high quality.

6. A similar study by Reasoning found that the MySQL database (a leading FLOSS database) had fewer defects than a set of 200 proprietary programs used for comparison. In a similar manner to the previous study, on December 15, 2003, Reasoning announced its analysis results comparing MySQL with various proprietary programs. MySQL had found 21 software defects in 236,000 source lines of code (SLOC), producing a defect density of 0.09 defects/KSLOC. Using a set of 200 recent proprietary projects (totalling 35 million SLOC), the same tools found a defect rate of 0.57 defects/KSLOC -- over six times the error rate. Again, not all defects are found by their tool, and this certainly doesn’t prove that FLOSS will always be the highest quality, but it clearly shows that FLOSS can be of high quality.

7. A study by Coverity found that the Linux kernel had far fewer defects than the industry average. Code-analysis firm Coverity performed a four-year research effort and found that the Linux kernel has significantly fewer software bugs in it than the industry average. Coverity’s approach reported 985 defects in the 5.7 million lines of code in the that make up the Linux kernel. According to data from Carnegie Mellon University, a typical program of similar size would usually have more than 5,000 defects. Coverity CEO Seth Hallem summarized this by saying, “Linux is a very good system in terms of bug density.” It’s not known how this compares to Microsoft Windows; Coverity did not have access to source code for the Microsoft Windows kernel. Coverity also did not have the source code for the many third-party drivers for Windows; these would need to be included for an accurate comparison, especially since Windows driver problems are known to be a significant problem in the reliability of many Windows deployments.

   Coverity reported newer results in August 2005, showing defect densities were very low (and had even gone down further). Their follow-up analysis of Linux kernel 2.6.12 found that all six critical defects they had found in their earlier study f Linux kernel 2.6.9 had been fixed. The August 2005 study found an average of 0.16 defects/KSLOC, down from 0.17 defects/KSLOC, even though the amount of code had increased, and “Although contributors introduced new defects, these were primarily in non-critical device drivers.”

8. Sites using Microsoft’s IIS web serving software have over double the time off-line (on average) than sites using the Apache software, according to a 3-month Swiss evaluation. These are the results of Syscontrol AG’s analysis of website uptime (announced February 7, 2000) They measured over 100 popular Swiss web sites over a three-month period, checking from 4 different locations every 5 minutes (it’d be interesting to see what a larger sample would find!). You can see their report (in German), or a Babelfish (machine) translation of the report. Here’s their set of published data on “average down-time (in hours in that month) for each type of server”, plus a 3-month average that I’ve computed:

   Downtime	Apache	Microsoft	Netscape	Other
   September	5.21	10.41	3.85	8.72
   October	2.66	8.39	2.80	12.05
   November	1.83	14.28	3.39	6.85
   Average	3.23	11.03	3.35	9.21

   It’s hard not to notice that Apache (the OSS web server) had the best results over the three-month average (and with better results over time, too). Indeed, Apache’s worst month was better than Microsoft’s best month. The difference between Netscape and Apache is statistically insignificant - but this still shows that the freely-available FLOSS solution (Apache) has a reliability at least as good as the most reliable proprietary solution.

   The report does state that this might not be solely the fault of the software’s quality, and in particular it noted that several Microsoft IIS sites had short interruptions at the same time each day (suggesting regular restarts). However, this still begs the question - why did the IIS sites require so many regular restarts compared to the Apache sites? Every outage, even if pre-planned, results in a service loss (and for e-commerce sites, a potential loss of sales). Presumably, IIS site owners who perform periodic restarts do so because they believe that doing so will improve their IIS systems’ overall reliability. Thus, even with pre-emptive efforts to keep the IIS systems reliable, the IIS systems are less reliable than the Apache-based systems which simply do not appear to require constant restarting.

9. 80% of the top ten most reliable hosting providers ran FLOSS, according to Netcraft’s May 2004 survey Netcraft’s May 2004 survey of the top ten most reliable hosting providers found 4 running GNU/Linux, 4 running FreeBSD, and only 2 running Microsoft Windows.

10. FLOSS did very well in a separate uptime study by Netcraft; as of August 3, 2001, of the 50 sites with the highest uptimes, 92% use Apache and 50% run on FLOSS OSes. Netcraft keeps a track of the 50 often-requested sites with the longest uptimes at http://uptime.netcraft.com. Looking at the August 3, 2001 uptime report, I found that 92% (46/50) of the sites use Apache; one site’s web server was unknown, and three others were not Apache. Of those three, only one reported to be Microsoft IIS, and that one instance is suspicious because its reported OS is BSD/OS (this apparent inconsistency can be explained in many ways, e.g., perhaps there is a front-end BSD/OS system that “masks” the IIS web site, or perhaps the web server is lying about its type to confuse attackers). In this snapshot, 50% (25/50) ran on an FLOSS OS, and only Unix-like OSes had these large uptimes (no Windows systems were reported as having the best uptimes).

    As with all surveys, this one has weaknesses, as discussed in Netcraft’s Uptime FAQ. Their techniques for identifying web server and OSes can be fooled. Only systems for which Netcraft was sent many requests were included in the survey (so it’s not “every site in the world”). Any site that is requested through the “what’s that site running” query form at Netcraft.com is added to the set of sites that are routinely sampled; Netcraft doesn’t routinely monitor all 22 million sites it knows of for performance reasons. Many OSes don’t provide uptime information and thus can’t be included; this includes AIX, AS/400, Compaq Tru64, DG/UX, MacOS, NetWare, NT3/Windows 95, NT4/Windows 98, OS/2, OS/390, SCO UNIX, Sony NEWS-OS, SunOS 4, and VM. Thus, this uptime counter can only include systems running on BSD/OS, FreeBSD (but not the default configuration in versions 3 and later), recent versions of HP-UX, IRIX, GNU/Linux 2.1 kernel and later (except on Alpha processor based systems), MacOS X, recent versions of NetBSD/OpenBSD, Solaris 2.6 and later, and Windows 2000. Note that Windows NT systems cannot be included in this survey (because their uptimes couldn’t be counted). Windows 2000 systems’s data are included in the source source for this survey, but they have a different problem. Windows 2000 had little hope to be included in the August 2001 list, because the 50th system in the list had an uptime of 661 days, and Windows 2000 had only been launched about 17 months (about 510 days) earlier. Note that HP-UX, GNU/Linux (usually), Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see an HP-UX, GNU/Linux (usually), or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days, and in fact their uptimes can be misleading (they may be up for a long time, yet not show it). There is yet one other weakness: if a computer switches operating systems later, the long uptime is credited to the new OS. Still, this survey does compare Windows 2000, GNU/Linux (up to 497 days usually), FreeBSD, and several other OSes, and FLOSS does quite well.

    It could be argued that perhaps systems on the Internet that haven’t been rebooted for such a long time might be insignificant, half-forgotten, systems. For example, it’s possible that security patches aren’t being regularly applied, so such long uptimes are not necessarily good things. However, a counter-argument is that Unix and Linux systems don’t need to be rebooted as often for a security update, and this is a valuable attribute for a system to have. Even if you accepted that unproven claim, it’s certainly true that there are half-forgotten Windows systems, too, and they didn’t do so well. Also, only systems someone specifically asked for information about were included in the uptime survey, which would limit the number of insignificant or half-forgotten systems.

    At the very least, Unix and Linux are able to quantitatively demonstrate longer uptimes than their Windows competitors can, so Unix and Linux have significantly better evidence of their reliability than Windows.

11. An in-depth analysis (published in the Communications of the ACM) found good evidence that FLOSS code quality appears to be at least equal and sometimes better than proprietary software. The article “Open Source Software Development Should Strive for Even Greater Code Maintainability” by Ioannis Samoladas, Ioannis Stamelos, Lefteris Angelis, and Apostolos Oikonomou, was published by the highly-respected “Communications of the ACM” in October 2004 (pp. 83-87). A minor variation of this paper was reprinted and made globally accessible in Programming Languages, Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005. The authors studied almost 6 million lines of code, tracking several programs over time, using the maintainability index (chosen by the Software Engineering Institute as the most suitable tool for measuring the maintainability of systems). Using their measurements, they concluded that FLOSS “code quality appears to be at least equal and sometimes better than the quality of [closed source software] code implementing the same functionality.” They conjectured that this “may be due to the motivation of skilled OSS programmers...” FLOSS is no panacea; they also found that FLOSS “code quality seems to suffer from the very same problems that have been observed in [closed source software] projects. Maintainability deterioration over time is a typical phenomenon... it is reasonable to expect similar behavior from the OSS projects as they age.” Clearly, FLOSS is not a silver bullet; developers of FLOSS programs have to work to keep their programs maintainable, and it is difficult to keep a program maintainable as it grows over time. FLOSS was found to have equal and sometimes better maintainability than proprietary programs, and that is a very encouraging result.

12. A detailed study of two large programs (the Linux kernel and the Mozilla web browser) found evidence that FLOSS development processes produce more modular designs. Harvard Business School’s “Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code” by Alan MacCormack, John Rusnak, and Carliss Baldwin (Working Paper Number 05-016) reports research results that worked to see if FLOSS programs tended to have better modularity than proprietary programs. It’s generally accepted that there are important benefits to greater modularity, in particular, a more modular system tends to be more reliable and easier to change over time.

    They examined the Linux kernel (developed as an FLOSS product), the original Mozilla web browser (developed as a proprietary product), and then the evolution of Mozilla after it became FLOSS. They found “significant differences in their designs”; Linux possessed a more modular architecture than the original proprietary Mozilla, and the redesigned FLOSS Mozilla had a more modular structure than both.

    To measure design modularity, they used a technique called Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) that identified dependencies between different design elements (in this case, between files, where calling a function/method of another file creates a dependency). They used two different measures using DSMs, which produced agreeing results.

    The first measure they computed is a simple one, called “change cost”. This measures the percentage of elements affected, on average, when a change is made to one element in the system. A smaller value is better, since as this value gets larger, it’s becomes increasingly likely that a change made will impact a larger number of other components and have unintended consequences. This measure isn’t that sensitive to the size of a system (see their exhibit 7), though obviously as a program gets larger that percentage implies a larger number of components. When Mozilla was developed as a proprietary product, and initially released as FLOSS, it had the large value of 17.35%. This means that if a given file is changed, on average, 17.35% of other files in system depend (directly or indirectly) on that file. After gaining some familiarity with the code, the FLOSS developers decided to improve its design between 1998-10-08 and 1998-12-11. Once the redesign was complete, the change cost dramatically decreased down to 2.78%, as you can see:

    Program	Change Cost
    Mozilla-1998-04-08	17.35%
    Mozilla-1998-10-08	18.00%
    Mozilla-1998-12-11	2.78%
    Mozilla-1999	3.80%
    Linux-2.1.88	3.72%
    Linux-2.1.105	5.16%

    Change cost is a fairly crude measure, though; it doesn’t take into account the amount of dependency (measured, say, as the number of calls from one file to another), and it doesn’t take clustering into account (a good design should minimize the communication between clusters more than communication in general). Thus, they computed “coordination cost,” an estimated cost of communicating information between agents developing each cluster. This measure is strongly dependent on the size of the system - after all, it’s easier to coordinate smaller projects. Thus, to use this as a measure of the quality of a design compared to another project, the sizes must be similar (in this case, by the number of files). The numbers are unitless, but smaller costs are better. The researchers identified different circumstances with similar sizes, so that the numbers could be compared. The following table compares Mozilla 1998-04-08 (built almost entirely by proprietary means) and Mozilla 1998-12-11 (just after the redesign by FLOSS developers) with Linux 2.1.105 (built by FLOSS processes):

    	Linux 2.1.105	Mozilla 1998-04-08	Mozilla 1998-12-11
    Number of Source files	1678	1684	1508
    Coordination Cost	20,918,992	30,537,703	10,234,903

    The paper computes numbers for several other cases, but yielding the same conclusion.

    It’d be easy to argue that kernels are fundamentally different than web browsers, but that can’t be the right explanation. When Mozilla was released to the FLOSS community, it was far worse by these measures, and the FLOSS community actively and consciously worked to improve its modularity. The browser soon ended up with a significant and measurable improvement in modularity, better than the kernel’s, without an obvious complete loss of functionality.

    It appears that at least part of the explanation is in the FLOSS development environment. FLOSS development is normally distributed worldwide, with little opportunity for face-to-face communication, and with many people contributing only part-time. Thus, “this mode of organization was only possible given that the design structure, and specifically, the partitioning of design tasks, was loosely-coupled.” In addition, the leadership of an FLOSS project is incentivized to make architectural decisions that lead to modularity, since if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to attract enough co-developers: “Without such an architecture, there was little hope that other contributors could a) understand enough of the design to contribute in a meaningful way, and b) develop new features or fix existing defects without affecting many other parts of the design.” Although not discussed in the paper, cultural norms may also be a factor; since the source code is reviewed by others, developers appear to actively disparage poor designs and praise highly modular designs.

    Again, this does not mean that FLOSS programs are always more modular; but it does suggest that there is pressure to make modular programs in an FLOSS project.

13. German import company Heinz Tröber found Linux-based desktops to be far more reliable than Windows desktops; Windows had a 15% daily failure rate, while Linux has 0%. Günter Stoverock, the data processing manager at German import company Heinz Tröber, reported that they had decided to run its ERP software on Linux-based systems, instead of Windows, because Windows was much less reliable. Stoverock stated that on Windows, “Out of 65 desktops, around 10 desktops crashed daily... Employees wasted around 30 minutes, that’s five times 30 minutes per week.” Note that this is a 15% daily failure rate, and the actual impacts were almost certainly more severe than simply a loss of 2 minutes of lost time per reboot. After all, this generous calculation ignores the cost of lost time due to lost data (requiring re-entry), time to restart whatever action they were doing, and the time for people to regain their focus on what they were doing. Stoverock then stated “That’s not acceptable -- we had to do something [to solve this].” The company switched to Linux desktop systems in 2001, and has had no downtime at all since (through March 2005). He reported that “There are no problems -- in the morning you turn the computer on, in the afternoon you turn it off -- that’s it.” I do not have more detailed information than this about their particular environment and results, which is a significant limitation of this report. On the other hand, I found no evidence that they have any reason to prefer either platform, and it appears that the functionality and usage was the same on both platforms, suggesting that this is valid comparison.

Damien Challet and Yann Le Du of the University of Oxford have written a paper titled Closed source versus open source in a model of software bug dynamics. In this paper they develop a model of software bug dynamics where users, programmers and maintainers interact through a given program. They then analyzed the model, and found that all other things being equal (such as number of users, programmers, and quality of programmers), “debugging in open source projects is always faster than in closed source projects.”

Of course, there are many anecdotes about Windows reliability vs. Unix. For example, the Navy’s “Smart Ship” program caused a complete failure of the USS Yorktown ship in September 1997. Whistle-blower Anthony DiGiorgio stated that Windows is “the source of the Yorktown’s computer problems.” Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office, said “there have been numerous software failures associated with [Windows] NT aboard the Yorktown.” Redman also said “Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT... If it were up to me I probably would not have used Windows NT in this particular application. If we used Unix, we would have a system that has less of a tendency to go down.”

Reliability is increasing important in software. ABI Research 2004 study “Automotive Electronics Systems: Market Requirements for Microcontrollers, Accelerometers, Hall Effect and Pressure Sensors” found that approximately 30% of all automotive warranty issues today are software and silicon-related.

One problem with reliability measures is that it takes a long time to gather data on reliability in real-life circumstances. Thus, there’s more data comparing older Windows editions to older GNU/Linux editions. The key is that these comparisons are fair, because they compare contemporaneous products. The available evidence suggests that FLOSS has a significant edge in reliability, at least in many circumstances.

4. Performance

Comparing GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows performance on equivalent hardware has a history of contentious claims and different results based on different assumptions. FLOSS has at least shown that it’s often competitive, and in many circumstances it beats the competition.

Performance benchmarks are very sensitive to the assumptions and environment, so the best benchmark is one you set up yourself to model your intended environment. Failing that, you should use unbiased measures, because it’s so easy to create biased measures.

First, here are a few recent studies suggesting that some FLOSS systems beat proprietary competitors in at least some circumstances:

1. Linux has done well in TPC database measures. In 2002, TPC-C database measures found that a Linux based system was faster than a Windows 2000 based system. In 2008, RHEL 5 did extremely well. More specifically, in 2002, an HP ProLiant DL580 with 32 Intel Xeon 900MHz CPUs running Oracle 9i R2 Enterprise edition ran faster running on a stock Red Hat Linux Advanced Server than on Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server. You can see the Linux and Windows reports; note that HP did not modify the Linux kernel to get these results.

   In 2008, In a recent independent test, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Advanced Platform did better than all other operating systems that could process more than 1 million transactions per minute, and at 22% lower cost than its next closest competitor. The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) validated Red Hat's processing of 1.2 million transactions per minute on an IBM System x 3950M2 with the Intel X7460 Xeon processor. Total IBM/Red Hat hardware and software costs were $1.99 per transaction, 22% cheaper than the next less expensive hardware/software combination (IBM/AIX at $2.81 per transaction). No Windows-based system performed as well, and Unix systems with faster performance cost at least 50% more.

2. PC Magazine’s November 2001 performance tests for file servers found that Linux with Samba significantly outperformed Windows 2000. Their article Performance Tests: File Server Throughput and Response Times found that Linux with Samba significantly outperformed Windows 2000 Server when used as a file server for Microsoft’s own network file protocols. This was true regardless of the number of simultaneous clients (they tested a range up to 30 clients), and it was true on the whole range on computers they used (Pentium II/233MHz with 128MiB RAM, Pentium III/550MHz with 256MiB RAM, and Pentium III/1GHz with 512MiB RAM, where MiB is 2^20 bytes). Indeed, as the machines became more capable the absolute difference grew more pronounced. On the fastest hardware while handling largest number of clients, GNU/Linux’s throughput was about 130 MB/sec vs. Windows’ 78 MB/sec (GNU/Linux was 78% faster).

3. PC Magazine tested file server performance again in April 2002; Linux with Samba beat Windows 2000 again, but Samba then surpassed Windows 2000 by about 100% and can handle 4 times as many clients. PC Magazine published another comparison of Samba and Windows (a summary is available electronically as “Samba runs rings around Win2000.”). They noted that the later Samba software surpasses the performance of Windows 2000 by about 100 percent under benchmark tests, and found that Linux and Samba can handle four times as many client systems as Windows 2000 before performance begins to drop off. Jay White, IT manager at electronics firm BF Group, said that Samba is one of the most useful pieces of server software available for a mixed Windows and Linux environment. “Our Samba server has been online for 394 days so far. The total cost is the hardware plus 30 minutes of my time each year,” he said. Mark Twells, IT coordinator at a large education facility, said, “We run six Samba servers on a variety of hardware [and] we have around 1,000 users.”; this certainly excellent evidence of Samba’s utility.

4. In performance tests by Sys Admin magazine, GNU/Linux beat Solaris (on Intel), Windows 2000, and FreeBSD. The article “Which OS is Fastest for High-Performance Network Applications?” in the July 2001 edition of Sys Admin magazine examined high-performance architectures and found that GNU/Linux beat its competition when compared with Solaris (on Intel), FreeBSD (an FLOSS system), and Windows 2000. They intentionally ran the systems “out of the box” (untuned), except for increasing the number of simultaneous TCP/IP connections (which is necessary for testing multi-threaded and asynchronous applications). They used the latest versions of OSes and the exact same machine. They reported (by OS) the results of two different performance tests.

   The FreeBSD developers complained about these tests, noting that FreeBSD by default emphasizes reliability (not speed) and that they expected anyone with a significant performance need would do some tuning first. Thus, Sys Admin’s re-did the tests for FreeBSD after tuning FreeBSD. One change they made was switching to “asynchronous” mounting, which makes a system faster (though it increases the risk of data loss in a power failure) - this is the GNU/Linux default and easy to change in FreeBSD, so this was a very small and reasonable modification. However, they also made many other changes, for example, they found and compiled in 17 FreeBSD kernel patches and used various tuning commands. The other OSes weren’t given the chance to “tune” like this, so comparing untuned OSes to a tuned FreeBSD isn’t really fair.

   In any case, here are their two performance tests:

   1. Their “real-world” test measured how quickly large quantities of email could be sent using their email delivery server (MailEngine). Up to 100 simultaneous sends there was no difference, but as the number increased the systems began showing significant differences in their hourly email delivery speed. By 500 simultaneous sends GNU/Linux was clearly faster than all except FreeBSD-tuned, and GNU/Linux remained at the top. FreeBSD-tuned had similar performance to GNU/Linux when running 1000 or less simultaneous sends, but FreeBSD-tuned peaked around 1000-1500 simultaneous connections with a steady decline not suffered by GNU/Linux, and FreeBSD-tuned had trouble going beyond 3000 simultaneous connections. By 1500 simultaneous sends, GNU/Linux was sending 1.3 million emails/hour, while Solaris managed approximately 1 million, and Windows 2000 and FreeBSD-untuned were around 0.9 million.
   2. Their “disk I/O test” created, wrote, and read back 10,000 identically-sized files in one directory, varying the size of the file instances. Here Solaris was the slowest, with FreeBSD-untuned the second-slowest. FreeBSD-tuned, Windows 2000, and GNU/Linux had similar speeds at the smaller file sizes (in some cases FreeBSD-tuned was faster, e.g., 8k and 16k file size), but when the file sizes got to 64k to 128k the OSes began to show significant performance differences; GNU/Linux was the fastest, then Windows 2000, then FreeBSD. At 128k, FreeBSD was 16% worse than Windows 2000, and 39% worse than GNU/Linux; all were faster than FreeBSD-untuned and Solaris. When totaling these times across file sizes, the results were GNU/Linux: 542 seconds, Windows 2000: 613 seconds, FreeBSD-tuned: 630 seconds, FreeBSD-untuned: 2398 seconds, and Solaris: 3990 seconds.

5. GNU/Linux with TUX has produced better SPEC values than Windows/IIS in several cases, even when given inferior drive configurations. One organization that tries to develop unbiased benchmarks is the SPEC Consortium, which develops and maintains a whole series of benchmarks. We can compare Microsoft Windows versus GNU/Linux by comparing SPECweb99 results (which measure web server performance) on identical hardware if both have undergone the same amount of performance optimization effort. Alas, things are not so simple; rarely are the same basic hardware platforms tested with both OSes, and even when that occurs, as of July 13, 2001 no exactly identical configurations have been tested (they differ in ways such as using a different number of hard drives, or including some faster hard drives). Using all results available by July 13, 2001, there were three hardware configurations, all from Dell, which ran both GNU/Linux (using the TUX web server/accelerator) and Windows (using IIS) on exactly the same underlying hardware. Here are the SPECweb99 results as of July 13, 2001 (larger is better), noting configuration differences:

   System	Windows SPEC Result	Linux SPEC Result
   Dell PowerEdge 4400/800, 2 800MHz Pentium III Xeon	1060 (IIS 5.0, 1 network controller)	2200 (TUX 1.0, 2 network controllers)
   Dell PowerEdge 6400/700, 4 700MHz Pentium III Xeon	1598 (IIS 5.0, 7 9GB 10KRPM drives)	4200 (TUX 1.0, 5 9GB 10KRPM drives)
   Dell PowerEdge 8450/700, 8 700MHz Pentium III Xeon	7300/NC (IIS 5.0, 1 9Gb 10KRPM and 8 16Gb 15KRPM drives) then 8001 (IIS 5.0, 7 9Gb 10KRPM and 1 18Gb 15KRPM drive)	7500 (TUX 2.0, 5 9Gb 10KRPM drives)

   The first row (the PowerEdge 4400/800) doesn’t really prove anything. The IIS system has lower performance, but it only had one network controller and the TUX system has two - so while the TUX system had better performance, that could simply be because it had two network connections it could use.

   The second entry (the PowerEdge 6400/700) certainly suggests that GNU/Linux plus TUX really is much better - the IIS system had two more disk drives available to it (which should increase performance), but the TUX system had over twice the IIS system’s performance.

   The last entry for the PowerEdge 8450/700 is even more complex. First, the drives are different - the IIS systems had at least one drive that revolved more quickly than the TUX systems (which should give IIS higher performance overall, since the transfer speed is almost certainly higher). Also, there were more disk drives (which again should give IIS still higher performance). When I originally put this table together showing all data publicly available in April 2001 (covering the third quarter of 1999 through the first quarter of 2001), IIS 5.0 (on an 8-processor Dell PowerEdge 8450/700) had a SPECweb99 value of 7300. Since that time, Microsoft changed the availability of Microsoft SWC 3.0, and by SPECweb99 rules, this means that those test results are “not compliant” (NC). This is subtle; it’s not that the test itself was invalid, it’s that Microsoft changed what was available and used the SPEC Consortium’s own rules to invalidate a test (possibly because the test results were undesirable to Microsoft). A retest then occurred, with yet another disk drive configuration, at which point IIS produced a value of 8001. However, both of these figures are on clearly better hardware - and in one circumstance the better hardware didn’t do better.

   Thus, in these configurations the GNU/Linux plus TUX system was given inferior hardware yet still sometimes won on performance. Since other factors may be involved, it’s hard to judge - there are pathological situations where “better hardware” can have worse performance, or there may be another factor not reported that had a more significant effect. Hopefully in the future there will be many head-to-head tests in a variety of identical configurations.

   Note that TUX is intended to be used as a “web accelerator” for many circumstances, where it rapidly handles simple requests and then passes more complex queries to another server (usually Apache). I’ve quoted the TUX figures because they’re the recent performance figures I have available. As of this time I have no SPECweb99 figures or other recent performance measures for Apache on GNU/Linux, or for Apache and TUX together; I also don’t have TUX reliability figures. I expect that such measures will appear in the future.

6. Low-level benchmarks by IBM found that GNU/Linux had better performance than Windows for pipes (an input/output mechanism), and also process and thread creation. Ed Bradford (manager of Microsoft Premier Support for IBM Software group) published in October 2001 the study Pipes in Linux, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. In this study he examined the the performance of pipes, a common low-level mechanism for communicating between program processes. He found the pipes in Red Hat 7.1 (with Linux kernel version 2.4.2) had a peak I/O rate of around 700 MB/sec, with a steady state at near 100 MB/sec for very large block sizes. In contrast, Windows 2000 peaked at 500 MB/sec, with a large block steady state of 80 MB/sec. Windows XP Professional (evaluation version) was especially disappointing; its peak I/O rate was only 120 MB/sec, with a stead state of 80 MB/sec, all on the same platform and all running a GUI.

   In February 2002 he published Managing processes and threads, in which he compared the performance of Red Hat Linux 7.2, Windows 2000 Advanced Server (”Win2K”), and Windows XP Professional (”WinXP”), all on a Thinkpad 600X with 320MiB of memory. Linux managed to create over 10,000 threads/second, while Win2K didn’t quite manage 5,000 threads/second and WinXP only created 6,000 threads/second. In process creation, Linux managed 330 processes/second, while Win2K managed less than 200 processes/second and WinXP less than 160 processes/second.

7. eWeek found in its tests that the FLOSS program MySQL was quite comparable to the proprietary Oracle database program, and the pair outperformed other proprietary programs. eWeek Labs/PC Labs compared several database packages and released the results on February 25, 2002. Comparable performance measures of database programs are actually quite rare. As they note, “database vendors routinely use no-benchmarking clauses in their license agreements to block publication of benchmarks of which they do not approve.” Indeed, to their knowledge, this is the first time a computer publication has published database benchmark results tested on the same hardware since PC Magazine did so in October 1993 (almost 9 years earlier). However, they took the risk and published the results examining five server databases: IBM’s DB2 7.2 with FixPack 5, Microsoft Corp.’s SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2, MySQL AB’s MySQL 4.0.1 Max, Oracle Corp.’s Oracle9i Enterprise Edition 9.0.1.1.1, and Sybase Inc.’s ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise) 12.5.0.1. Their goal was to create a level playing field to determine which database performed best when used with a Java-based application server.

   The results? They found that overall Oracle9i and MySQL had the best performance and scalability; Oracle9i was slightly ahead of MySQL in most cases, but Oracle costs far more. “ASE, DB2, Oracle9i and MySQL finished in a dead heat up to about 550 Web users. At this point, ASE’s performance leveled off at 500 pages per second, about 100 pages per second less than Oracle9i’s and MySQL’s leveling-off point of about 600 pages per second. DB2’s performance dropped substantially, leveling off at 200 pages per second under high loads. Due to its significant JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) driver problems, Microsoft’s SQL Server was limited to about 200 pages per second for the entire test.”

   Naturally, “Manual tuning makes a huge difference with databases - in general, our final measured throughput was twice as fast as our initial out-of-the-box test runs.” In this case, they found that “SQL Server and MySQL were the easiest to tune, and Oracle9i was the most difficult because it has so many separate memory caches that can be adjusted.”

   MySQL also demonstrated some significant innovation. Its performance was due primarily to its “query cache”, a capability not included in any other database. If the text of a query has a byte-for-byte match with a cached query, MySQL can retrieve the results directly from its cache without compiling the query, getting locks or doing index accesses. Obviously, this technique is only effective for tables with few updates, but it certainly made an impact on this benchmark and is a helpful optimization for many situations. MySQL also supports different database engines on a table-by-table basis; no other tested database had this feature.

   They also found that of the five databases they tested, only Oracle9i and MySQL were able to run their test application as originally written for 8 hours without problems. They had to work around various problems for all the others.

   In this case, an FLOSS program beat most of its proprietary competition in both performance and reliability (in terms of being able to run a correctly-written application without problems). A proprietary program (Oracle) beat it, but barely, and its competitor is far more expensive. It certainly is arguable that MySQL is (for this application) a comparable application worthy of consideration.

   MySQL AB also reports other benchmark results comparing MySQL with other products; however, since they are not an independent lab, I’m not highlighting their results here.

8. In February 2003, scientists broke the Internet2 Land Speed Record using GNU/Linux. Scientists sent 6.7 GB of uncompressed data at 923 megabits per second in just 58 seconds from Sunnyvale, California, to Amsterdam - the equivalent of four hours of DVD-quality movies, using a transfer speed 3,500 times faster than a typical household broadband connection. The team used PCs running Debian GNU/Linux in Amsterdam and Red Hat Linux in Sunnyvale, California.

9. Benchmarks comparing Sun Solaris x86 and GNU/Linux found many similarities, but GNU/Linux had double the performance in web operations. Tony Bourke’s October 2003 evaluation Sun Versus Linux: The x86 Smack-down gave a general review comparing Sun Solaris x86 and Red Hat Linux. He found that “Performance was overall similar for most of the metrics tested, perhaps with Linux in a very slight lead. However, with the web operations test (arguably the most important and relevant), Linux is a clear winner.” He found that, given the same web serving programs and configuration, GNU/Linux supported over 2000 fetches/second while Solaris x86 supported less than 1000 fetches/second.

10. Anandtech’s August 2005 comparison of Mac OS X and GNU/Linux found that the Linux-based system ran five to eight times faster on server tasks (specifically using MySQL). Anandtech ran Linux on a slightly slower system, and Mac OS X on a slightly faster system. With effort they showed that the poor performance they’d seen earlier in Mac OS X was not due to the hardware, but to the operating system itself, because changing operating systems on essentially the same hardware produced radically different performance results. In particular, They found Linux created processes and threads, raised signals, and performed other interprocess communication far more rapidly than Mac OS X. Note that many Linux systems are exclusively FLOSS, while Apple’s Mac OS X is a mix of proprietary and FLOSS (the result is very much proprietary).

11. Microsoft themselves found that two FLOSS operating systems, Linux and FreeBSD, had better performance than Windows by many measures. Paul Murphy’s “’Unix beats Windows’ - says Microsoft!” article of November 8, 2005, pointed out a Microsoft Research report about their research on their “Singularity” research prototype. The report compares their research prototype to Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD... exposing performance figures that compare these operating systems directly to each other. Murphy writes, “What’s noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants.” And where they didn’t do as well, Murphy determines that it was because “there are better, faster, ways of doing these things in Unix, but these guys... either didn’t know or didn’t care.” These numbers certainly don’t prove that any one system is always the best performer, but it certainly justifies considering them.

All OSes in active development are in a constant battle for performance improvements over their rivals. The history of comparing Windows and GNU/Linux helps put this in perspective:

1. Ziff-Davis found that GNU/Linux with Apache beat Windows NT 4.0 with IIS by 16%-50% depending on the GNU/Linux distribution. Ziff-Davis compared Linux and Windows NT’s performance at web serving. They found that “Linux with Apache beats NT 4.0 with IIS, hands down. SuSE, the least effective Linux, is 16% faster than IIS, and Caldera, the leader, is 50% faster.”

2. Mindcraft released a report in April 1999 that claimed that Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 is 2.5 times faster than Linux (kernel 2.2) as a File Server and 3.7 times faster as a Web Server when running on a 4-CPU SMP system. Several people and organizations, such Linux Weekly News (LWN) and Dan Kegel, identified serious problems with this study. An obvious issue was that NT was specially tuned by Microsoft’s NT experts, at Microsoft, while GNU/Linux was not tuned at all. Another issue is that the price/performance wasn’t considered (nor was total expenditure kept constant - for the same amount of money, the GNU/Linux system could have had better hardware). Mindcraft claimed they asked for help, but they didn’t use the documented methods for getting help nor did they purchase a support contract. Many were especially offended that even though this study was funded by Microsoft (one of the contestants) and held at their facility, neither Mindcraft’s initial announcement nor its paper made any mention of this conflict-of-interest - and it could be easily claimed that their configuration was designed to put GNU/Linux at a disadvantage. Their configuration was somewhat bizarre - it assumed all web pages were static (typical big sites tend to use many dynamically generated pages) and that there were 100 or so clients connected via 100baseT (in 1999 a more typical situation would be that most clients are using slower 28.8 or 56 Kbps modems).

   Careful examination of the benchmark did find some legitimate Linux kernel problems, however. These included a TCP bug, the lack of “wake one” semantics, and SMP bottlenecks (see Dan Kegel’s pages for more information). The Linux kernel developers began working on the weaknesses identified by the benchmark.

3. PC Week confirmed that Windows did indeed do better in this less probable configuration. In June 30, 1999, Mindcraft released their Open Benchmark in conjunction with PC Week. While this didn’t excuse Mindcraft’s biases, it did make a convincing case that there were legitimate problems in the Linux kernel and Apache that made GNU/Linux a poorer-performing product in this somewhat improbable configuration (serving static web pages to clients with high-speed connections). Note that this configuration was considerably different than Ziff-Davis’s, so the benchmarks don’t necessarily conflict; it’s merely that different assumptions can produce different results (as I’ve already stressed).

4. The German magazine c’t found that web sites with NT were better at static content and dual network connections, but GNU/Linux sites were better for sites with dynamic content and single connections. Their article Mixed Double: Linux and NT as Web Server on the Test Bed examined Windows NT with IIS against GNU/Linux (kernel 2.2.9) with Apache on a machine with four Pentium II Xeon CPUs. They found that the performance winner depended on the situation (by now that should not be a surprise). If the web server primarily served static web pages through two high-performance network cards, NT’s performance was better. However, they also noted that in sophisticated web sites this result didn’t apply, because such sites tend to have primarily dynamic content, and that few sites had this kind of dual-network connection (when only one network board was available, GNU/Linux generally had an edge). They concluded that “Mindcraft’s result can’t be transferred to situations with mainly dynamic contents - the common case in nearly every sophisticated web site... In the web server areas most relevant for practical use, Linux and Apache are already ahead by at least one nose. If the pages don’t come directly from the system’s main memory, the situation is even reverted to favor Linux and Apache: Here, the [FLOSS] movement’s prime products leave their commercial competitors from Redmond way behind.” See their paper for more figures and background.

5. Network Computing found that GNU/Linux with Samba ran at essentially the same speed as Windows for file serving. In their article “Is it Time for Linux”, Network Computing compared Red Hat Linux v5.2 running Samba 2.0.3 against Microsoft Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition on a Pentium II-based HP NetServer LPr, stressing the machine with multiple reads and writes of small, medium and large files over the course of several hours.

   For file serving, they discovered only “negligible performance differences between the two for average workloads... [and] depending on the degree of tuning performed on each installation, either system could be made to surpass the other slightly in terms of file-sharing performance.” Red Hat Linux slightly outperformed NT on file writes, while NT edged out Red Hat Linux on massive reads. Note that their configuration was primarily network-limited; they stated “At no point were we able to push the CPUs much over 50-percent utilization-the single NIC, full duplex 100BASE-T environment wouldn’t allow it.”

   They also noted that “examining the cost difference between the two licenses brings this testing into an entirely new light... the potential savings on licenses alone is eye-opening. For example, based on the average street price of $30 for a Windows NT client license, 100 licenses would cost around $3,000, plus the cost of an NT server license (around $600). Compare this to the price of a Red Hat Linux CD, or perhaps even a free download, and the savings starts to approach the cost of a low-end workgroup server. Scale that up to a few thousand clients and you begin to see the savings skyrocket.” See this paper’s section on total cost of ownership.

6. The Linux developers’ various efforts to improve performance appear to have paid off. In June 2000, Dell measured the various SPECweb99 values noted above.

There are other benchmarks available, but I’ve discounted them on various grounds:

1. A more recent set of articles from eWeek on June 2001, shows some eye-popping performance numbers for GNU/Linux with TUX. However, although they compare it to Microsoft IIS, they don’t include Microsoft’s SWC (Scalable Web Cache), Microsoft’s response to TUX - and omitting it makes this comparison less balanced. You can read more at “Tux: Built for Speed”, “Smart Coding pays off Big”, and Kegel’s detailed remarks.

2. The ZDNet article Take that! Linux beats MS in benchmark test, loudly trumpeted that GNU/Linux was the May 2001 performance leader in the TPC-H decision support (database) benchmark (“100Gb” category). However, this result should not be taken very seriously; the hardware that Linux ran on was more powerful than that of the runner-up (Windows 2000). Frankly, the more surprising fact than its top score (which can be easily explained by the hardware) is its mere measurement at all with this benchmark - traditionally only Microsoft’s numbers are reported for this benchmark at this range. For more information, see the TPC results.

More information on various benchmarks is available from Kegel’s NT vs. Linux Server Benchmark Comparisons, SPEC, and the dmoz entry on benchmarking.

Remember, in benchmarking, everything depends on the configuration and assumptions that you make. Many systems are constrained by network bandwidth; in such circumstances buying a faster computer won’t help at all. Even when network bandwidth isn’t the limitation, much depends on what the products are designed to do. Neither Windows nor GNU/Linux do well in large-scale symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) shared memory configurations, e.g., for 64-way CPUs with shared memory. On the other hand, if you want massive distributed non-shared memory, GNU/Linux does quite well, since you can buy more CPUs with a given amount of money. If massive distribution can’t help you and you need very high performance, Windows isn’t even in the race; today Windows runs essentially only on Intel x86 compatible chips, while GNU/Linux runs on much higher performance processors as well as the x86.

5. Scalability

1. GNU/Linux dominates in supercomputing: GNU/Linux is used in 78% of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers use GNU/Linux, most of the world’s ten fastest supercomputers... including the world’s most powerful supercomputer (as of March and November 2005). By March 2005 Forbes noted that 60% of the world’s fastest supercomputers use GNU/Linux, using data from Top500 to determine which computers are the world’s fastest. Of those top 500, the best available information shows that 301 run GNU/Linux, 189 on Unix, 2 on FreeBSD (another FLOSS Unix variant), and one on Microsoft’s Windows. A few machines’ operating systems are unknown, but even so, Forbes says “Linux clearly is by far the top choice for high-performance computing.”

   Joe Greenseid reported on LWN that this dominance is even more obvious is the top ten supercomputers as of March 2005; GNU/Linux systems account for 8 out of the top 10. Six of these ten were made by IBM, including five Blue Gene systems and one PPC Cluster. Third place is held by an SGI Altix running GNU/Linux. Thunder, an Intel Itanium2 Tiger4 “white box” system, holds seventh place and runs GNU/Linux.

   More recent data from November 2005 shows this as an increasing trend. Jay Lyman’s November 15, 2005 article Linux continues supercomputer domination notes that on the November 2005 Top500 list, 78% of the world’s fastest machines (391/500) rely on Linux, far more than anything else. Seven of the top 10 systems are running GNU/Linux (the other three run AIX, UNICOS, and Super-UX), and as with the March 2005 survey, the fastest supercomputer in the world runs on GNU/Linux. In contrast, “Microsoft Windows didn’t even turn up on the list.” Erich Strohmaier, co-founder and editor of the Top500 list, said that the FLOSS “Linux is the dominating OS in the supercomputing community and will keep this role... If anything, it will only enlarge its prevalence.” In fact, he believes that “no other operating system is likely to be used as much as [GNU/]Linux in the foreseeable Top500 future.” Strohmaier said there were at least two reasons for this: GNU/Linux was more cost-effective, and that it matches what many organizations already run on their servers. Instead, GNU/Linux “has become an industry standard in this community, and any other OS trying to break into this market (Mac OS X, Windows, etc.) would have to fight a steep, uphill battle.”

   This increasing use of FLOSS operating systems in supercomputers has been a long-running trend. For years, GNU/Linux has been used in the most powerful computers in the world. GNU/Linux can be used to support massive parallel processing; a common approach for doing this is the Beowulf architecture. In June 2001, the 42nd most powerful computer (according to the TOP 500 Supercomputer list, June 2001) was Sandia’s Linux-based “CPlant”. By May 2004, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Linux-based “Thunder” delivered 19.94 teraflops, making it the second fastest on earth and the most powerful computer in North America. By November 2004, IBM’s Linux-based Blue Gene/L supercomputer became the most powerful supercomputer in the world, with 91.75 teraflops of peak floating point performance (as measured by the Linpack Fortran benchmark test) and 70.72 teraflops of sustained performance. This system is based on Linux, and is only a quarter of its eventual planned size. Indeed, IBM plans for the Blue Gene family to eventually perform a quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop). As of March 2005 Blue Gene/L was still the fastest supercomputer in the world, and it was running GNU/Linux. The Internet Archive -- the world’s largest library in terms of the amount of text it retains -- uses an FLOSS operating system. The Internet Archive crawls and archives the entire World Wide Web, including old versions of documents, subject to certain restrictions. They note that as of 2005 they archive approximately 1 petabyte of data (one million gigabytes), growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. As they note, “This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.” They do this on x86 machines using the GNU/Linux operating system. As of June 2005 they are changing their machine architecture, by adding an additional 1.5 Petabytes of space (see here for details), but they are still running running GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux and NetBSD (both FLOSS) support a wider range of hardware platforms and performance than any other OS. Many people mean by “scalability” to answer the question, “can you use the same software system for both small and large projects?” Often the implied issue is that you’d like to start with a modest system, but have the ability to grow the system as needs demand without costly modifications. Here FLOSS is unbeatable; because many people can identify scalability problems, and because its source code can be optimized for its platform, the scalability of many FLOSS products is amazing. Let’s specifically look at GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux works on PDAs (including the Agenda VR3), obsolete hardware (so you needn’t throw the hardware away), common modern PC hardware, over a dozen different chipsets (not just Intel x86s), mainframes, massive clusters, and a number of supercomputers. There’s even a prototype implementation of GNU/Linux on a wrist watch, And GNU/Linux runs on a vast number of different CPU chips, including the x86, Intel Itanium, ARM, Alpha, IBM AS/400 (midrange), SPARC, MIPS, 68k, and Power PC, indeed, the Linux kernel supports more different processors than any other operating system kernel ever has.. Another FLOSS operating system that widely scales to many other hardware platforms is NetBSD.

   Thus, you can buy a small GNU/Linux or NetBSD system and grow it as your needs grow; indeed, you can replace small hardware with massively parallel or extremely high-speed processors or very different CPU architectures without switching OSes. Windows CE scales down to smaller platforms, but Windows simply does not scale up to the largest computing systems. Windows used to run on other platforms (such as the Alpha chips), but in practical terms, Windows is used and supported almost exclusively on x86 systems. Many Unix systems (such as Solaris) scale well to specific large platforms, but not as well to distributed or small platforms. In short, the most scalable and portable systems available are FLOSS.

2. FLOSS development processes can scale to develop large software systems. At one time it was common to ask if the FLOSS process is “scalable,” that is, if FLOSS processes could really develop large-scale systems. Bill Gates’ 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists” asked rhetorically, “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distribute it for free?” He presumed these were unanswerable questions - but he was wrong. See my reports estimating GNU/Linux’s size. For Red Hat Linux 6.2, I found the size to be over 17 million source lines of code (SLOC). Implemented traditionally it would have taken 4,500 person-years and over $600 million to implement this distribution. For Red Hat Linux 7.1, I found it to have over 30 million SLOC, representing 8,000 person-years or $1 billion (a “Gigabuck”). Most developers ascribe to the design principle that components should be divided into smaller components where practical - a practice also applied to GNU/Linux - but some components aren’t easily divided, and thus some components are quite large themselves (e.g., over 2 million lines of code for the kernel, mostly in device drivers). By October 2002, Sourceforge.net announced that it had surpassed 500,000 registered users and supported almost 50,000 FLOSS projects - and a vast number of FLOSS projects don’t use SourceForge. Thus, it’s no longer reasonable to argue that FLOSS cannot scale to develop large systems -- because it clearly can.

6. Security

At one time the security of FLOSS systems was widely debated. Clearly FLOSS systems are not magically invincible from security flaws. But for most of those who study the question, the issue of whether or not FLOSS improves or reduces security appears to be an increasingly settled issue. The prestigious Communications of the ACM published “Increased Security through Open Source” by Hoepman and Jacobs in January 2007 , which stated that “We believe open source software is a necessary requirement to build systems that are more secure.... opening the source of existing systems will at first increase their exposure... However, this exposure (and the associated risk of using the system) can now be determined publicly. With closed source systems the perceived exposure may appear to be low, while the actual exposure... may be much higher. Moreover, because the source is open... the period of increased exposure is short. In the long run, openness of the source will increase its security... [and] it allows users to make a more informed choice about the security of a system....”

Fundamentally FLOSS better meets the principle of "open design", a basic principle for developing secure systems identified by Saltzer and Schroeder long before FLOSS became popular. This principle itself isn't even new; Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted even earlier that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."

The European Parliament approved A5-0264/2001 which calls “on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes [and calls] on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the ‘least reliable’ category” (5 September, 2001; 367 votes for, 159 against and 39 abstentions).

Here are some quantitative studies that back this up:

1. "Is Open Source Security a Myth?" by Guido Schryen (Communciations of the ACM, May 2011) gives excellent evidence that OSS should be considered. shows that, by their measure, OSS and proprietary software were roughly equal in security. Which means OSS security is not a myth. In this report, the author examined the NIST National Vulnerability Database, selected 17 packages, and found that by this measure, "open source and closed source software do not significantly differ in terms of the severity of vulnerabilities, the type of development of vulnerability disclosure over time, and vendors' patching behavior. Although open source software development seems to prevent "extremely bad" patching behavior, overall there is no empirical evidence that the particular type of software development is the primary driver of security. Rather, the policy of the particular vendor determines the patching behavior." Indeed, it's not so clear that OSS is only "just as good" even by looking at the paper. The paper reports that "17.6% (30.4%) of the published open (closed) source software vulnerabilities (in terms of the median) are still unpatched". So on average, OSS had nearly half as many unpatched vulnerabilities... that does NOT sound like equality. I agree with the author, though, that whether or not something was unpatched depended far more on the supplier than on OSS vs. proprietary. Even more interestingly, the OSS vulnerabilities tended to be significantly less severe: "When we determine the medians of medians of open source software (5.7) and closed source software (6.8) and also the corresponding medians of the proportions of highly severe vulnerabilities (30.28% and 45.95%, respectively), the first impression is that open source software is more secure in terms of the severity level. However, applying statistical analysis (Mann-Whitney U-test) on the medians, no statistically significant differences can be found: the two-tailed test provides a high number for p (p=0.11). Applying the same test to the proportion figures, the test, again, does not indicate that the samples are significantly different at the 0.05 level (p=0.06)." The statistical test with a p=0.06 technically doesn't meet the p=0.05 threshold (I think that is due to the small sample size), but I'd show up at ANY casino if I knew I was going to win 94% of the time.
2. J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers’ “hacker insurance” costs 5-15% more if Windows is used instead of Unix or GNU/Linux for Internet operation. At least one insurance company has indicated that Windows NT is less secure than Unix or GNU/Linux systems, resulting in higher premiums for Windows-based systems. It’s often difficult to find out when a company has been successfully cracked; companies often don’t want to divulge such information to the public for a variety of reasons. Indeed, if consumers or business partners lost trust in a company, the resulting loss might be much greater than the original attack. However, insurance companies that insure against cracking can require that they get such information (as a condition of coverage), and can compute future premiums based on that knowledge. According to Cnet, Okemos, Mich.-based J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers, one of the earliest agencies to offer “hacker insurance” (and thus more likely to have historical data for premium calculation), has begun charging its clients anywhere from 5 to 15 percent more if they use Microsoft’s Windows NT software instead of Unix or GNU/Linux for their Internet operations. Walter Kopf, senior vice president of underwriting, said that “We have found out that the possibility for loss is greater using the NT system.” He also said the decision is based on findings from hundreds of security assessments the company has done on their small and midsize business clients over the past couple of years.

3. Most defaced web sites are hosted by Windows, and Windows sites are disproportionately defaced more often than explained by its market share. Another way to look at security is to look at the OS used by defaced web sites, and compare them to their market share. A “defaced” web site is a site that has been broken into and has its content changed (usually in a fairly obvious way, since subtle modifications are often not reported). The advantage of this measure is that unlike other kinds of security break-ins (which are often “hushed up”), it’s often very difficult for victims to hide the fact that they’ve been successfully attacked. Historically, this information was maintained by Attrition.org. A summary can be found in James Middleton’s article, with the actual data found in Attrition.org’s web site. Attrition.org’s data showed that 59% of defaced systems ran Windows, 21% Linux, 8% Solaris, 6% BSD, and 6% all others in the period of August 1999 through December 2000. Thus, Windows systems have had nearly 3 times as many defacements as GNU/Linux systems. This would make sense if there were 3 times as many Windows systems, but no matter which figures you use, that’s simply not true.

   Of course, not all sites are broken through their web server and OS - many are broken through exposed passwords, bad web application programming, and so on. But if this is so, why is there such a big difference in the number of defacements based on the OS? No doubt some other reasons could be put forward (this data only shows a correlation not a cause), but this certainly suggests that FLOSS can have better security.

   Attrition.org has decided to abandon keeping track of this information due to the difficulty of keeping up with the sheer volume of broken sites, and it appeared that tracking this information wouldn’t be possible. However, defaced.alldas.de has decided to perform this valuable service. Their recent reports show that this trend has continued; on July 12, 2001, they report that 66.09% of defaced sites ran Windows, compared to 17.01% for GNU/Linux, out of 20,260 defaced websites.

4. Red Hat Linux Enterprise did very well over a two-year period; the default install was only vulnerable to 3 critical flaws.

   "Risk report: Two years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4" by Mark Cox examined Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS from its release day, February 15, 2005, through February 14, 2007. Over this time it released 289 security advisories, but this figure is very misleading, because that ignores severity and assumes a system has installed every available package (which is neither default nor likely). A default install of Enterprise Linux 4 AS was only vulnerable to 3 critical flaws. The system intentionally includes many mechanisms to prevent unknown vulnerabilities from being exploitable, or at least to reduce their impact. Mark Cox is not an independent observer; he is Director of the Red Hat Security Response Team, so keep that in mind. On the other hand, he's a technologist, not a marketer; he's developed software for many projects.

5. Unpatched Linux systems last longer than unpatched Windows systems, according to a combination of studies from the Honeynet Project, AOL, and others. As summarized in C|Net and Vnunet, and described in more detail in The Honeynet Project’s report “Know Your Enemy: Trend Analysis” (17 December 2004), as of 2004 the average Linux system lasts three months before being compromised, (a significant increase from the 72 hours life span of a Linux system in 2001). Unpatched Windows systems continue to be compromised far more quickly, sometimes within minutes. This data on Windows compromise is consistent with other studies. Avantgarde found that Windows did not last long, and one unpatched Windows XP system (pre-SP2) only lasted 4 minutes on the Internet before it was compromised. and in general did not last long (see also USAToday’s “Unprotected PCs can be hijacked in minutes”, which worked with AvantGarde). Note, however, that users who install Windows Service Pack 2 have much less risk than previous versions of Windows. Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report (January 1-June 30, 2004), The Internet Storm Center’s Survival Time History claims that by December 2004 a Windows survival time of 18 minutes.

   It could be argued that because there are so many Windows systems, attackers tend to focus on Windows. However, Apache shows that merely having the largest market share does not automatically make a system the most vulnerable. In any case, there are good reasons to reduce use of a system if it is so easily subverted, regardless of the reasons, if there is an alternative.

6. In a 2008 contest where the first successful attacker got the computer and prize money, Vista and MacOS fell but Linux stayed up. You need to take these contests with grains of salt, but still, that is pretty interesting.

7. The Bugtraq vulnerability database suggests that the least vulnerable OS is FLOSS, and that all the FLOSS OSes in its study were less vulnerable than Windows in 1999-2000, unless you counted every GNU/Linux vulnerability multiple times. One approach to examining security is to use a vulnerability database; an analysis of one database is the Bugtraq Vulnerability Database Statistics page. As of September 17, 2000, here are the total number of vulnerabilities for some leading OSes:

   OS	1997	1998	1999	2000
   Debian GNU/Linux	2	2	30	20
   OpenBSD	1	2	4	7
   Red Hat Linux	5	10	41	40
   Solaris	24	31	34	9
   Windows NT/2000	4	7	99	85

   You shouldn’t take these numbers very seriously. Some vulnerabilities are more important than others (some may provide little if exploited or only be vulnerable in unlikely circumstances), and some vulnerabilities are being actively exploited (while others have already been fixed before exploitation). FLOSS OSes tend to include many applications that are usually sold separately in proprietary systems (including Windows and Solaris). For example, Red Hat 7.1 includes two relational database systems, two word processors, two spreadsheet programs, two web servers, and many text editors. In addition, in the open source world, vulnerabilities are discussed publicly, so vulnerabilities may be identified for software still in development (e.g., “beta” software). Those with small market shares are likely to have less analysis. The “small market share” comment won’t work with GNU/Linux, since GNU/Linux is the #1 or #2 server OS (depending on how you count them). Still, this clearly shows that the three FLOSS OSes listed (Debian GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, and Red Hat Linux) did much better by this measure than Windows in 1999 and (so far) in 2000. Even if a bizarre GNU/Linux distribution was created explicitly to duplicate all vulnerabilities present in any major GNU/Linux distribution, this intentionally bad GNU/Linux distribution would still do better than Windows (it would have 88 vulnerabilities in 1999, vs. 99 in Windows). The best results were for OpenBSD, an FLOSS OS that for years has been specifically focused on security. It could be argued that its smaller number of vulnerabilities is because of its rarer deployment, but the simplest explanation is that OpenBSD has focused strongly on security - and achieved it better than the rest.

   This data is partly of interest because various reporters make the same mistake: counting the same vulnerability multiple times. One journalist, Fred Moody, failed to understand his data sources - he used these figures to try to show show that GNU/Linux had worse security. He took these numbers and then added the GNU/Linux ones so each Linux vulnerability was counted at least twice (once for every distribution it applied to plus one more). By using these nonsensical figures he declared that GNU/Linux was worse than anything. If you read his article, you also must read the rebuttal by the manager of the Microsoft Focus Area at SecurityFocus to understand why the journalist’s article was so wrong.

   In 2002, another journalist (James Middleton) made the same mistake, apparently not learning from prior work. Middleton counted the same Linux vulnerability up to four times. What’s bizarre is that he even reported the individual numbers showing that specific Linux systems were actually more secure by using Bugtraq’s vulnerability list through August 2001, and somehow he didn’t realize what it meant. He noted that Windows NT/2000 suffered 42 vulnerabilities, while Mandrake Linux 7.2 (now Mandriva) notched up 33 vulnerabilities, Red Hat Linux 7.0 suffered 28, Mandrake 7.1 had 27 and Debian 2.2 had 26. In short, all of the GNU/Linux distributions had significantly fewer vulnerabilities by this count. It’s not fully clear what was being considered as being “in” the OS in this case, which makes a difference. There are some hints that vulnerabilities in some Windows-based products (such as Exchange) were not counted, while vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux products with the same functionality (e.g., sendmail) were counted. It also appears that many of the Windows attacks were more dangerous (which were often attacks that could be invoked by remote attackers and were actively exploited), as compared to the GNU/Linux ones (which were often attacks that could only be invoked by local users and were not actively exploited at the time). I would appreciate links to someone who’s analyzed these issues more carefully. The funny thing is that given all these errors, the paper gives evidence that the GNU/Linux distributions were more secure.

   The September 30, 2002 VNUnet.com article “Honeymoon over for Linux Users”, claims that there are more “Linux bugs” than “Microsoft bugs.” It quotes X-Force (the US-based monitoring group of security software firm Internet Security Systems), and summarizes by saying that in 2001 the centre found 149 bugs in Microsoft software compared to 309 for Linux, and in 2002 485 Linux bugs were found compared to Microsoft’s 202. However, Linux Weekly News discovered and reported serious flaws in these figures:

   1. “Each distribution is counted independently. The same vulnerability in five distributions will count as five separate vulnerabilities. This practice drastically overstates the number of reported Linux problems.
   2. Linux vulnerabilities include those in applications (i.e. PostgreSQL) which are not part of a standard Windows system.
   3. Most Linux vulnerabilities are found through code audits and similar efforts; they are patched and reported before any exploits happen. Any Windows bugs found through similar audits are fixed silently and do not appear in these counts.
   Indeed, assuming that the vulnerabilities were only counted three times (and thus dividing by only 3) would show Linux as having a better result, never mind the fact that there are more than 3 Linux distributions and the other factors noted by Linux Weekly News.

   Indeed, as noted in Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-gram of September 15, 2000, vulnerabilities are affected by other things such as how many attackers exploit the vulnerability, the speed at which a fix is released by a vendor, and the speed at which they’re applied by administrators. Nobody’s system is invincible.

   A more recent analysis by John McCormick in Tech Republic compared Windows and Linux vulnerabilities using numbers through September 2001. This is an interesting analysis, showing that although Windows NT lead in the number of vulnerabilities in 2000, using the 2001 numbers through September 2001, Windows 2000 had moved to the “middle of the pack” (with some Linux systems having more, and others having fewer, vulnerabilities). However, it appears that in these numbers, bugs in Linux applications have been counted with Linux, while bugs in Windows applications haven’t - and if that’s so, this isn’t really a fair comparison. As noted above, typical Linux distributions bundle many applications that are separately purchased from Microsoft.

8. Red Hat (an FLOSS vendor) responded more rapidly than Microsoft or Sun to advisories; Sun had fewer advisories to respond to yet took the longest to respond. Another data point is that SecurityPortal has compiled a list of the time it takes for vendors to respond to vulnerabilities. They concluded that:

   How did our contestants [fare]? Red Hat had the best score, with 348 recess days on 31 advisories, for an average of 11.23 days from bug to patch. Microsoft had 982 recess days on 61 advisories, averaging 16.10 days from bug to patch. Sun proved itself to be very slow, although having only 8 advisories it accumulated 716 recess days, a whopping three months to fix each bug on average.

   Their table of data for 1999 is as shown:

   1999 Advisory Analysis Vendor Total Days, Hacker Recess Total Advisories Recess Days/Advisory Red Hat 348 31 11.23 Microsoft 982 61 16.10 Sun 716 8 89.50

   Clearly this table uses a different method for counting security problems than the prior table. Of the three noted here, Sun’s Solaris had the fewest vulnerabilities, but it took by far the longest to fix security problems identified. Red Hat was the fastest at fixing security problems, and placed in the middle of these three in number of vulnerabilities. It’s worth noting that the OpenBSD OS (which is FLOSS) had fewer reported vulnerabilities than all of these. Clearly, having a proprietary OS doesn’t mean you’re more secure - Microsoft had the largest number of security advisories, by far, using either counting method.

   More recent examples seem to confirm this; on September 30, 2002, eWeek Labs’ article “Open Source Quicker at Fixing Flaws” listed specific examples of more rapid response. This article can be paraphrased as follows: In June 2002, a serious flaw was found in the Apache Web server; the Apache Software Foundation made a patch available two days after the Web server hole was announced. In September 2002, a flaw was announced in OpenSSL and a patch was available the same day. In contrast, a serious flaw was found in Windows XP that made it possible to delete files on a system using a URL; Microsoft quietly fixed this problem in Windows XP Service Pack 1 without notifying users of the problem. A more direct comparison can be seen in how Microsoft and the KDE Project responded to an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) vulnerability that made the Internet Explorer and Konqueror browsers, respectively, potential tools for stealing data such as credit card information. The day the SSL vulnerability was announced, KDE provided a patch. Later that week, Microsoft posted a memo on its TechNet site basically downplaying the problem. The article Linux Security Holes Opened and Closed makes the same argument: FLOSS systems fix problems more rapidly, reducing the time available for attackers to exploit them.

   In an August 18, 2004 interview, Symantec’s chief technology officer Robert Clyde argued that proprietary vendors were more reliable for fixing problems within a fixed timescale, and that he didn’t know of a single vendor who would sit on a vulnerability. Yet the day before (August 17), an eWeek article revealed that Oracle waited 8 months to fix a vulnerability. And Microsoft waited 9 months to fix a critical IE vulnerability (and only fixed it after it was being actively exploited in 2004). Proprietary vendors are certainly not winning prizes for reliably and rapidly fixing security vulnerabilities.

   This problem continues. Gregg Keizer's November 19, 2007 article, "Microsoft DNS bug long known, familiar to researchers: Problem goes back at least a decade, say security pros" notes a delay of over 10 years in Microsoft's patches. In late 2007, Microsoft fixed a DNS cache poisoning bug in its Domain Name System (DNS) server included with Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003. This was a "spoofing flaw that could be exploited by identity thieves or malware authors to silently redirect users from intended Web destinations to malicious pretenders." Both Trusteer and Scanit have exaplined that "the vulnerability is well known and has been extensively documented for more than a decade. 'It is saddening to realize that 10-15 years after the dangers of predictable DNS transaction ID were discovered, still one of the most popular DNS cache servers does not incorporate strong transaction ID generation," said Amit Klein, Trusteer's chief technology officer." Scanit's Alla Bezroutchko cited research from 1997, 2002 and 2003 on predictable DNS transaction IDs in Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND), showing that the problem is "common and well researched." In contrast, the developers of BIND (which is FLOSS) have been actively working to counter the attack.

9. A 2002 survey of developers found that GNU/Linux systems are relatively immune from attacks from outsiders. Evans Data Corp.’s Spring 2002 Linux Developer Survey surveyed over 400 GNU/Linux developers, and found that Linux systems are relatively immune from attacks from outsiders. Even though computer attacks have almost doubled annually since 1988 (according to CERT), 78% of the respondents to the GNU/Linux developers survey have never experienced an unwanted intrusion and 94% have operated virus-free. Clearly, the survey shows that GNU/Linux “doesn’t get broken into very often and is even less frequently targeted by viruses,” according to Jeff Child (Evans Data Corp.’s Linux Analyst); and claims that “Linux systems are relatively immune from attacks from outsiders.” Child notes that it’s much harder to hack a knowledgeable owner’s system (and most Linux developers have hands-on, technical knowledge) and that because there are fewer desktop GNU/Linux systems there are fewer viruses being created to attack GNU/Linux. The developers being surveyed attributed the low incidence of attacks to the Open Source Software (OSS) environment; “more than 84% of Linux developers believe that Linux is inherently more secure than software not created in an OSS environment,” and they ranked “Linux’s security roughly comparable in security to Solaris and AIX ... and above any of the Windows platforms by a significant margin.”

10. Apache has a better security record than Microsoft’s IIS, as measured by reports of serious vulnerabilities. Eweek’s July 20, 2001 article “Apache avoids most security woes” examined security advisories dating back to Apache 1.0. They found that Apache’s last serious security problem (one where remote attackers could run arbitrary code on the server) was announced in January 1997. A group of less serious problems (including a buffer overflow in the server’s logresolve utility) was announced and fixed in January 1998 with Apache 1.2.5. In the three and a half years since then, Apache’s only remote security problems have been a handful of denial-of-service and information leakage problems (where attackers can see files or directory listings they shouldn’t).

    In contrast, in the article “IT bugs out over IIS security,” eWeek determined that Microsoft has issued 21 security bulletins for IIS from January 2000 through June 2001. Determining what this number means is a little difficult, and the article doesn’t discuss these complexities, so I examined these bulletins to find their true significance. Not all of the bulletins have the same significance, so just stating that there were “21 bulletins” doesn’t give the whole picture. However, it’s clear that several of these bulletins discuss dangerous vulnerabilities that allow an external user to gain control over the system. I count 5 bulletins on such highly dangerous vulnerabilities for IIS 5.0 (in the period from January 2000 through June 2001), and prior to that time, I count 3 such bulletins for IIS 4.0 (in the period of June 1998 through December 1999). Feel free to examine the bulletins yourself; they are MS01-033, MS01-026, MS01-025, MS01-023, MS00-086, MS99-025, MS99-019, and MS99-003. The Code Red worm, for example, exploited a vast number of IIS sites through the vulnerabilities identified in the June 2001 security bulletin MS01-033.

    In short, by totaling the number of reports of dangerous vulnerabilities (that allow attackers to execute arbitrary code), I find a total of 8 bulletins for IIS from June 1998 through June 2001, while Apache had zero such vulnerabilities for that time period. Apache’s last such report was in January 1998, and that one affected the log analyzer not the web server itself. As was noted above, the last such dangerous vulnerability in Apache itself was announced in January 1997.

    It’s time-consuming to do this kind of analysis, so I haven’t repeated the effort more recently. However, it’s worth noting eWeek’s April 10, 2002 article noting that ten more IIS flaws have been found in IIS Server 4.0, 5.0, and 5.1, some of which would allow attackers to crash the IIS service or allow the attacker to run whatever code he chooses.

    Even this doesn’t give the full story, however; a vulnerability in IIS tends to be far more dangerous than an equivalent vulnerability in Apache, because Apache wisely follows the good security practice of “least privilege.” IIS is designed so that anyone who takes over IIS can take over the whole system, performing actions such as reading, modifying, or erasing any file on the system. In contrast, Apache is installed with very few privileges by default, so even taking over Apache gives attackers relatively few privileges. For example, cracking Apache does not give attackers the right to modify or erase most files. This is still not good, of course, and an attacker may be able to find another vulnerability to give them unlimited access, but an Apache system presents more challenges to an attacker than IIS.

    The article claims there are four reasons for Apache’s strong security, and three of these reasons are simply good security practices. Apache installs very few server extensions by default (a “minimalist” approach), all server components run as a non-privileged user (supporting “least privilege” as noted above), and all configuration settings are centralized (making it easy for administrators to know what’s going on). However, the article also claims that one of the main reasons Apache is more secure than IIS is that its “source code for core server files is well-scrutinized,” a task that is made much easier by being FLOSS, and it could be argued that FLOSS encourages the other good security practices.

    Simple vulnerability notice counts are an inadequate metric for security. That's particularly true for comparing proprietary and FLOSS software; A vendor could intentionally release fewer bulletins - but since Apache’s code and its security is publicly discussed, it seems very unlikely that Apache is deliberately underreporting security vulnerabilities. Fewer vulnerability notices could result if the product isn’t well scrutinized or is rarely used - but this simply isn’t true for Apache. Even the trend line isn’t encouraging - using the months of the bulletins (2/99, 6/99, 7/99, 11/00, three in 5/01, and 6/01), I find the time in months between new major IIS vulnerability announcements to be 4, 1, 18, 6, 0, 0, 1, and 3 as of September 2001; this compares to 12 and 44 as of September 2001 for Apache. Given these trends, it looks like IIS’s security is slowly improving, but it has little likelihood of meeting Apache’s security in the near future. Indeed, these vulnerability counts are corroborated by other measures such as the web site defacement rates.

    Indeed, in 2007 Microsoft admitted that it silently fixes multiple vulnerabilities in patches without revealing what the other vulnerabilities are, and that That means that Microsoft's vulnerability counts, as posted to the public, are significantly smaller than the real vulnerability counts. FLOSS, due to its open nature, often can't hide problems that way. What's worse, in 2007 Microsoft also admitted that Microsoft has left unpatched many more publicly-known vulnerabilities in Vista; Microsoft only patched 12 out of 27 disclosed Vista vulnerabilities in the six months after it first shipped (November 2006), while during Windows XP's first six months, Microsoft's security team patched 36 out of 39.

    The issue here isn’t whether or not a given program is invincible (what nonsense!) - the issue is which is more likely to resist future attacks, based on past performance. It’s clear that the FLOSS Apache has much a better security record than the proprietary IIS, so much so that Gartner Group decided to make an unusual recommendation (described below).

11. IIS was attacked 1,400 times more frequently than Apache in 2001, and Windows was attacked more than all versions of Unix. SecurityFocus co-founder and CEO Arthur Wong reported an analysis of the various vulnerabilities and attacks (based on SecurityFocus’s data) in the February 2002 article RSA: Security in 2002 worse than 2001, exec says. IIS was attacked 17 million times, but Apache was attacked only 12,000 times. This is a stunning comparison, since there are about twice as many Apache systems on the Internet. In 2001, Windows systems were attacked 31 million times, while Unix systems were attacked 22 million times. See the article for more information.

12. The Gartner Group is recommending that businesses switch from Microsoft IIS to Apache or iPlanet due to IIS’s poor security track record, noting that enterprises had spent $1.2 billion simply fixing Code Red (IIS-related) vulnerabilities by July 2001. Microsoft’s IIS has such a bad security record that in September 2001, Gartner Group announced a recommendation that “businesses hit by both Code Red and Nimda immediately investigate alternatives to IIS, including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors such as iPlanet and Apache. Although those Web servers have required some security patches, they have much better security records than IIS and are not under active attack by the vast number of virus and worm writers.” Microsoft is sometimes a Gartner Group customer, so this announcement is especially surprising.

    In a background document by Gartner, they discuss Code Red’s impacts further. By July 2001, Computer Economics (a research firm) estimated that enterprises worldwide had spent $1.2 billion fixing vulnerabilities in their IT systems that Code Red could exploit (remember, Code Red is designed to only attack IIS systems; systems such as Apache are immune). To be fair, Gartner correctly noted that the problem is not just that IIS has vulnerabilities; part of the problem is that enterprises using IIS are not keeping their IT security up to date, and Gartner openly wondered why this was the case. However, Gartner also asked the question, “why do Microsoft’s software products continue to provide easily exploited openings for such attacks?” This was prescient, since soon after this the “Nimba” attack surfaced which attacked IIS, Microsoft Outlook, and other Microsoft products.

    A brief aside is in order here. Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler tried to counter Gartner’s recommendation, trying to label it as “extreme” and saying that “serious security vulnerabilities have been found in all Web server products and platforms.. this is an industry-wide challenge.” While true, this isn’t the whole truth. As Gartner points out, “IIS has a lot more security vulnerabilities than other products and requires more care and feeding.” It makes sense to select the product with the best security track record, even if no product has a perfect record.

13. Microsoft IIS is twice as likely to be serving malware features, according to a 2007 Google study. The study Web Server Software and Malware found that "Microsoft IIS is twice as likely to be serving malware features twice as often (49% vs. 23%) as a malware distributing server." This is because Apache has a much larger market share, yet among servers with malicious software they have about the same market share. This does not necessarily mean that IIS is more vulnerable (though the data listed elsewhere does support that hypothesis), particularly because it varies by country. Instead, the authors of this study suspect that is caused because "automatic updates have not been enabled due to software piracy (piracy statistics from NationMaster, and BSA), and second, some security patches are not available for pirated copies of Microsoft operating systems. For instance the patch for a commonly seen ADODB.Stream exploit is not available to pirated copies of Windows operating systems." So in short, because it costs much more to buy Windows and IIS compared to Linux and Apache, and such unauthorized systems aren't able to get maintenance, many systems are not being properly maintained.

14. The majority of the most serious security problems only apply to Microsoft’s products, and not to FLOSS products, as suggested by the CERT/CC’s “most frequent, high-impact types of security incidents and vulnerabilities” and the ICAT database. Some security vulnerabilities are more important than others, for a variety of reasons. Thus, some analysis centers try to determine what’s “most important,” and their results suggest that FLOSS just doesn’t have as many vulnerabilities.

    The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) is federally funded to study security vulnerabilities and perform related activities such as publishing security alerts. I sampled their list of “current activity” of the most frequent, high-impact security incidents and vulnerabilities on September 24, 2001, and found yet more evidence that Microsoft’s products have poor security compared to others (including FLOSS). Four of the six most important security vulnerabilities were specific to Microsoft: W32/Nimda, W32/Sircam, cache corruption on Microsoft DNS servers, and “Code Red” related activities. Only one of the six items primarily affected non-Microsoft products (a buffer overflow in telnetd); while this vulnerability is important, it’s worth noting that many open source systems (such as Red Hat 7.1) normally don’t enable this service (telnet) in the first place and thus are less likely to be vulnerable. The sixth item (“scans and probes”) is a general note that there is a great deal of scanning and probing on the Internet, and that there are many potential vulnerabilities in all systems. Thus, 4 of 6 issues are high-impact vulnerabilities are specific to Microsoft, 1 of 6 are vulnerabilities primarily affecting Unix-like systems (including FLOSS OSes), and 1 of 6 is a general notice about scanning. Again, it’s not that FLOSS products never have security vulnerabilities - but they seem to have fewer of them.

    The ICAT system provides a searchable index and ranking for the vulnerabilities cross-references by CVE. I sampled its top ten list on December 19, 2001; this top ten list is defined by the number of requests made for a vulnerability in ICAT (and including only vulnerabilities within the last year). In this case, 8 of the top 10 vulnerabilities only affect proprietary systems (in all cases, Windows). Only 2 of 10 affect FLOSS systems (#6, CAN-2001-0001, a weakness in PHP-Nuke 4.4, and #8, CVE-2001-0013, a new vulnerability found in an old version of BIND - BIND 4). Obviously, by itself this doesn’t prove that there are fewer serious vulnerabilities in FLOSS programs, but it is suggestive of it.

15. An analysis of security reports by Nicholas Petreley found that a much larger percentage of Windows vulnerabilities are critical compared to Red Hat Linux. In October 2004, Nicholas Petreley’s paper “Security Report: Windows vs Linux” (available in HTML or PDF) found that Windows vulnerabilities are far more likely to be serious than vulnerabilities in Red Hat Linux. He examined the 40 most recent patches/vulnerabilities listed for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3, as reported by each vendor’s website. He then used a metric to score their severity, and by that measure, 50% of the Windows vulnerabilities are critical, compared to 10% being critical in Red Hat.

    There’s an interesting twist here; Microsoft claims that certain vulnerabilities aren’t as serious as long as an administrator doesn’t change certain settings. But as Petreley notes, “it is nearly inconceivable that anyone who uses Windows Server 2003 will leave the [Windows Server 2003] settings ... unchanged. These settings make the Internet Explorer browser nearly useless to the server administrator who wants to perform any browser-based administrative tasks, download updates, etc. To lower the severity rank based on the assumption that Windows Server 2003 users will leave these default settings as they are is a fantasy, at best.” Also, Microsoft presumes that “Users” are never “Administrators”, a very doubtful assumption on a Microsoft Windows server. If you accept these implausible claims, the percentage drops to 40%, which is still larger than Red Hat’s. Microsoft assigns its own criticality levels (Red Hat doesn’t), but even using Microsoft’s reporting level things are worse; 38% of the patched programs are rated as Critical by Microsoft.

    He also did some analysis of the CERT database; while that analysis was more limited, that still suggested that Linux vulnerabilities tended to be less severe.

    The article goes on to argue against what it terms “myths.” Petreley also argues that the reason for this difference is that Linux-based systems have a far better design for security than Windows systems. His design argument makes four statements: Linux-based systems are based on a long history of well fleshed-out multi-user design, they are modular by design (not monolithic), they are not constrained by an RPC model (that unnecessarily enables external control of internal functions), and Linux servers are ideally designed for headless non-local administration.

    This study didn’t try to determine how many critical vulnerabilities there have been overall in the same period, which is a weakness of the study. And Petreley is certainly an advocate of GNU/Linux systems. Still, this report makes a plausible case that there is a difference in design and/or development process that makes GNU/Linux vulnerabilities less severe than Microsoft Windows vulnerabilies.

16. Computer viruses are overwhelmingly more prevalent on Windows than any other system. Virus infection has been a major cost to users of Microsoft Windows. The LoveLetter virus alone is estimated to have cost $960 million in direct costs and $7.7 billion in lost productivity, and the anti-virus software industry sales total nearly $1 billion annually. Dr Nic Peeling and Dr Julian Satchell’s Analysis of the Impact of Open Source Software includes an analysis of the various data sources for virus counts, noting the disproportionate vulnerability of Windows systems. Here is what they said:

    The numbers differ in detail, but all sources agree that computer viruses are overwhelmingly more prevalent on Windows than any other system. There are about 60,000 viruses known for Windows, 40 or so for the Macintosh, about 5 for commercial Unix versions, and perhaps 40 for Linux. Most of the Windows viruses are not important, but many hundreds have caused widespread damage. Two or three of the Macintosh viruses were widespread enough to be of importance. None of the Unix or Linux viruses became widespread - most were confined to the laboratory.

    Many have noted that one reason Windows is attacked more often is simply because there are so many Windows systems in use. Windows is an attractive target for virus writers simply because it is in such widespread use. For a virus to spread, it must transmit itself to other susceptible computers; on average, each infection must cause at least one more. The ubiquity of Windows machines makes it easier for this threshold to be reached.

    There may be a darker reason: there are many who do not like Microsoft’s business practices, and perhaps this contributes to the problem. Some of Microsoft’s business practices have been proven in court to be illegal, but the U.S. government appears unwilling to effectively punish or stop those practices. Some computer literate people may be taking their frustration out on users of Microsoft’s product. This is absolutely wrong, and in most countries illegal. It is extremely unethical to attack an innocent user of a Microsoft product simply because of Microsoft’s policies, and I condemn such behavior. At this point, although this has been speculated many times, I have not found any evidence that this is a widespread motivator for actual attacks. On the other hand, if you are choosing products, do you really want to choose the product whom people may have a vendetta against?

    However, the reasons given above don’t explain the disproportionate vulnerability of Microsoft’s products. A simpler explanation, and one that is easily proven, is that Microsoft has made many design choices over many years in their products that have rendered them fundamentally less secure, and this has made their products a much easier target than many other systems. Even Microsoft’s Craig Mundie admitted that their products were “less secure than they could have been” because they were “designing with features in mind rather than security” -- even though most people didn’t use those new features. Examples include executing start-up macros in Word (even though users routinely view documents developed by untrustworthy sources), executing attachments in Outlook, and the lack of write protection on system directories in Windows 3.1/95/98. This may be because Microsoft has assumed in the past that customers will buy their products whether or not Microsoft secures them. After all, until recently there’s been little competition, so there was no need to spend money on “invisible” attributes such as security. It’s also possible that Microsoft is still trying to adjust to an Internet-based world; the Internet would not have developed as it has without Unix-like systems, which have supported the Internet standards for decades, while for many years Microsoft ignored the Internet and then suddenly had to play “catch-up” in the early 1990s. Microsoft has sometimes claimed that they can’t secure their products because they want to ensure that their products are “easy to use”. While it’s true that some security features can make a product harder to use, usually a secured product can be just as easy to use if the security features are carefully designed into the product. Besides, what’s so easy to use about a system that must be reformatted and reinstalled every few months because yet another virus got in? (This is a problem made worse because Microsoft plans to require people to call Microsoft to gain permission simply to reinstall the operating system they bought.) But for whatever the reason, it’s demonstrably true that Microsoft’s designers have in the past made decisions that made their products’ security much weaker than other systems. Microsoft has recently declared that they are working hard to improve their products’ security; I have hopes that they will improve, and I see some encouraging signs, but it’s like to take many years to really secure their products.

    In contrast, while it’s possible to write a virus for FLOSS OSes, their design makes it more difficult for viruses to spread... showing that Microsoft’s design decisions were not inevitable. It appears that FLOSS developers tend to select design choices that limit the damage of viruses, probably in part because their code is subject to public inspection and comment (and ridicule, if deserving of it). For example, FLOSS programs generally do not support attacker-controlled start-up macros, nor do they usually support easy execution of mail attachments from attackers. Also, leading FLOSS OSes (such as GNU/Linux and the *BSDs) have always had write protection on system directories, making it more difficult for certain attacks to spread. Another discussion on why viruses don’t seem to significantly affect FLOSS systems is available from Roaring Penguin. FLOSS systems are not immune to malicious code, but they are certainly more resistant.

17. Surveys report that GNU/Linux systems experience fewer viruses and successful cracks. In July 2004, Evans Data’s Summer 2004 Linux Development Survey reported that 92% of their Linux systems have never been infected with a virus, and 78% that their Linux systems have never been cracked (called “hacked” in the report). This contrasts with their Spring 2004 survey, where only 40% non-Linux users reported no security breach; indeed, 32% non-Linux users experienced three or more breaches.

18. According to a June 2004 study by Sandvine, 80% of all spam is sent by infected Windows PCs. 80% of all spam comes from computers contaminated with Trojan horse infections, according to a study by network management firm Sandvine. Trojans and worms with backdoor components turn infected PCs into drones in vast networks of compromised zombie PCs.

    Sandvine identified subscribers bypassing their home mail servers and contacting many mail servers within a short period of time over sustained periods - i.e., spammers. It also looked at SMTP error messages returned to clarify the total volume of spam. They then compared this with the messages passing through the service provider’s mail system.

    Sandvine’s preliminary analysis has shown that the most active Trojans for spamming purposes are the Migmaf and SoBig variants; note that these are Windows-only attacks. Indeed, since almost all successful trojans and worms are those that attack Windows systems, it appears that this problem is essentially due to Windows systems.

19. National Cyber Security Alliance’s study of May 2003 reported that 91% of Broadband users have spyware on their home computers running proprietary operating systems; in contrast, there’s no evidence of that this is an issue for FLOSS systems. America Online, Inc. conducted a study for the National Cyber Security Alliance. Its results, “Fast and Present Danger: In-Home Study on Broadband Security among American Consumers” (May 2003) produces some interesting results, in particular, they found that “91% of Broadband Users Have Spyware Lurking on Home Computers”. Their study method did not appear to permit collection of data from FLOSS systems, and spyware systems are essentially nonexistent on FLOSS systems anyway.

20. Microsoft has had far more vulnerabilities than anyone else, according to SecurityTracker. The paper SecurityTracker Statistics (March 2002) analyzes vulnerabilities from April 2001 through March 2002. They identified 1595 vulnerability reports, covering 1175 products from 700 vendors. Their analysis found that Microsoft had more vulnerabilities than anyone else (187, or 11.7% of all vulnerabilities), and more than four times the next vendor. The next largest were Sun (42, 2.6% of the total), HP (40, 2.5%), and IBM (40, 2.5%). Solely FLOSS vendors did much better: the Apache Software Foundation had 13 (0.8% of the total), and Red Hat had 10 (0.6% of the total). It can be argued that Microsoft sells more kinds of software than most other vendors, but this is nevertheless an astonishingly large number of vulnerabilities. The gap between Microsoft and everyone else widened during the second half of the year, which is even scarier.

21. In late June 2004, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recommended using browsers other than Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer (IE) for security reasons. Microsoft had failed to patch a critical vulnerability for 9 months, and IE was being actively exploited in horrendous ways. Customers then rushed to download Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox, popular FLOSS alternatives, to replace IE. This was a good idea, since 4 more serious IE vulnerabilities were soon admitted, and the technologically savvy began to switch in droves to FLOSS browsers. The U.S. CERT warned that the Microsoft browser (IE) cannot protect against vulnerabilities, and there were dangerous active attacks exploiting them. A team of crackers (supposedly Russia-based) exploited Microsoft IE vulnerabilities by also exploiting other vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s IIS. The crackers broke into IIS sites and inserted malicious code that IE users would download if they viewed an IIS site they’d broken into. The IE users who visited those sites (who legitimately trusted these sites) would have their IE program exploited, which then compromised their system. As a result, many IE users had keystroke information stolen from them. It’s hoped the purpose was to steal credit card numbers, though passwords and other sensitive data could have been stolen too (e.g., to drain people’s bank accounts or steal extremely private data). By June 25, 2004, this active attack was publicly known, but a fix to IE wasn’t available until July 2, 7 days later. Even worse, ZDNet found that Microsoft had failed to fix this critical known IE vulnerability for nearly nine months. And even after a 9-month lead time, ComputerWorld learned that the patch doesn’t address another closely related vulnerability.

    Nine months is a shamefully long time; 2-30 days is the expected time by most security practitioners, since every day a known exploit is unfixed is another day that attackers can exploit it, and attackers often know and exploit attacks that the vendor claims are secret. This is long after Microsoft loudly announced (in 2002) that it would pay much more attention to security; certainly in this case users were left unprotected for a long time. Even more tellingly, at the same time (June 28, 2004), Microsoft’s Bill Gates told Australians that while other operating system vendors took 90-100 days to release a security patch, Microsoft had this time “down to less than 48 hours.” Gates assured attendees that the Internet Explorer attack was new, but later analysis has shown otherwise. Clearly Microsoft admits that long delays in security patches are a bad thing, but it nevertheless still commits them.

    The U.S. CERT took the unusual step of noting that a useful solution would be to stop using IE and use another program instead. SANS made a similar announcement, noting that one solution would be to stop using IE. FLOSS programs sometimes have vulnerabilities too, but it’s rare that they last so long. More importantly, users of FLOSS programs can always fund to have a repair created and implemented quickly if it is important to them, and can have that fix reviewed and shared with others worldwide. Proprietary users have no such options; proprietary users are completely dependent on the proprietary vendor for making any emergency repairs, and for more reacting more responsibly than this. Downloads of Mozilla and Mozilla’s Firefox dramatically increased in late June 2004, presumably as a response to this serious problem in IE. Downloads of Mozilla and Firefox browsers hit an all-time high on July 1, 2004, from the usual 100,000 or so downloads on a normal day to more than 200,000 in one day. Mozilla argues that IE is in general less secure, in part because Microsoft’s ActiveX technologies, IE’s tight integration into the Microsoft operating system, and IE’s weak default security settings make IE easier to exploit than its competition. Even the U.S. CERT notes that IE includes many design decisions that make it an especially easy web browser to exploit; and all of them are true for IE and not problems for Firefox, except for the fact that both use graphical user interfaces. For example, Semantic recommends that users consider disabling ActiveX altogether (see page 65), because of ActiveX’s problems. In contrast, every change made to Mozilla applications is first peer reviewed by at least two engineers who are familiar with the code and overall architecture of the system before the new code is allowed into the product. The product then goes through automated tests and evaluations, and then Mozilla users and the development community are invited to review the impact of each change by downloading the test builds that are produced two or three times a day. All source code is available for review by anyone.

    This problem was so significant that it was noted in many different media and technology analysis sites. USA Today noted in 2004 that “Using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser to surf the Internet has become a marked risk -- even with the latest security patches installed.” The New York Times noted in 2004 that concerns about Internet Explorer’s security vulnerabilities have dented its market share, and that the US CERT recommendation to consider other browsers was an unusual step. The Inquirer reported that the “US Government warns against Internet Explorer”, noting that the US Government’s tone essentially pleaded for “users to stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer”. Netcraft suggested that this may mean that the browser wars will recommence. Netcraft noted that one major difference is that this attack was different because of its extreme gravity: “victims of [these] attacks might conceivably lose their life savings. Some people now perceive Internet Explorer and Internet Banking as a potentially lethal cocktail that must not be mixed, with insiders in the banking industry urging their families to switch if not operating systems, then at least browsers, while conversely some Internet banking customers have adapted to the threat by forgoing convenience and moving funds back into accounts which require traditional telephone and fax instructions.” Netcraft also noted that there is now “a serious alternative to Internet Explorer available on Windows” and that “this [combination of loss of confidence and a viable alternative] is an extremely dangerous situation for Microsoft. The phishing threats and the growing professional chorus of disapproval for Internet Explorer provide Windows users with very good reasons to turn elsewhere, even if only temporarily. But [FLOSS] Firefox is so good that many will want to stay with it. And once they have tasted the power and freedom of open source, maybe they will be tempted to try ‘just one more program’.”

    Indeed, the security problems of IE have caused IE to lose marketshare, ceding marketshare to FLOSS browsers.

    As if to prove the point of how differently security vulnerabilities are handled, a vulnerability was found soon after that affected Mozilla and Firefox when running on Windows (though it was actually another Windows vulnerability). In contrast with IE, the security fix was delivered extremely rapidly. The initial notice of this vulnerability was on July 7, it was fixed the same day, and the configuration change was released to all in one day - with no known compromises to any system. The Mozilla project has more information about the security issue, and you can even read the detailed discussions between the finders and developers. What’s especially interesting is that it’s not even a vulnerability in the FLOSS programs; it’s a vulnerability in Windows itself. The problem is the Windows maintains a registry of secure programs that accept URLs, but the list provided by Microsoft includes an application known to be insecure (the shell: URL). Windows XP Service Pack 1 was supposed to have closed this hole, but it didn’t. Thus, the Mozilla project had to create a patch to compensate for Windows’ insecurity, but explicitly disabling it on Windows. It appears that other Microsoft products, such as MSN Messenger and Word, are affected by this vulnerability in Windows. And it appears that Mozilla is continuing to be proactive in its security; they have already added new features to make attacks against the browser even more difficult.

    After all that, on July 13, 2004, Secunia reported four more extremely critical vulnerabilities in IE. The only solutions at the time were to disable active scripting or use another product. It’s unlikely that these additional vulnerabilities will improve IE’s reputation. All of this has convinced me; in my essay on how to secure Microsoft Windows (for home and small business users), I suggest switching from IE to Firefox, and from Outlook to something else; too many people (both myself and others) have observed that simply replacing these two programs greatly reduces the number of security problems in the real world.

22. According to Symantec Corp., Mozilla Firefox fixed its vulnerabilities faster, and had fewer severe vulnerabilities (though more total vulnerabilities), in the July - December 2004 period than Internet Explorer. Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, Volume VII (released March 2005), found that Internet Explorer had 9 highly severe vulnerabilities affecting it in the time period, while Firefox had 7. In addition, the Internet Explorer flaws also took longer to fix -- an average of 43 days, compared to 26 days for Mozilla browsers (which presumably includes Firefox).

    In all previous reports, the total number of Mozilla vulnerabilies was lower than IE. The bad news is that this March 2005 report reports that in this period there were more total vulnerabilities (though fewer high severity ones) in Mozilla-based browsers than in IE. There are 13 vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer, compared to 21 vulnerabilities affecting the Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox browsers during the survey period. It’s difficult to tease out what the issue is, unfortunately. Symantec was encouraged that the security vulnerabilities, where found in Firefox, were at least less likely to be of high severity. The good (?) news is that attackers were only exploiting the IE vulnerabilities, not the Mozilla/Firefox ones, in the time period.

    CNet reported in an article about Symtatec’s later September 2005 report that Mozilla browsers were more vulnerable than IE -- yet once all information is taken into account, IE was more vulnerable. This latest study found that 25 vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities were disclosed for the Mozilla browsers during the first half of 2005 (18 were high severity); during the same period, 13 vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities were disclosed for IE (eight were high severity).

    But wait -- there was a major caveat that made the headline misleading. Symantec only counted the security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor; vulnerabilities that are known to the public, but not acknowledged by the vendor, aren’t counted. CNet examined data from security monitoring company Secunia to see what that meant, and found that there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.

    Internet Explorer is definitely not better than Mozilla-based browsers once you include the vulnerabilities the vendor has not yet fixed. IE has a a total of 32 known vulnerabilities (13+19) compared to 28 (25+3) vulnerabilities over that period. That’s pretty close, so in terms of known vulnerabilities over that period I’d call that a tie. Mozilla also noted that IE tended to have more serious vulnerabilities. What’s even more concerning, though, is that Internet Explorer has more unpatched vulnerabilities (13 vs. 3). And while they claim both now have similar response times (6 days) it’s not clear how that could be true. (Especially when you only consider the ones that are publicly announced first; clearly, it’s easy to have a patch immediately if you only publicly announce the vulnerability with the patch, but sometimes vulnerabilies publicly announced when a patch is not available.) CNet themselves note that Microsoft generally releases patches only on a monthly basis, which is more than 6 days. Even more importantly, since IE has many more unaddressed vulnerabilities compared to in Mozilla, IE’s average response times would increase more rapidly too (making “equality” only make sense when you ignore the unpatched vulnerabilities).

23. More recent summaries as of August 2005 suggest Internet Explorer is still more dangerous than the FLOSS Firefox. David Hammond’s Internet Explorer is dangerous examined the Secunia reports on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera, as of August 4, 2005. Here is his summary (my credits to him):

    Feature	Internet Explorer	Firefox	Opera
    Historical quantity	43	21	23
    Present quantity	25	4	0
    Historical relative danger	121	56	59
    Present relative danger	50	9	0

    The “quantity” shows the number of vulnerabilities, but doesn’t account for their criticality. Thus, he also computes a “relative danger” by simply “adding up the criticality levels for each vulnerability (not critical=1, extremely critical=5)”. As of that date:
    • “Internet Explorer has had 43 reported vulnerabilities. 7 were marked as moderately critical, 11 were marked as highly critical, and 6 were marked as extremely critical. There are still 25 unfixed vulnerabilities, including 6 that were marked as moderately critical, 1 that was marked as highly critical, and 1 that was marked as extremely critical.”
    • “Mozilla Firefox has had 21 reported vulnerabilities. 8 were marked as moderately critical, 4 were marked as highly critical, and 0 were marked as extremely critical. There are still 4 unfixed vulnerabilities, including 1 that was marked as moderately critical.”
    • “Opera has had 23 reported vulnerabilities. 14 were marked as moderately critical, 0 were marked as highly critical, and 0 were marked as extremely critical. All reported vulnerabilities have since been fixed.”
    Obviously, this doesn’t show that FLOSS is always better than proprietary; by these measures, the proprietary Opera is even better. But it does clearly suggest that FLOSS can do very well, beating at least some competitors.
24. Statistics by Scanit’s Browser Security Test group found that 98% of time in 2004 Internet Explorer was vulnerable to dangerous known remote attacks, for which no patch to fix it was available, compared to 17% for Opera and 15% for Mozilla/Firefox. There were only 7 days in 2004 that Internet Explorer was safe from known yet unstoppable remote attacks. The paper A Year Of Bugs by scanIT’s Browser Security Test examined the life spans of vulnerabilities during 2004 for three popular browsers: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla-based browsers (including Firefox and Netscape), and Opera. Since not all vulnerabilities are equal, they only considered the especially dangerous “remote code execution” vulnerabilities, i.e., defects that allow a “malicious web page or e-mail message to execute arbitrary code or OS commands on the viewer’s computer.” They then compared the time from the “public announcement of the vulnerability to the time when the fix is available to the general user population.” The results were disturbing, if you use Internet Explorer:
    • For Internet Explorer, “there was only one period in 2004 when there were no publicly known remote code execution bugs - between the 12th and the 19th of October - 7 days in total.” That means that someone who diligently kept their installation patched every day of the year was still known to be vulnerable 98% of the time in 2004. The excuse “well, it wasn’t exploitable” doesn’t work, either; they found that for “200 days (that is, 54% of the time) there was a [known] worm or virus in the wild exploiting one of those unpatched vulnerabilities.” And that’s just the known mass attacks in the wild; it’s probably foolish to presume that those were the only attacks. Frankly, 2004 was a disturbing year for IE; at the beginning of the year there were two known unpatched vulnerabilities, and 2004 ended with an “unpatched HTML Help ActiveX control vulnerability and [the worm] Trojan.Phel using it to install a backdoor.”
    • In 2004 Opera had publicly known unpatched remote code execution vulnerabilities for 65 days (17%). It could have been worse, but two different “unpatched periods” happened to intersect, so it actually faired better by this measure than it might have otherwise.
    • Mozilla and the family (including Firefox, Netscape Navigator and the Camino browsers) has the shortest attack window of opportunity. There were 56 days (15%) in 2004 when there was a publicly known remote code execution vulnerability with no publicly-available patch, and about half of that 15% only applied to MacOS users. There was a 30 day period in May-June for an attack that only affected MacOS users, one day in July for a “shell: protocol” vulnerability (with a very rapid fix), one day in August for a libPNG vulnerability, and 24 days in October-November for problems problems found by Michal Zalewski’s mangleme program. Note that in several cases, the time between the report and fix was one day or less. At no time were any vulnerabilities being actively exploited, as far as anyone knows.
25. Security Fix that 78% (284/365) of the time in 2006 Internet Explorer was vulnerable to dangerous known attacks, for which no patch to fix it was available, compared to 2% (9/365) for Mozilla Firefox. Brian Krebs “Security Fix” column compiled statistics on vulnerability response times, including those for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla Firefox. He found that for “a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users... In a total of ten cases last year, instructions detailing how to leverage “critical” vulnerabilities in IE were published online before Microsoft had a patch to fix them. Microsoft labels software vulnerabilities ‘critical’ -- its most severe rating -- if the flaws could be exploited to criminal advantage without any action on the part of the user, or by merely convincing an IE user to click on a link, visit a malicious Web site, or open a specially crafted e-mail or e-mail attachment. In contrast, Internet Explorer’s closest competitor in terms of market share -- Mozilla’s Firefox browser -- experienced a single period lasting just nine days last year in which exploit code for a serious security hole was posted online before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem...” He also notes that in several cases the attacks (from organized crime) were so severe, and Microsoft was so late in producing patches, that third-party security patches were released with many recommending their use.

26. Internet Explorer (IE) users are far more likely to end up with a spyware-infected PC than Mozilla’s Firefox users. If the user always says “yes” to security queries, unpatched IE was infected by 1.6% of domains while unpatched Firefox was experienced 0.09%. If the user always says “no”, IE was infected by 0.6% while Firefox experienced 0% (no infections). In TechWeb.com (February 9, 2005), Gregg Keizer’s article “Spyware Barely Touches Firefox” describes some research work from the University of Washington. Henry Levy stated that his research showed that users “will have a safer experience [surfing] with Firefox.” Researchers Henry Levy and Steven Gribble crawled 45,000 websites, cataloguing their executable files, and then exposed unpatched Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox browsers to them. They also observed if running the program required a user to actively agree (a practice naive users often unfortunately do) or if the program could install and run without being permitted to do so. During their most recent crawl on October 2005, 1.6% of the domains infected the first IE configuration that always permitted executing programs; and 0.6% planted spyware even when the user rejected the program. In contrast, only 0.09% of domains infected Firefox when the user permitted it, and 0% (no) domain managed to infect Firefox without permission. A startling result of the research was the number of spyware sites; about 5% of all executable files on web sites are spyware, and “1 in 25 domains contain at least one piece of spyware waiting for victims.” Levy said: “If you browse, you’re eventually going to get hit with a spyware attack.” Perhaps choosing the program with the better record would help. Obviously, you should patch your browser when there’s a security patch. But next, we’ll see statistics that make you worry about that too.

27. Proprietary vendor Microsoft took three times as long (on average) to fix critical flaws in its Windows software than FLOSS Mozilla took to fix critical flaws in its software, according to analysis by Brian Krebs. Microsoft took 134 days on average to release patches for security problems in 2004-2005; Mozilla averaged 37 days. Brian Krebs’ “A Time to Patch II: Mozilla” compared patch times of Mozilla with Microsoft. Even with an outlier included, Mozilla did much better on average than Microsoft. Mozilla took an average of about 37 days to issue patches for critical security problems in its products over a 3-year period. In general it did much better; one-third of its critical security updates were within less than 10 days of being notified. (The longest time was for a bug that perhaps should not have been marked as “critical”; Microsoft had exactly the same bug but marked it only as “moderate.)

    In a similar study of Microsoft’s vulnerability report response times, he notes that “In 2003, Microsoft took an average of three months to issue patches for problems reported to them. In 2004, that time frame shot up to 134.5 days, a number that remained virtually unchanged in 2005.” This is an extraordinarily long time; such a lengthy time may convince vulnerability reporters that Microsoft doesn’t take vulnerability reports seriously. It’s certainly true that many more people report vulnerabilities quietly to Mozilla than to Microsoft; instead, people often report vulnerabilities publicly (the “full disclosure” method). Many advocates of full disclosure say that they do it because companies often ignore vulnerability reports until they’re made public, so do it publicly to start with. The data certainly proves that Microsoft does fix problems released under full disclosure more quickly. In 2003, it took an average of 71 days to release a fix for a flaws reported under “full disclosure”; in 2004 it decreased to 55 days, and in 2005 it shrank further to 46 days. Note that this 46 day value is still longer than the average Mozilla repair time for reports that were usually private.

    It may be that security researchers trust that Mozilla will usually respond quickly to private vulnerability reports -- with good reason, given their typical response times. And in contrast, they may not trust Microsoft to respond quickly to private vulnerability reports -- and unfortunately, the data suggests that they have reason to believe that.

28. FLOSS suppliers are 60% faster than proprietary suppliers at responding to vulnerability reports The analysis paper Empirical Analysis of Software Vendors’ Patching Behavior: Impact of Vulnerability Disclosure examined the behavior of 325 vendors and 438 unique vulnerabilities. Their primary interest was in the whether or not publicly announcing a vulnerability sped up its repair (it does). However, they also compared FLOSS suppliers to proprietary suppliers, and found that the FLOSS suppliers were 60% faster than the proprietary ones.

29. According to a Network Security evaluation, an FLOSS vulnerability scanner (Nessus) was found to be the best (most effective). On January 8, 2001, Network Computing’s article Vulnerability Assessment Scanners. reported an evaluation of nine network scanning tools, most of them proprietary. In their evaluation, Network Computing set up demonstration systems with 17 of the most common and critical vulnerabilities; they then used the various network scanning tools to see how effectively each of the tools detected these vulnerabilities. Sadly, not one product detected all vulnerabilities; the best scanner was the FLOSS program Nessus Security Scanner, which found 15 of the 17 (which also received their top total score); the next best was a proprietary scanner which only found 13.5 out of 17.

    In their words,

    Some of us were a bit skeptical of the open-source Nessus project’s thoroughness until [Nessus] discovered the greatest number of vulnerabilities. That’s a hard fact to argue with, and we are now eating our words ... [Nessus] got the highest overall score simply because it did more things right than the other products.

    I agree with the authors that ideally a network vulnerability scanner should find every well-known vulnerability, and that “even one hole is too many.” Still, perfection is rare in the real world. More importantly, a vulnerability scanner should only be part of the process to secure an organization - it shouldn’t be the sole activity. Still, this evaluation suggests that an organization will be more secure, not less secure, by using an FLOSS program. It could be argued that this simply shows that this FLOSS program had more functionality - not more security - but in this case, the product’s sole functionality was to improve security.

30. Information Systems Journal (a peer-reviewed journal) published researcher Christian Payne’s results, showing good evidence that FLOSS can be secure. Information Systems Journal, Vol.12, Issue 1, February 2002, includes the peer-reviewed paper “On the security of open source software” by Christian Payne of Murdoch University (Perth, Australia). In it, Payne first summarizes the various arguments made for and against open source software. He discusses some of the arguments that FLOSS is more secure, in particular, claims that the process of peer review improves security, FLOSS flexibility and freedom is a significant aid (e.g., organizations are free to audit FLOSS, modify it to meet their security needs, and rapidly patch FLOSS without having to wait for a vendor), and that FLOSS projects tend to respond more quickly with security fixes. He also discusses some of the arguments made against FLOSS, such as claims that that vulnerabilities are harder for attackers to find in proprietary programs (since the source code is not available), and that there are flaws in the peer review argument (e.g., it may be available but not necessarily reviewed). In short, there are different effects, and it’s easy to have opinions about the strengths of those different effects. Without measurement, it’s hard to know what effects are stronger.

    But Payne goes beyond a mere summary of arguments, and actually works to try to gather quantitative data to measure the effect of these alternative approaches. Payne devised a scoring system for measuring security features, measuring reported security vulnerabilities, and then rolling those two factors into a final score. He then applied this to two FLOSS systems (Debian and OpenBSD) and one proprietary system (Solaris, which at the time was proprietary); all are Unix-based operating systems. The following table summarizes the results:

    	Debian	Solaris	OpenBSD
    Number of Features:	15	11	18
    Features score:	6.42	5.92	7.03
    Number of Vulnerabilities:	12	21	5
    Vulnerabilities score:	7.72	7.74	4.19
    Final Score:	-1.0	-3.5	10.2

    OpenBSD had the most security features (features that support confidentiality, integrity, availability, or audit), with Debian second and Solaris third. OpenBSD also had the highest score for those features. In terms of vulnerabilities, OpenBSD had the fewest reported vulnerabilities, and those vulnerabilities “were also relatively minor[,] only rating an average of 4.19 out of 10”. Solaris, the proprietary system, had the largest number of vulnerabilities. The final rolled-up score is quite intriguing: of the three systems, the proprietary system had the worst security by this rolled-up measure.

    The author correctly notes that these are only a few systems, using information taken at only one point in time, so these results are “far from being final”. And the author certainly does not take the view that any FLOSS program is automatically more secure than any proprietary alternative. Still, this data suggests that FLOSS programs can be more secure than their competing proprietary products. Hiding the source code certainly did not reduce the number of reported vulnerabilities, contrary to some proprietary vendors’ claims; the proprietary system had the most vulnerabilities reported about it. OpenBSD has far better score than either of the other systems; the author believes this is because of OpenBSD’s focused code audits by developers with the necessary background and security expertise.

    A BZ Research survey of 6,344 software development managers shows Linux superior to Windows for operating system security attacks, and FLOSS was in most categories considered equal or better at the application layer. A BZ Research survey of 6,344 software development managers reported in April 2005 asked about the security of different popular enterprise operating environments; FLOSS did very well. Below are some of the results; the margin of error for the survey is 2.5 percentage points.

    Among server operating systems, there was uniform agreement that both Sun Solaris and Linux were much more secure than Microsoft’s Windows Server against operating system related attacks. When comparing Sun Solaris against Linux by this measure, There was no consensus as to whether Sun Solaris or Linux were better against operating system level attacks; more people ranked Linux as “secure or very secure” compared to Sun Solaris, yet more people also ranked Linux as “very insecure or insecure” than Sun Solaris. One complication (for this paper’s purpose) is that Sun Solaris was originally built in large part from FLOSS approaches, then made proprietary for a time, and more recently released as FLOSS, so it’s difficult to cleanly take lessons from its Solaris results for either FLOSS or proprietary approaches.

    	MS Windows Server	Linux	Sun Solaris
    Very insecure or Insecure:	58%	6%	13%
    Secure or very secure:	38%	74%	66%

    Windows Server also did poorly against application-related “hacks and exploits”:

    	MS Windows Server	Linux
    Very insecure or Insecure:	58%	18%
    Secure or very secure:	30%	66%

    FLOSS was also far ahead of proprietary programs in in 4 of the 8 categories they considered: desktop/client operating systems (44% to 17%), Web servers (43% to 14%), server operating systems (38% to 22%), and components and libraries (34% to 18%). Results were essentially equal in three categories: desktop/client applications, server applications and application servers. Only in one area was proprietary software considered more secure than FLOSS, database servers (34% to 21%).

    Note that this is merely a survey of opinions. Opinions can, of course, be quite wrong; measurements of products are often better than measurements of opinions. Still, opinion polls of large numbers of people who would have every reason to know the facts should not be ignored.

Security is notoriously hard to measure, and many reports that attempt to do so end up with interesting information that’s hard to interpret or use. And some reports come from sources whose reliability is widely questioned. On November 2, 2004, mi2g reported on successful digital breaches against permanently connected computers worldwide. They concluded that BSDs (which are usually FLOSS) and Apple’s computers had the fewest security breaches; on the surface, that sounds positive for FLOSS. They also reported that GNU/Linux systems had the most breaches, followed by Windows. That result sounds mixed, but digging deeper it turns out that this ranking is artificial, based on artificial definitions. Their default definition for a security breach only included manual attacks and ignored malware (viruses, worms, and Trojans). Yet malware is one of the dominant security problems for Windows users, and only Windows users! After all, why bother with a manual attack when completely automated attacks against broad collections of computers will do more? When they include malware in their calculations for all system breaches, “including the impact of MyDoom, NetSky, SoBig, Klez and Sasser, Windows has become the most breached computing environment in the world accounting for most of the productivity losses associated with malware - virus, worm and trojan - proliferation.” Even without malware, in governments “the most breached Operating System for online systems has now become Windows (57.74%) followed by Linux (31.76%) and then BSD and Mac OS X together (1.74%)” (a reversal of their previous rankings). But while these results are interesting, there are significant problems in interpreting what these results actually mean:

1. Ignoring malware in the main report is hard to justify, though to be fair the report does clearly state this assumption and explains how the results would change with a different definition. But most users want to be protected from all attacks, automated or not, and it’s especially hard to justify this assumption since malware is a leading attack on only one of the systems.
2. None of these statistics, at least what’s publicly posted, seem to take market share into account, or control sampling in general. If 2 of 100 type A machines are broken into, and 1 of 1 type B machines are broken into, type A may have twice as many break-ins, but that’s irrelevant to most users; what’s more interesting is noticing that 98% of the type A machines were unbreached, while 0% of the type B machines were unbreached! Besides, what you really want to know is not raw numbers like this, but the probability that a given system will be breached (given various criteria such security configuration and as if you’re relatively up-to-date on patches). That information doesn’t appear to be available from the public information provided.

One serious problem in making secure software is that there are strong economic disincentives for proprietary vendors to make their software secure. For example, if vendors make their software more secure, they would often fail to be “first” in a given market; this often means that they will lose that market. Since it is extremely difficult for customers to distinguish proprietary software with strong security from those with poor security, the poor products tend to eliminate the good ones (after all, they’re cheaper to develop and thus cost less). Governments have other disincentives as well. For a discussion of some of the economic disincentives for secure software, see Why Information Security is Hard - an Economic Perspective by Ross Anderson (Proceedings of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), December 2001, pp. 358-365). It’s not clear that FLOSS always avoids these disincentives, but it appears in at least some cases it does. For example, FLOSS source code is public, so the difference in security is far more visible than in proprietary products.

One of the most dangerous security problems with proprietary software is that if intentionally malicious code is snuck into it, such code is extremely difficult to find. Few proprietary vendors have other developers examine all code in great detail - their testing processes are designed to catch mistakes (not malice) and often don’t look at the code at all. In contrast, malicious code can be found by anyone when the source code is publicly available, and with FLOSS, there are incentives for arbitrary people to review it (such as to add new features or perform a security review of a product they intend to use). Thus, someone inserting malicious code to an FLOSS project runs a far greater risk of detection. Here are two examples, one confirmed, one not confirmed:

1. Some time between 1992 and 1994, Borland inserted an intentional “back door” into their database server, “InterBase”, as a secret username and fixed password. This back door allowed any local or remote user to manipulate any database object and install arbitrary programs, and in some cases could lead to controlling the machine as “root”. This vulnerability stayed in the product for at least 6 years - no one else could review the product, and Borland had no incentive to remove the vulnerability. Then Borland released its source code on July 2000 as an FLOSS project. The “Firebird” project began working with the source code, and uncovered this serious security problem with InterBase in December 2000 (only 5 months after release). By January 2001 the CERT announced the existence of this back door as CERT advisory CA-2001-01. What’s discouraging is that the backdoor can be easily found simply by looking at an ASCII dump of the program (a common cracker trick), so it’s quite possible that this vulnerability was exploited many times in the intervening years. Once this problem was found by open source developers reviewing the code, it was patched quickly.
2. Mohammad Afroze Abdul Razzak, arrested by Mumbai (Bombay) police Oct. 2, 2001, claims that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network were able to gain employment at Microsoft and attempted to plant “trojans, trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP.” This was reported to Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, a New Delhi information systems and telecommunication consultant, and then reported by the Washington Post’s Newsbytes division. This claim has not been confirmed; indeed, I’m somewhat skeptical. The problem, however, is that this is impossible to disprove. Even if this particular case isn’t true, note that this threat is unfortunately a credible threat to proprietary software, because very few of its users can review the code. This is far less dangerous to FLOSS software, due to the worldwide review that’s possible (including the ability to see the changes made in each version).

Bruce Perens, in “Open sourcers wear the white hats”, makes the interesting claim that most of the people reviewing proprietary products looking for security flaws (aside from one or two paid reviewers) are “black hats,” outsiders who disassemble the code or try various types of invalid input in search of a flaw that they can exploit (and not report). There is simply little incentive, and many roadblocks, for someone to search for security flaws simply to improve someone else’s proprietary product. “Only a black hat would disassemble code to look for security flaws. You won’t get any ‘white hats’ doing this for the purpose of [just] closing the flaws.” In contrast, he thinks many open source developers do have such an incentive. This article slightly overstates the case; there are other incentives (such as fame) that can motivate a few people to review some other company’s proprietary product for security. Still, it has a point; even formal reviews often only look at designs (not code), proprietary code is often either unreviewed or poorly reviewed, and there are many cases (including the entire OpenBSD system) where legions of developers review open source code for security issues. As he notes, “open source has a lot of ‘white hats’ looking at the source. They often do find security bugs while working on other aspects of the code, and the bugs are reported and closed.”

Those who are familiar with computer security issues may raise an objection: what about the “Trusting Trust” attack? An Air Force evaluation by Karger and Schell first publicly described this very nasty computer attack, which Ken Thompson ably demonstrated and described in his classic 1984 paper “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. Thompson showed that because we use software to create other software, if an attacker subverts the software-creating programs, no amount of auditing any program can help you - the subverted programs can hide whatever they want to! This has been called the “uncounterable attack”, and some have said that it’s impossible to secure computers simply because this attack is possible. Some have even said that all those security audits of FLOSS are worthless, because subverted tools could insert attacks the auditors couldn’t see. But it turns out that the trusting trust attack can be countered. My 2005 paper Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC), published by ACSAC, shows how the “uncounterable” trusting trust attack can be countered. But there’s a catch: the DDC defense only works if you can get the source code for your software creation tools, including the operating system, compiler, and so on. That kind of information is typically only available for FLOSS programs! Thus, even in the case of the dangerous “trusting trust” attack, FLOSS has a security advantage.

FLOSS programs can be evaluated using the formal security evaluations required by some government agencies, such as the Common Criteria (ISO Standard 15408) and NIST FIPS 140, One complication has been that many governments have assumed that vendors would pay for such evaluations on their own. This assumption is a poor match for many FLOSS projects, whose business models typically require that users who want a particular improvement (such as an evaluation) pay for that improvement (in money or effort). This doesn’t make formal security evaluations of FLOSS projects impossible, but it may require that customers change their approach to performing evaluations in some cases. In particular, customers will need to not assume that vendors will do evaluations ‘for free.’ Part of the problem is that many organizations’ acquisition strategies were defined before FLOSS became prevalent, and have not yet been adjusted to the widespread presence of FLOSS. Some FLOSS programs have multiple project sites, so an organization must select exactly what project to evaluate, but that‘s not really change; evaluations of proprietary programs must select a specific version too.

Here are several reports on FLOSS program evaluations:

1. Government Computer News reports that Novell Inc.’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 has achieved Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) with EAL 4+ when running on IBM Corp.’s eServers. The U.S. NIAP Validated Products List shows that Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server V8 successfully passed a Common Criteria EAL3+ evaluation against the Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) in January 2004.
2. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 passed an EAL2 evaluation in February 2004. Various reports in IT Security and by Red Hat state that in August 2004 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 was successfully against the Common Criteria EAL 3+ and the Controlled Access Protection Profile (though it hasn’t appeared in the Validated Products List yet). Red Hat also reports that they are working to complete an EAL 4 evaluation (in various forums).
3. Mandrakesoft (now Mandriva) and others have won a 1 million Euro three-year contract to help create a highly secure Linux based solution for the French Ministry of Defense that meets Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 5.
4. Trusted Computer Solutions Inc. of Herndon, Va., expects to begin beta-testing Trusted Linux this fall and seek Common Criteria certification at EAL 4 to meet not only the Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP), but the additional requirements of the Labeled Security Protection Profile, the Role-based Access Control Protection Profile, and the requirements of Director of Central Intelligence Directive 6/3.
5. The IBM Crypto for C (ICC) library received a FIPS 140-2 level 1 certificate #384 in 2004, and it uses the cryptographic library provided by FLOSS OpenSSL.
6. The FLOSS cryptographic library OpenSSL is being evaluated itself using the FIPS 140 evaluation process. The OpenSSL FAQ provides more information on an effort to evaluate OpenSSL sponsored by HP and the Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support program.

Some other interesting data about security can be found in Google Facts/Statistics question about computer security and loss of data.

The “Alexis de Tocqueville Institute” (ADTI) published a white paper called “Opening the Open Source Debate” that purported to examine FLOSS issues. Unfortunately, ADTI makes many wrong, specious, and poorly-argued claims about FLOSS, including some related to security. Wired (in its article Did MS Pay for Open-Source Scare?) made some startling discoveries about ADTI; after querying, they found that “a Microsoft spokesman confirmed that Microsoft provides funding to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution... Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment on whether the company directly sponsored the debate paper. De Tocqueville Institute president Ken Brown and chairman Gregory Fossedal refused to comment on whether Microsoft sponsored the report.” Politech found additional suspicious information about ADTI, and UPI reported that ADTI receives a significant portion of its funding from the Microsoft Corp, and thus it essentially lobbies in favor of issues important to Microsoft. ADTI apparently has a history of creating “independent” results that are apparently paid for by corporations (e.g., see the Smoke Free for Health article about ADTI’s pro-tobacco-lobby papers). Reputable authors clearly identify any potential conflict of interest, even if it’s incidental; ADTI did not. Specific to their report, Andy Tanenbaum has described how Ken Brown of ADTI failed to understand the issues and appeared to have an agenda.

The ADTI paper makes many errors and draws unwarranted conclusions. I’ll just note a few examples of the paper’s problems that aren’t as widely noted elsewhere: incorrect or incomplete quotations, rewriting web browser history, and cleverly omitting the most important data in one of their charts:

• The ADTI “quotes” me several times in the paper, but in some cases claims I said something I never said, and in others places them out of context by intentionally omitting important things that I said. ADTI originally claimed that I said that “without licensing the source code in a multi-license format, (referring to other more permissive licenses), it is impossible for GPL to work for a proprietary business model.” But I never said this. In fact, I specifically noted to ADTI that Microsoft sells a GPL’ed product (a fact I’d already publicly published). Instead of removing the statement, ADTI later made up a statement and claimed that I said it. What I really said was more nuanced: “without licensing the source code in a multi-license format [GPL and other licenses], the GPL does not permit certain kinds of uses in proprietary business models.” The words are similar, but this is a much narrower statement. In particular, ADTI’s Brown was essentially trying to claim that the GPL was essentially incompatible with business, even though this wasn’t true, I told them it wasn’t true, and even provided them with examples. ADTI also claims I said that “today I would be confident that the number [of GPL software] has probably grown to 80%;” I only said that I believed the number was probably larger than 50%, but since I couldn’t remember the exact figures offhand, I told them to examine my papers - a trivial search which ADTI did not do (if they had, they’d notice that I’d recently published that 71.85% of Freshmeat’s software packages were covered by the GPL). More intriguing are the omissions. For example, I explained to ADTI the GPL license (which they did not understand, even though they were attacking it); ADTI seems to think that the GPL requires public release of code, but it does not. The GPL only requires that those who receive the binary executable receive the source code. This is crucial, because it means you can still keep “secrets” in GPL’ed code, in spite of ADTI’s implied assertion otherwise. Besides, there’s anecdotal evidence that the government uses most GPL’ed code as-is, in which case these issues don’t apply - the GPL permits arbitrary use and redistribution of unmodified copies.
• For a second example, the ADTI paper rewrites the history of web browsers in an attempt to make its claims; it bases much on the claim that Mosaic was an open source web browser, but it never was; modified versions of the Unix version could only be used non-commercially without a separate license (FLOSS must be usable commercially), and the Mac and Windows licenses were even more restrictive. It also completely omits the heavily publicized move of Netscape to FLOSS in 1998, clearly the most important event in web browser history relating to FLOSS. I specifically mentioned these problems to ADTI before they published their paper, but ADTI was not willing to fix their paper to meet the facts.
• Switching to the third example, ADTI includes a chart of showing source lines of code (SLOC) for various programs; it even references my paper More than a Gigabuck while noting that the Linux kernel is over 2 million SLOC. The same chart also reports that Windows XP is 30 million SLOC, an interesting statement since to my knowledge this value has not been made public (ADTI has not revealed their source, but has confirmed to me that they really meant Windows XP). But note the invalid comparison - ADTI reports on the Linux kernel (a small part of an OS), and Windows XP (a whole OS), but not on an whole FLOSS OS. ADTI willfully ignores my paper’s abstract and main point, which reported that the whole Red Hat Linux 7.1 distribution is also 30 million SLOC; by omitting the most important data, ADTI gives false impressions. But these are merely the tip of the iceberg; the paper’s flaws are so numerous, and discussing the flaws in its conclusions require so much effort, that a serious rebuttal would require writing a whole separate paper.

All of this is unfortunate, because the real Alexis de Tocqueville strongly approved of the FLOSS’s underlying approaches. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the extraordinary success in the United States of voluntary community associations to do many tasks, and viewed them extremely favorably. He found such associations to be remarkably effective.

There are other non-quantitative discussions on FLOSS and security. The October 2002 paper Open Source Digital Forensics Tools: The Legal Argument by Brian Carrier notes that to enter scientific evidence into a United States court, a forensics tool must be reliable and relevant as determined through the “Daubert” guidelines. The paper examines then those guidelines and argues that “open source tools may more clearly and comprehensively meet the [forensics] guidelines than closed source tools.” Stacey Quandt’s ”Linux and Windows security compared” compares Windows and GNU/Linux security qualitatively; she concludes that they’re comparable in network security/protocols, deployment and operations, and trusted computing; Linux is superior in base security, application security, and open standards. The only area where Windows was ahead was in assurance, because an EAL4 Common Criteria evaluation has been completed for Windows; an EAL3 evaluation for a GNU/Linux has completed, but an EAL4 evaluation for a GNU/Linux is in process but not yet complete. Since an EAL4 GNU/Linux evaluation is expected to complete by around the end of 2004, this doesn’t appear to be a long-lasting advantage for Windows.

Many security experts have stated that FLOSS has advantages over the security of proprietary software, including Whitfield Diffie (co-inventor of public key cryptography), Bruce Schneier (expert on cryptography and computer security), Vincent Rijmen (a developer of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)), Elias Levy (Aleph1, the former moderator of the popular security discussion group Bugtraq), John Viega (author of a book on secure programming), Kenneth van Wyk, and Peter Neumann (long-time expert on security). A humorous article expressing this view is the article Microsoft Windows: A lower Total Cost of 0wnership (0wnership starts with zero, not the letter O; 0wn is slang for gaining illicit remote administrative control over someone else’s computer). This article by Immunix, Inc., compares the security of Microsoft Windows and OSS systems based on their technology characteristics, and declares that the “best platform for your targets [victims] to be running is Microsoft Windows, allowing you unparalleled value for their dollar” (see the next section for the more traditional Total Cost of Ownership information). This doesn’t guarantee that a particular FLOSS program is more secure than a particular proprietary product - merely that there are some fundamental security advantages to easing public review.

And it’s worth noting that the better distributions, who job includes ensuring that their packages don’t have known vulnerabilities, seem to take their job seriously. Mark J. Cox has posted a summary of how Red Hat ensured that Fedora Core 4 didn’t include any known vulnerabilities (through an auditing process); Debian does similar types of analysis.

In contrast, Microsoft’s Jim Allchin disclosed under oath in court testimony that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed to the public. Yet more recently, Microsoft announced its “Government Security Program” to allow governments to view most source code (though not all code, and they cannot change and freely redistribute the results). Indeed, Reuters reported a survey by Forrester Research Inc. that found that most computer security experts at major companies do not think Microsoft Corporation’s products are secure; 77% said security was a top concern when using Windows. The primary problem reported was that patches were not implemented, because “administrators lacked both the confidence that a patch won’t bring down a production system and the tools and time to validate Microsoft’s avalanche of patches.” If you need to secure Windows, feel free to look at my essay on how to secure Microsoft Windows (for home and small business users); while many issues are true for any system, there are also a number of security problems that are essentially unique to Windows.

Specialized applications may need high assurance software. If you are interested in that, see my essay High Assurance (for Security or Safety) and Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Now it should be obvious from these figures that FLOSS systems are not magically invincible from security flaws. Indeed, some have argued that making the source code available gives attackers an advantage (because they have more information to make an attack). While FLOSS gives attackers more information, this ignores opposing forces: having the source code also gives the defenders more information (because they can also examine its original source code), and in addition, the defenders can improve the code. More importantly, the necessary information for breaking into a program is in the binary executable of the program; disassemblers and decompilers can quickly extract whatever information is needed from executables to break into a program, so hiding the source code isn’t all that helpful for preventing attacks against attackers who are willing to use such programs. Even if source code were required (it’s not), source code can often be acquired by attackers, either by simply asking for it (in exchange for funds) or by acquiring the source code itself by attack. Again, it is not true that proprietary programs are always more secure, or that FLOSS is always more secure, because there are many factors at work. Writing secure software does require that developers know how to do it, but there’s no evidence that proprietary software developers in general have more such knowledge; indeed, since many developers create both proprietary and FLOSS programs, it’s unlikely there’s a major difference, and FLOSS encourages code review in a way that few proprietary projects match. It is also greatly enhanced by review; certainly not all FLOSS programs are reviewed for security, but many are, both by other developers and by others (for example, one group of students was assigned the task of finding and reporting vulnerabilities, and reported 44). And clearly, any vulnerabilities must be fixed and distributed. Note that a well-configured and well-maintained system, of any kind, will almost always be far more secure than a poorly configured and unmaintained system of any kind over the long term. For a longer description of these issues, see my discussion on open source and security (part of my book on writing secure software). However, from these figures, it appears that FLOSS systems are in many cases better - not just equal - in their resistance to attacks as compared to proprietary software.

7. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Indeed, whatever product you use or support, you can probably find a study to show it has the lowest TCO for some circumstance. Not surprisingly, both Microsoft and Sun provide studies showing that their products have the lowest TCO. Xephon has a study determining that mainframes are the cheapest per-user (due to centralized control) at £3450 per user per year; Centralized Unix cost £7350 per user per year, and a decentralized PC environment costs £10850 per user per year. Xephon appears to be a mainframe-based consultancy, though, and would want the results to come out this way. There are indeed situations where applying a mainframe makes sense.. but as we’ll see in a moment, you can use FLOSS in such environments too.

In short, what has a smaller TCO depends on your needs and your environment. First, identify what the requirements are, including the types of applications. You must then determine the architectural options that meet these requirements. For example, GNU/Linux systems can be implemented as independent client systems with a few common servers, just like most Windows systems are. But there are many architectural alternatives, such as using X-Windows terminals (programs run on a central server (so the client systems can be extremely low-end “throw-away” systems), clustering (where tasks can be divided among many computers), or use Stateless Linux (programs run locally on the computer, but since nothing is stored locally, anyone can log into any computer later).

Then, to determine TCO you must identify all the important cost drivers (the “cost model”) and estimate their costs. Don’t forget “hidden” costs, such as administration costs, upgrade costs, technical support, end-user operation costs, and so on. Computer Sciences Corporation’ study “Open Source: Open for Business” (pp. 39-43) identifies the TCO factors that it believes are most important for evaluating FLOSS with proprietary software: hardware costs (including purchase price and hardware maintenance), direct software costs (including purchase price and support and maintenance), indirect software costs (especially administration of licenses), staffing costs, support costs, and downtime (CSC claims that the “modularity of Linux can allow a very lean build to be deployed, which in turn can enable more stability...”).

To be honest, the term “TCO” is common but misleading for most software, especially for proprietary software, because software users often don’t own the software they use and thus don’t have the rights of ownership. It might be more accurate to say that proprietary software users often “lease” or “rent” the software, and thus this category could more accurately be named “total cost to lease or own”. Fundamentally, unless you arrange to have a software program’s copyright transferred to you, you do not actually own the software -- you only own a license to run the software in certain limited ways. That’s an important distinction; in particular, with proprietary software you typically do not have the rights associated with ownership. When you pay to own a physical product (say a building or computer hardware), you typically have nearly unlimited rights to modify and resell the product you bought (subject to legal limits that prevent harm to others like zoning laws and limits on electromagentic emissions). In contrast, with nearly all proprietary software, you do not have the right to modify the software to suit your needs. Many proprietary licenses are even more stringent; they typically forbid reverse engineering the product to understand what it does (say, to examine its security), forbid publishing benchmarks or reviews without approval by the vendor, and often forbid (sub)leasing, reselling, or redistributing the product. These kinds of limits make proprietary software users more like leasee or a renter of a building, who can occupy a space but cannot modify or sublease the space. Some proprietary software programs are sold for use only over a period of time, and thus the analogy to renting is especially easy to see. But though there are many proprietary software programs that are sold with a one-time cost (a “perpetual” license), in reality these programs also impose recurring fees, such as upgrade costs to continue to use the programs on newer hardware and operating systems, upgrades so that your software will continue to be compatible with others’ copies and with other software, and various support fees, and so even so-called perpetual licenses have recurring costs like a typical rent or lease. This isn’t necessarily terrible, and I’m certainly not going to say that such arrangements are unethical; people decide to rent or lease physical property too! But it’s important to understand what the transaction entails. For more on this topic, see Dr. Debora Halbert’s The Open Source Alternative: Shrink-Wrap, Open Source and Copyright, particularly point 22. As explained by Ross Anderson’s Trusted Computing (TC) Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), vendors are already working to build mechanisms to enforce this even more strongly, because so-called “trusted computing” transfers control of your computer from you to the vendors (the FSF calls this technology “treacherous computing” because while the computer is more trustworthy for users, it does this by becoming less trustworthy by owners). As Anderson says, “TC will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buy it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created. So if you stop paying for upgrades to Media Player, you may lose access to all the songs you bought using it.” Users of FLOSS software aren’t actually owners either, and they have some of the same types of recurring costs (such as support). On the other hand, the rights FLOSS users are granted (users can understand, publicly comment on, modify, and redistribute the software -- and all this in perpetuity) are far closer to an owner’s rights than the rights granted to a proprietary software user.

There’s another problem in thinking that people really “own” software: maintenance matters. If a proprietary software company goes out of business, the value of the software it sold immediately plummets to near zero. This is not how people react when they purchase land or other real property; the value of the property does not diminish just because the seller is going out of business. This suggests that when users are purchasing software, they’re really purchasing future support and upgrades as well. Robert Lefkowitz’s “Calculating the True Price of Software” argues that FLOSS pricing essentially splits the costs of initial value and the value of options on future maintenance, converting warrants on future maintenance and enhancements into options, so that instead of having a sole supplier (warrants), it creates a third-party market (options) of these derivatives.

FLOSS has many strong cost advantages in various categories that, in many cases, will result in its having the smallest TCO:

1. FLOSS costs less to initially acquire. FLOSS costs much less to get initially. FLOSS isn’t free in the monetary sense, because the “free” in “free software” refers to freedom, not price. This distinction is usually summarized as “free speech, not free beer”. Merrill Lynch executive Robert Lefkowitz found what may be a better way to describe it: “We like to think of it as ‘free as in market.’”

   FLOSS isn’t cost-free, because you’ll still spend money for paper documentation, support, training, system administration, and so on, just as you do with proprietary systems. In many cases, the actual programs in FLOSS distributions can be acquired freely by downloading them (linux.org provides some pointers on how to get distributions). However, most people (especially beginners and those without high-speed Internet connections) will want to pay a small fee to a distributor for a nicely integrated package with CD-ROMs, paper documentation, and support. Even so, FLOSS costs far less to acquire.

   For example, examine the price differences when trying to configure a server, such as public web server or an intranet file and email server, in which you’d like to use C++ and an RDBMS. This is simply an example; different missions would involve different components. Using the prices from “Global Computing Supplies” (Suwanee, GA), September 2000, rounded to the nearest dollar, here is a quick summary of the purchasing costs:

   	Microsoft Windows 2000	Red Hat Linux
   Operating System	$1510 (25 client)	$29 (standard), $76 deluxe, $156 professional (all unlimited)
   Email Server	$1300 (10 client)	included (unlimited)
   RDBMS Server	$2100 (10 CALs)	included (unlimited)
   C++ Development	$500	included

   Basically, Microsoft Windows 2000 (25 client) costs $1510; their email server Microsoft Exchange (10-client access) costs $1300, their RDBMS server SQL Server 2000 costs $2100 (with 10 CALs), and their C++ development suite Visual C++ 6.0 costs $500. Red Hat Linux 6.2 (a widely-used GNU/Linux distribution) costs $29 for standard (90 days email-based installation support), $76 for deluxe (above plus 30 days telephone installation support), or $156 for professional (above plus SSL support for encrypting web traffic); in all cases it includes all of these functionalities (web server, email server, database server, C++, and much more). A public web server with Windows 2000 and an RDBMS might cost $3610 ($1510+$2100) vs. Red Hat Linux’s $156, while an intranet server with Windows 2000 and an email server might cost $2810 ($1510+$1300) vs. Red Hat Linux’s $76.

   Both packages have functionality the other doesn’t have. The GNU/Linux system always comes with an unlimited number of licenses; the number of clients you’ll actually use depends on your requirements. However, this certainly shows that no matter what, Microsoft’s server products cost thousands of dollars more per server than the equivalent GNU/Linux system.

   For another in-depth analysis comparing the initial costs GNU/Linux with Windows, see Linux vs. Windows: The Bottom Line by Cybersource Pty Ltd. Here’s a summary of their analysis (in 2001 U.S. dollars):

   	Microsoft Solution	FLOSS (GNU/Linux) Solution	Savings by using GNU/Linux
   Company A (50 users)	$69,987	$80	$69,907
   Company B (100 users)	$136,734	$80	$136,654
   Company C (250 users)	$282,974	$80	$282,894

   Consulting Times found that as the number of mailboxes got large, the three-year TCO for mainframes with GNU/Linux became in many cases quite compelling. For 50,000 mailboxes, an Exchange/Intel solution cost $5.4 million, while the Linux/IBM(G6) solution cost $3.3 million. For 5,000 mailboxes, Exchange/Intel cost $1.6 million, while Groupware on IFL cost $362,890. For yet another study, see the Cost Comparison from jimmo.com. Obviously, the price difference depends on exactly what functions you need for a given task, but for many common situations, GNU/Linux costs far less to acquire.

2. Upgrade/maintenance costs are typically far less. Long-term upgrade costs are far less for FLOSS systems. For example, upgrading a Microsoft system will typically cost around half the original purchase. What’s worse, you are essentially at their mercy for long-term pricing, because there is only one supplier (see Microsoft Turns the Screws). In contrast, the GNU/Linux systems can be downloaded (free), or simply re-purchased (generally for less than $100), and the single upgrade be used on every system. This doesn’t include technical support, but the technical support can be competed (a situation that’s not practical for proprietary software). An anti-trust lawyer would say that FLOSS technical support is “contestable.” In short, if you don’t like your GNU/Linux supplier (e.g., they’ve become too costly), you can switch.

3. FLOSS does not impose license management costs, does not in practice include noxious licensing clauses, and avoids nearly all licensing litigation risks. Proprietary vendors make money from the sale of licenses, and are imposing increasingly complex mechanisms on consumers to manage these licenses. Customers who cannot later prove than they paid for every installed copy of proprietary software (e.g., due to copying by an employee or losing the license paperwork) risk stiff penalties. In short: by using proprietary software, you run the risk of having the vendor sue you.

   To counter these risks, organizations must keep careful track of license purchases. This means that organizations must impose strict software license tracking processes, purchase costly tracking programs, and pay for people to keep track of these licenses and perform occasional audits.

   Organizations must also be careful to obey licensing terms, some of which may be extremely noxious or risky to the user. Those who think that proprietary software gives them “someone to sue” are in for a rude awakening -- practically all software licenses specifically forbid it. A Groklaw article contrasted the terms of the GPL vs. the Windows XP End-User License Agreement (EULA) terms, and stated that Windows XP’s license was far more dangerous to users. For example, it requires a mandatory activation (where you reveal yourself to the vendor), it allows the vendor to modify your computer’s software at will, the vendor may collect personal data about you without warning or limitation, and the vendor can terminate the agreement without due process. Con Zymaris has published a detailed comparison of the GPL and the Microsoft EULA. Both note, for example, that if things go awry, you can get no more than $5 from the Microsoft EULA. Indeed, many common EULAs now include dangerous clauses.

   In contrast, there’s no license management or litigation risk in simply using FLOSS software. Some FLOSS software do have legal requirements if you modify the program or embed the program in other programs, but proprietary software usually forbids modifying the program and often also imposes licensing requirements for embedding a program (e.g., royalty payments). Thus, software developers must examine what components they’re employing to understand their ramifications, but this would be true for both FLOSS and proprietary programs. See the licensing litigation discussion later in this paper for more about licensing costs and risks.

4. FLOSS can often use older hardware more efficiently than proprietary systems, yielding smaller hardware costs and sometimes eliminating the need for new hardware. FLOSS runs faster on faster hardware, of course, but many FLOSS programs can use older hardware more efficiently than proprietary systems, resulting in lower hardware costs - and in some cases requiring no new costs (because “discarded” systems can suddenly be used again). For example, the minimum requirements for Microsoft Windows 2000 Server (according to Microsoft) are a Pentium-compatible CPU (133 MHz or higher), 128 MiB of RAM minimum (with 256MiB the “recommended minimum”), and a 2 GB hard drive with at least 1.0 GB free. According to Red Hat, Red Hat Linux 7.1 (a common distribution of GNU/Linux) requires at a minimum an i486 (Pentium-class recommended), 32MiB RAM (64MiB recommended), and 650MB hard disk space (1.2 GB recommended).

   In Scientific American’s August 2001 issue, the article The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer discusses how the researchers built a powerful computing platform with many discarded computers and GNU/Linux. The result was dubbed the “Stone Soupercomputer”; by May 2001 it contained 133 nodes, with a theoretical peak performance of 1.2 gigaflops.

5. When used as an application server based system, the total costs for hardware drop by orders of magnitude. Many people make the mistake of deploying FLOSS workstations (such as GNU/Linux or the *BSDs) the same way they would deploy Windows systems. Although it’s possible, this is an unnecessarily costly approach if they’re installing a set of workstations for typical productivity applications (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets, etc. for an office), For many, a better approach is to provide each user with a very old GNU/Linux-based machine which is merely a graphics display (an “X terminal”), and then run the actual applications on an “application server” that is shared by all the users. See How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts for more information about this. With this application server approach, workstations can cost about $30 each (using “obsolete” machines), a server (shared by many users) can cost about $1000 each, and nearly all system administration is centralized (reducing administration costs). A nice side-effect of this approach is that users can use any workstation just by logging in. A more detailed discussion of this approach is given in Paul Murphy’s article, Total cost of ownership series revisited. Linux Style: Windows PCs vs. X Terminals: A Cost Comparison describes how the Mark O. Hatfield Library at Willamette University has used networked X terminals in its public and staff computing environments since 1995. The 15-year cost of 25 Linux systems in this environment is estimated to be $41,359 versus a 15-year cost of $100,000 to $155,000 for Windows PCs serving the same function. This is how the City of Largo, Florida, and many other organizations use GNU/Linux.

6. FLOSS tends to require less ongoing administration; a survey of European governments found that administrators of FLOSS systems can handle 35% more PCs per IT administrator than administrators of proprietary systems. FLOSSPOLS’ “Results and policy paper from survey of government authorities” (Deliverable D3) did a survey in March 2005 of 955 European local governments. It found that “FLOSS users administer 35% more PCs per IT administrator than non-users -- FLOSS use appears to reduce administrator workload per PC, and IT departments with high workloads are more likely to want a future increase in FLOSS use.” About half (49%) of local government authorities reported intentionally using FLOSS, but a huge additional portion (29%) were definitely using FLOSS (GNU/Linux, MySQL or Apache) and were unaware that these were FLOSS; I suspect that the true percentage of users was probably even higher. Once people started using it, they wanted more; 70% of FLOSS users wanted to increase its use. Groklaw summarized this FLOSSPOLS survey.

7. As the number of systems and hardware performance increases, this difference in initial and upgrade costs becomes even more substantial. As the number of servers increases, proprietary solutions become increasingly costly. First, many proprietary systems (including Microsoft) sell per-client licenses; this means that even if your hardware can support more clients, you’ll must pay more to actually use the hardware you’ve purchased. Secondly, if you want to use more computers, you must pay for more licenses in proprietary systems. In contrast, for most GNU/Linux distributions, you can install as many copies as you like for no additional fee, and there’s no performance limit built into the software. There may be a fee for additional support, but you can go to competing vendors for this support.

   According to Network World Fusion News, Linux is increasingly being used in healthcare, finance, banking, and retail due to its cost advantages when large numbers of identical sites and servers are built. According to their calculations for a 2,000 site deployment, SCO UnixWare would cost $9 million, Windows would cost $8 million, and Red Hat Linux costs $180.

8. There are many other factors; their effect varies on what you’re trying to do. There are many other factors in TCO, but it’s difficult to categorize their effects in general, and it’s generally difficult to find justifiable numbers for these other effects. Windows advocates claim that system administrators are cheaper and easier to find than Unix/Linux administrators, while GNU/Linux and Unix advocates argue that fewer such administrators are needed (because administration is easier to automate and the systems are more reliable to start with). Various reports have mentioned this (a Red Hat executive stated that one Wall Street bank has one administrator for 800 machines), quantitative studies are beginning to back this claim that fewer administrators are needed. Some GNU/Linux advocates have told me that GNU/Linux lends itself to hosting multiple services on one server in cases where Windows installations must use multiple servers. License compliance administration can be costly for proprietary systems (e.g., time spent by staff to purchase CALS, keep track of licenses, and undergo audits) - a cost that simply isn’t relevant to FLOSS.

9. A European Commission-sponsored study The reported savings in nearly all cases from using FLOSS Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU (November 20, 2006) said “Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term “ costs of ownership of the software products... Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and mainly are budgeted in less than one year... Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.... OpenOffice.org has all the functionalities that public offices need to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations... OpenOffice.org is free, extremely stable, and supports the ISO Open Document Standard.” A Groklaw article on this study summarizes the report This study presents a lot of quantitative data on other FLOSS topics as well.

10. Cybersource’s 2002 study found TCO savings of 24% to 34% when using FLOSS instead of Microsoft’s proprietary approach; their 2004 study found TCO savings from 19% to 36%. Cybersource’s 2004 update of their “Linux vs. Windows: Total Cost of Ownership Comparison” (as noted in the press) found 19% to 36% savings using Linux, compared to Microsoft Windows, depending on various factors (see their paper). This is basically an update of Cybersource’s “Linux vs. Windows: Total Cost of Ownership Comparison” 2002 study, which modeled an organization with 250 computer-using staff, an appropriate number of workstations, servers, with Internet connectivity, an e-business system, network cabling and hardware, standard software, and salaries for IT professionals to establish and support this infrastructure and technology. Using existing hardware and infrastructure, they found a three-year savings of 34.26% ($251,393 U.S. dollars) when using the “Linux/Open Source Solution” instead of the proprietary “Microsoft solution”. When new hardware and infrastructure were purchased, the savings were 24.69%. Note that this study is a follow-on of an even earlier study; a commentary is available at Linux Journal. It could be argued that this was merely a paper study, but they claim that they’ve seen significant savings in their consulting work. It’s also fair to note that this organization is pro-FLOSS. In any case, TCO savings have been reported by real organizations, corroborating these results, as discussed below.

11. An Italian study in 2002 found GNU/Linux to have a TCO 34.84% less than Windows. The full study is in Italian; you can try to read an automatically-generated translation.

12. Forrester Research found that the average savings on TCO when using FLOSS database management systems (DBMSs) is 50%. The November 2006 article “Open source databases ‘60 percent cheaper’” reports details of a Forrester study, where average TCO savings were determined to be 50%, and in some cases up to 60%.

13. For many circumstances, the total cost savings can be substantial. For example, real-world savings exceeding $250,000 per year were reported by 32% of the Chief Technical Officers (CTOs) surveyed in a 2001 InfoWorld survey; 60% of these CTOs saved over $50,000 annually. The August 27, 2001 InfoWorld (pages 49-50) reported on a survey of 40 CTOs who were members of the InfoWorld CTO network. In this survey, 32% using OSS reported savings greater than $250,000; 12% reported savings between 100,001 and $250,000; and 16% reported saving between $50,001 and $100,000. Indeed, only 8% reported annual savings less than $10,000 (so 92% were saving $10,000 or more annually). A chief benefit of OSS, according to 93% of the CTOs, was reduced cost of application development or acquisition; 72% said that a chief benefit was reduced development or implementation time (multiple answers were allowed). The CTOs reported using or planning to use OSS for web servers (65%), server OSes (63%), web-application servers (45%), application development testing (45%), and desktop OS (38%), among other uses. InfoWorld summarized it this way: “in early 2000, it seemed as if no one was using open-source software for business-critical tasks... a vast majority of today’s corporate IT executives are now using or plan to use OSS OSes and web servers for their enterprise applications.”

14. The Robert Frances Group’s July 2002 study found the TCO of GNU/Linux is roughly 40% (less than half) that of Microsoft Windows and only 14% that of Sun Microsystem’s Solaris. The Robert Frances Group (RFG), in Westport, Conn., studied actual costs at production deployments of Web servers running on GNU/Linux with Apache, Microsoft Windows with IIS, and Sun Solaris with Apache at 14 Global 2000 enterprises. These are real deployments where, if the web server goes down, money is lost - not minor prototype sites. Their TCO analysis was based on the software purchase price, hardware purchase and maintenance prices, software maintenance and upgrade prices, and administrative costs. To make the numbers comparable, these figures were were scaled to a “processing unit” able to handle 100,000 hits per day; see the study for more information. They determined that over three years a (scaled) GNU/Linux deployment cost $74,475, a Windows deployment cost $190,662, and a Solaris deployment cost $534,020. Thus, the cost of running GNU/Linux is roughly 40% that of Microsoft Windows and only 14% that of Sun Microsystem’s Solaris.

    This report also found that GNU/Linux and Solaris had smaller administrative costs than Windows. Although Windows system administrators cost less individually, each Linux or Solaris administrator could administrate many more machines, making Windows administration much more costly. The study also revealed that Windows administrators spent twice as much time patching systems and dealing with other security-related issues than did Solaris or GNU/Linux administrators.

    RFG also examined some areas that were difficult to monetize. In the end, they concluded that “Overall, given its low cost and flexible licensing requirements, lack of proprietary vendor goals, high level of security, and general stability and usability, Linux is worth considering for most types of server deployments.”

15. In August 2005, Robert Frances Group (RFG) found Linux on x86 had a significantly lower TCO than Windows (40% less) or Solaris (54% less) as an application server. Robert Frances Group’s August 2005 study, funded by IBM, examining GNU/Linux, Windows, and Solaris when used as J2EE application server (e.g., for typical business intranet applications). The GNU/Linux systems had a 3-year TCO of $40,149, compared to Microsoft Windows’ $67,559 (both on x86) and Solaris’ $86,478 (on SPARC). This was based on a “3-year period of ownership for a system supporting 100,000 operations per second on the SPECjbb(R) benchmark.”

    They included total costs, not just initial purchase price; TCO included hardware acquisition, software license and maintenance, OS support and systems administration, and application server support / system administration costs. RFG was surprised how much more expensive Windows hardware was; GNU/Linux systems were able to use much less expensive systems and more fully use the raw computing capacity to support the workload. (It may also be that the GNU/Linux users were more confident in the system reliability and security, and thus willing to use the same hardware for more simultaneous functions.) They also found that Windows required more administration time than either GNU/Linux or Solaris, and that GNU/Linux systems tended to need the fewest number of systems to do the same job; as a result, the administration costs were lowest in GNU/Linux.

16. Netproject reported that the TCO with Linux on the desktop was 35% that of Microsoft Windows (a 65% savings). Netproject’s Cost of Ownership report found a very significant savings, and it reported the following causes:
    • The elimination of license fees for both the system software and office software;
    • Elimination of vendor churn that forces unnecessary software updates;
    • Reduction in the number of software security updates;
    • No need for anti-virus software for Linux computers [anti-virus software for Linux is only needed to check for viruses that run on Microsoft PCs];
    • Reduction in the number of support staff.

17. A set of 2003 Gartner studies notes that the TCO of Linux (or FLOSS) on the desktop depends on your situation, but on average Linux cost less when used on the desktop. Gartner reported that that enterprises that installed Linux on client desktops would save $80 in hardware acquisition costs and an average of $74 per user per year on office automation software (assuming that StarOffice will be purchased instead of Microsoft Office). However, they also note that “lost productivity stemming from learning curves and compatibility can eat up direct-cost savings when moving to Linux on the desktop.” A key issue is that many organizations have built or bought specialized applications that only run on Windows. Note that these studies primarily examine Linux vs. Windows on the client desktop, not other FLOSS deployment options (such as moving to web-based applications using FLOSS tools that work with any client operating system, or using FLOSS applications on Windows). Gartner concludes that both Windows and GNU/Linux can have a lower TCO, depending on your circumstance, and that “before migrating your desktop computers to Linux, take inventory of your business applications and compare Linux to Windows in terms of total cost of ownership.”

18. Enterprise Management Associates’ February 2006 report claimed Linux tended to have a lower TCO than Windows. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)’s report Get the Truth on Linux Management, co-sponsored by Levanta (a specialist in Linux management and data virtualization) and the Open Source Development Labs, Inc. (OSDL), determined that “Sophisticated management tools now allow Linux management to be fast, effective, and inexpensive.” They studied over 200 Linux-using enterprises, and found a number of statistical results, such as (and I quote):
    • Most Linux administrators spend less than 5 minutes per server per week on patch management; sophisticated tools reduce this even further.
    • Most respondant reported 99.99% or higher availability; 17% reported no downtime at all.
    • Linux acquisition costs can be almost $60,000 less per server only considering software; hardware also tended to cost less.
    • Linux administrators tend to be able to manage more servers than Windows administrators, and the Linux systems tend to handle greater workloads
    • Respondants strongly endorsed Linux as inherently less vulnerable.
    The sponsors obviously have a bias, but this report is trying to counter an alternative biased source.

19. A majority of InternetWeek Newsbreak subscribers from companies with over $5 million in revenues reported that FLOSS software costs substantially less than proprietary software.

    A survey was by TheOpenEnterprise.com (a joint editorial effort between InternetWeek.com and InformationWeek) of individuals with management responsibility for IT and software specifically in companies with over $5 million in revenue. In this survey, 39% said “open source/standards-based software” costs 25% to 50% less than proprietary software, while 27% (over 1 in 4) said it’ costs 50% to 75% less. In context, it appears their phrase was intended to mean the same (or similar) thing as the term FLOSS in this paper, since in many cases they simply use the term “open-source.” As they note, “Would your CFO react favorably to a 50-75% reduction in software costs?”

20. A report by Research and Markets found a number of cases where deploying open source software resulted in significant savings. The report Saving Cash: A Comparison of Open Source and Proprietary Software (Oct 2004, 95 pages) on FLOSS in Germany shows significant saving potentials through the deployment of open source software for different company sizes. The study found that the risk for users on account of copyright or patent violations is minimal. A set of interviews were used to create a detailed TCO model, and they perform calculations with typical case studies. Warning: This is an expensive report.

21. The UK Government’s British Educational Communications and Technology Association (Becta) found that using FLOSS could save a significant amount of money in primary and secondary schools. Becta is wrapping up a 3-year study that analyzed a sample of 15 schools who use FLOSS programs, comparing their costs (and other factors) to 45 (originally 33) schools which use proprietary software. Becta found that secondary schools could reduce their information technology overheads by 24% (including software, hardware, and support costs) by switching to FLOSS. Primary schools could cut their computer costs by nearly half using FLOSS. Support costs (usually 60% of a PC’s total cost) had the biggest reduction in cost. Initial hardware costs were also lower, because the FLOSS (which they call FLOSS) required less expensive hardware compared to the proprietary solutions. They concluded that “FLOSS can be implemented successfully with cost benefits” and that “Use of office based FLOSS offers a cost-effective alternative to proprietary solutions.” The case studies showed that the cost advantages of FLOSS “were often used to increase provision, rather than reduce overall budgets in schools.”

    These results have been widely reported; see reports from the Times Educational Supplement (TES), ZDNet UK, silicon.com, and eGov monitor. Note that Schoolforge has detailed report from a 14 April 2005 meeting summarizing the report.

22. Many organizations report significant savings when using FLOSS. Here are a few examples of specific organizations saving money through FLOSS:
    1. The analysis Linux as a Replacement for Windows 2000 compares Red Hat Linux 7.1 to Windows 2000; in this customer’s case, using Linux instead of Windows 2000 saved $10,000. The reviewer came from a Windows/DOS background, and after performing an intensive hands-on Linux project lasting several months, determined that “you will be stunned by the bang for the buck that ... open source software offers.”

    2. Intel’s IT Vice President, Doug Busch, reported savings of $200 million by replacing costly Unix servers with cheaper servers running GNU/Linux.

    3. Amazon.com was able to cut $17 million in technology expenses in a single quarter, largely due to a switch to Linux. Amazon spent $54 million on technology and content expenses in its third quarter (ending Sept. 30), compared with $71 million in the year-ago quarter, and executives expected that technology costs as a portion of net sales would decrease by 20% this year.

    4. The city of Largo, Florida reports a savings of $1 million per year using GNU/Linux and “thin clients.”

    5. Dell offers a savings of 21% when using GNU/Linux. Dell computer has a dedicated hosting service, such as their D-2800 offering. This service offers a respectable system (Pentium 850, 256MiB, 20GB, 21GB/month bandwidth) in two configurations: Red Hat Linux 7.1 for $189/month, and Windows 2000 for $239/month. Thus, with identical hardware and bandwidth provision, the GNU/Linux system is 21% cheaper. This is especially interesting because Dell is not out to prove which system is better; as a business, they’ve just figured out competitive prices at which they can offer their services.

    6. An independent report in Denmark concluded that if the political goals for using the Internet to improve the public sector are to be fulfilled, it would be $500 million cheaper over the next 10 years to use FLOSS instead of Microsoft software (my thanks to Poul-Henning Kamp, who translated the conclusions).

    There are many other reports from those who have switched to FLOSS systems; see the usage reports section for more information.

23. Even Microsoft has admitted that its products are more costly than GNU/Linux. For some time Microsoft has tried to convince users that its products are somehow less costly. However, as documented in Var Business and The Register, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in 2002 admitted that Microsoft has not “figured out how to be lower-priced than Linux. For us as a company, we’re going through a whole new world of thinking.” The Register summarizes Microsoft’s new approach as saying that “it costs more because it’s worth more”; whether this is true is rather debatable in many cases, but at least it’s a more sensible argument. However, Microsoft has gone back to trying to claim that they cost less, so the detail in this section is still needed.

24. A Microsoft-sponsored study claims that Windows is cheaper than Linux, but this has been debunked as a general claim. The Microsoft-sponsored study (available from Microsoft) compared Windows 2000 to Linux; it stated that Linux had lower TCO for web serving, and Windows 2000 had a lower TCO for network infrastructure, print serving, file serving and security applications (note: the “David Wheeler” quoted in InfoWorld is not the author of this paper). I will give credit here: unlike the Mindcraft reports sponsored by Microsoft, this TCO report clearly states that it was sponsored by Microsoft, and I appreciate that.

    It’s important to examine the assumptions of any TCO study, to see if its assumptions could apply to many other situations - and it is easily argued that they don’t. Joe Barr discusses some of the problems in this TCO study. These include assuming that the operating system is never upgraded in a 5-year period, using an older operating system Microsoft is transitioning from, and not using the current Enterprise license agreement (which many organizations find they must use). Costs that are not included in the study include legal advice costs (when signing large-scale agreements), purchase and maintenance of a software license inventory system (which you’ll generally need even with Enterprise agreements), costs if you are audited, cost of insurance and liability incidents (if a proof of purchase is misplaced, you might need to pay the $151,000 per-incident liability), and paying multiple times for the same product (a side-effect of many Enterprise license agreements).

    Barr concludes with: “TCO is like fine wine: it doesn’t travel well. What may be true in one situation is reversed in another. What gets trumpeted as a universal truth ( ‘Windows is cheaper than Linux’ ) may or may not be true in a specific case, but it is most certainly false when claimed universally.” Since the TCO of a system depends on its application, and Microsoft as sponsor could specifically set all of the parameters, the conclusions of the report were easily predicted.

25. Another Microsoft-sponsored study claims that Microsoft’s toolsuite with .NET is cheaper than using GNU/Linux with J2EE. This Giga Research study sponsored by Microsoft compared the costs incurred by five large and medium-size companies that used J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) with the costs incurred by seven large and medium-size companies that used .Net applications to develop Web portal applications. For large corporations, the cost of using Microsoft products (for development and deployment plus three years of maintenance) was 28% less than for J2EE/Linux. For medium-size companies, the Microsoft products were 25% cheaper.

    However, once again, the TCO values all hinge on the assumptions made. As CIO.com points out, the Microsoft-based solution was cheaper primarily because the GNU/Linux systems were configured using extremely expensive proprietary products such as those from Oracle (for the database system) and BEA (for the development system).

    A company can certainly choose to use these particular products when developing with GNU/Linux, but not all organizations will choose to do so. Indeed, the acronym “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl) was coined because that combination is extremely popular when creating web portal applications. MySQL and PostgreSQL are popular FLOSS database programs; PHP, Python, and Perl are popular FLOSS development languages (and tie easily into the rest of the development suite provided by FLOSS operating systems). An obvious question to ask is, “Why were extremely common configurations (such as LAMP) omitted in this Microsoft-funded study?” CIO.com reports Giga’s answer: “Microsoft didn’t ask them [to] look at any such companies.”

    Again, I give credit to Giga for clearly reporting who funded the study. Indeed, if your situation closely matches Giga’s study, your costs might be very similar. But it would be a mistake to conclude that different situations would necessarily have the same results.

26. A 2005 InformationWeek survey reported that GNU/Linux was cheaper than mainframe systems, Windows, and Unix according to 70% of the respondents. InformationWeek Research Brief “Linux Outlook” published February 2005 surveyed 439 business technology professionals, and found that “Respondents in this study agree that Linux is less expensive. At least seven in 10 sites report that Linux is cheaper to operate than mainframe systems, Windows NT, Windows 2000 servers, Windows XP servers and Commercial Unix servers. Companies also say Linux is a cheaper PC option than Commercial Unix, Windows XP or Macintosh. Only PC terminals offer some cost competitiveness.”
27. Georgia Public Library Service’s Evergreen program is saving that library system over $3 million a year. Linux.com reports that librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) have developed the open source, enterprise-class library management system called Evergreen for large-scale libraries. Evergreen is an Integrated Library System (ILS) -- meaning that it manages, catalogs, and tracks the circulation of library holdings. GPLS looked at existing FLOSS applications; they noted that while Koha would work fine for a 10-branch library, none met their needs for supporting their large-scale environment, so they wrote their own. Evergreen supports GPLS’ 252 member libraries - almost the entire U.S. state of Georgia - with 8.8 million items in its index and 1.6 active cardholders. It went live September 2006, and was “easiest conversion I’ve ever been through in my 25 years of working in libraries” by one account.

    Their cost savings came at many levels. Their old system required expensive Sun servers, while the new one uses a much cheaper GNU/Linux cluster. Replacing the system across their libraries with a proprietary system would have cost more than $15 million dollars, plus about $5 million dollars a year for maintenance (with 252 libraries, license fees quickly became very expensive). They run their Evergreen system for only $1.6 million a year - over $3 million in savings annually. Also, by releasing as FLOSS, they can share the cost of maintaining and improving the software with others. For example, in December 2006 the University of Windsor announced that it was officially partnering with GPLS to help add new capabilities to Evergreen.

    Being FLOSS has other advantages, for example, instead of making a request and hoping someday the vendor will respond, they can implement what is important to them, sometimes literally overnight. Evergreen already includes many innovations lacking in many or all proprietary ILS products, such as on-the-fly spellcheck, search suggestions, and reviews, as well as allowing users to create “bookbags” of selected titles that can be shared with other patrons.

    This experience was so successful that Kent County Public Library recently switched to Evergreen, with very positive results.

You may also want to see MITRE Corporation’s business case study of OSS, which considered military systems.

Most of these items assume that users will use the software unmodified, but even if the FLOSS software doesn’t do everything required, that is not necessarily the end of the story. One of the main hallmarks of FLOSS software is that it can be modified by users. Thus, any true TCO comparison should consider not just the products that fully meet the requirements, but the existing options that with some modifications could meet the requirements. It may be cheaper to start with an existing FLOSS program, and improve it, than to start with a proprietary program that has all of the necessary functionality. Obviously, the total TCO including such costs varies considerably depending on the circumstances.

ComputerWorld published an essay by Bernard Golden (Navica) who argues that computing ROI when switching from proprietary to FLOSS (such as from Windows to Linux) is the worst-case return on investment (ROI) scenario. This is because a transition requires retraining and perhaps hiring new personnel, which are always expensive propositions. Indeed, in general, any change imposes the costs of managing that change.

Brendan Scott (a lawyer specializing in IT and telecommunications law) argues that the long run TCO of FLOSS must be lower than proprietary software. Scott’s paper makes some interesting points, for example, “TCO is often referred to as the total cost of ‘ownership’... [but] ‘ownership’ of software as a concept is anathema to proprietary software, the fundamental assumptions of which revolve around ownership of the software by the vendor. ... The user [of proprietary software] will, at best, have some form of (often extremely restrictive) license. Indeed, some might argue that a significant (and often uncosted) component of the cost of ‘ownership’ of proprietary software is that users don’t own it at all.” The paper also presents arguments as to why GPL-like free software gives better TCO results than other FLOSS licenses. Scott concludes that “Customers attempting to evaluate a free software v. proprietary solution can confine their investigation to an evaluation of the ability of the packages to meet the customer’s needs, and may presume that the long run TCO will favor the free software package. Further, because the licensing costs are additional dead weight costs, a customer ought to also prefer a free software solution with functionality shortfalls where those shortfalls can be overcome for less than the licensing cost for the proprietary solution.”

Microsoft’s first TCO study comparing Windows to Solaris (mentioned earlier) is not a useful starting point for estimating your own TCO. Their study reported the average TCO at sites using Microsoft products compared to the average TCO at sites using Sun systems, but although the Microsoft systems cost 37% less to own, the Solaris systems handled larger databases, more demanding applications, 63% more concurrent connections, and 243% more hits per day. In other words, the Microsoft systems that did less work cost less than systems that did more work. This is not a useful starting point if you’re using TCO to help determine which system to buy - to make a valid comparison by TCO, you must compare the TCOs of systems that meet your requirements. A two-part analysis by Thomas Pfau (see part 1 and part 2) identifies this and many other flaws in the study.

There are some studies that emphasize Unix-like systems, not FLOSS, which claim that that there are at least some circumstances where Unix-like systems are less costly than Windows. A Strategic Comparison of Windows vs. Unix by Paul Murphy is one such paper. It appears that many of these arguments would also apply to FLOSS systems, since many of them are Unix-like.

Be sure that you actually compute your own TCO; don’t just accept a vendor’s word for it, and in particular, don’t just accept a vendor’s claims for the TCO of its competitors. In 2004 Newham council chose Microsoft products over a mixed solution, reporting that their selected solution had a lower TCO according to an independent study. Yet when the reports were made public in September 2004, it was discovered that it was Microsoft who created the cost figures of switching to their competitor - not an independent source at all. Any vendor (open or closed) can tell you why their competitor costs more money, if you naïvely let them.

Again, it’s TCO that matters, not just certain cost categories. However, given these large differences in certain categories, in many situations FLOSS has a smaller TCO than proprietary systems. At one time it was claimed that FLOSS installation took more time, but nowadays FLOSS systems can be purchased pre-installed and automatic installers result in equivalent installation labor. Some claim that system administration costs are higher, but studies like Sun’s suggest than in many cases the system administration costs are lower, not higher, for Unix-like systems (at least Sun’s). For example, on Unix-like systems it tends to be easier to automate tasks (because you can, but do not need, to use a GUI) - thus over time many manual tasks can be automated (reducing TCO). Retraining costs can be significant - but now that GNU/Linux has modern GUI desktop environments, there’s anecdotal evidence that this cost is actually quite small. I’ve yet to see serious studies quantitatively evaluating this issue, but anecdotally, I’ve observed that people familiar with other systems are generally able to sit down and use modern GNU/Linux GUIs without any training at all. In short, it’s often hard to show that a proprietary solution’s purported advantages really help offset their demonstrably larger costs in other categories when there’s a competing mature FLOSS product for the given function.

One factor that needs to be included in a TCO analysis is switching costs, where that applies. Thankfully, most people remember to include the costs of switching to something. As noted in “IT analysts’ influence on open source adoption”, Gartner Vice President Mark Driver says that the best place for a company to first deploy Linux in a large way is in a new-from-scratch operation rather than as a replacement for Windows. That’s because, “Gartner’s (and other analysts’) figures show that migration from another operating system and porting software written for the old operating system are the two largest costs of a Linux migration, [so] it is obvious -- at least to Driver -- that Linux TCO drops radically when you avoid the migration step and install Linux in the first place.”

However, don’t forget to include the extremely important costs of switching away from a decision later. As noted in Linux Adoption in the Public Sector: An Economic Analysis by Hal R. Varian and Carl Shapiro (University of California, Berkeley; 1 December 2003), “a system that will be difficult to switch away from in the future, in part because the lock-in associated with using such a system[,] will reduce their future bargaining power with their vendor. Vendors always have some incentive to make it difficult for users to switch to alternatives, while the users will generally want to preserve their flexibility. From the user’s viewpoint, it is particularly important to make sure that file formats, data, system calls, APIs, interfaces, communication standards, and the like are well enough documented that it is easy to move data and programs from one vendor to another.” Obviously, someone who elects to use a proprietary program that locks them into that specific program will almost certainly pay much higher prices in future updates, because the vendor can exploit the user’s difficulty in changing.

Clearly, if one product is significantly more productive than another where it’s used, it’s worth paying more for it. However, it’s clear that at least for major office tasks, GNU/Linux systems are about as usable as Windows systems. For example, one usability study comparing GNU/Linux to Microsoft Windows XP found that it was almost as easy to perform most major office tasks using GNU/Linux as with Windows: “Linux users, for example, needed 44.5 minutes to perform a set of tasks, compared with 41.2 minutes required by the XP users. Furthermore, 80% of the Linux users believed that they needed only one week to become as competent with the new system as with their existing one, compared with 85% of the XP users.” The detailed report (in German) is also available.

Does this mean that FLOSS always have the lowest TCO? No! As I’ve repeatedly noted, it depends on its use. But the notion that FLOSS always has the larger TCO is simply wrong.

8. Non-Quantitative Issues

In fairness, I must note that not all issues can be quantitatively measured, and to many they are the most important issues. The issues important to many include freedom from control by another (especially a single source), protection from licensing litigation, flexibility, social / moral / ethical issues, and innovation.

1. FLOSS protects its users from the risks and disadvantages of single source solutions. While “free software” advocates use the term “freedom,” and some businesses emphasize different terms such as “free market”, “multiple sources”, “alternate supply channels”, and “the necessity of multiple vendors”, the issue is the same: users do not want to be held hostage by any one vendor. Businesses often prefer to buy products in which there is a large set of competing suppliers, because it reduces their risk; they can always switch to another supplier if they’re not satisfied, the supplier raises their prices substantially, or the original supplier goes out of business. This translates into an effect on the products themselves: if customers can easily choose and switch between competing products, the products’ prices go down and their quality goes up. Conversely, if there is a near or real monopoly for a given product, over time the vendor will continuously raise the cost to use the product and limit its uses to those that benefit the monopolist. Users who are unwilling to leave single source solutions often pay dearly later as their single source raises their costs.

   For example, many organizations have chosen to use Microsoft’s products exclusively, and Microsoft is trying to exploit this through its new “Microsoft Licensing 6.0 Program.” The TIC/Sunbelt Software Microsoft Licensing Survey Results (covering March 2002) reports the impact on customers of this new licensing scheme. 80% had a negative view of the new licensing scheme, noting, for example, that the new costs for software assurance (25% of list for server and 29% of list for clients) are the highest in the industry. Of those who had done a cost analysis, an overwhelming 90% say their costs will increase if they migrate to 6.0, and 76% said their costs would increase from 20% to 300% from what they are paying now under their current 4.0 and 5.0 Microsoft Licensing plans. This survey found that 36% of corporate enterprises don’t have the funds to upgrade to the Microsoft Licensing 6.0 Program. Half indicated that the new agreement would almost certainly delay their migration initiatives to new Microsoft client, server and Office productivity platforms, and 38% say they are actively seeking alternatives to Microsoft products. In New Zealand a Commerce Commission Complaint has been filed claiming that Microsoft’s pricing regime is anti-competitive. Craig Horrocks notes that the Software Assurance approach does not assure that the purchaser receives anything for the money; it merely buys the right to upgrade to any version Microsoft releases in the covered period. Microsoft may levy further charges on a release, and the contract does not obligate Microsoft to deliver anything in the time period.

   There are increasing concerns about Microsoft’s latest releases of Windows. Michael Jennings argues in Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going that Microsoft users are increasingly incurring invasion of privacy, intentionally crippled yet necessary services, and other problems.

   More generally, defining an organization’s “architecture” as being whatever one vendor provides is sometimes called “Vendor Lock-in” or “Pottersville”, and this “solution” is a well-known AntiPattern (an AntiPattern is a “solution” that has more problems than it solves). Vendors are not foolish; given such power, they may add draconian rules that cause problems for users.

   Having only one vendor completely control a market is dangerous from the viewpoint of costs (since the customer then has no effective control over costs), and it also raises a security concern: the monoculture vulnerability. In biology, it is dangerous to depend on one crop strain, because any disease can cause the whole crop to fail. Similarly, one proprietary vendor who completely controls a market creates a uniformity that is far easier to massively attack. FLOSS programs provide an alternative implementation, and even when one dominant FLOSS program exists, because they can be changed (because the source code is available) at least some implementations are likely to be more resistant to attack.

   Historically, proprietary vendors eventually lose to vendors selling products available from multiple sources, even when their proprietary technology is (at the moment) better. Sony’s Betamax format lost to VHS in the videotape market, IBM’s microchannel architecture lost to ISA in the PC architecture market, and Sun’s NeWS lost to X-windows in the networking graphics market, all because customers prefer the reduced risk (and eventually reduced costs) of non-proprietary products. This is sometimes called “commodification”, a term disparaged by proprietary vendors and loved by users. Since users spend the money, users eventually find someone who will provide what they want, and then the other suppliers discover that they must follow or give up the market area.

   With FLOSS, users can choose between distributors, and if a supplier abandons them they can switch to another supplier. As a result, suppliers will be forced to provide good quality products and services for relatively low prices, because users can switch if they don’t. Users can even band together and maintain the product themselves (this is how the Apache project was founded), making it possible for groups of users to protect themselves from abandonment.

   The article Commentary from a new user: Linux is an experience, not an operating system, describes freedom this way:

   “As I worked in Linux... the word ‘free’ took on a far greater meaning. As the advocates of the Open Source and Free Software movements put it, free means freedom. Yes, as a humble user of Linux, I am experiencing freedom and pride in using a world-class operating system.

   Linux is not only an operating system. It embodies a myriad of concepts about how the world of computers and software should be. This is an operating system designed by the world, meant for the world. Everyone who is interested in Linux, can develop, share and use it. People can contribute their best in programming, documenting or in any aspect of their choice. What a novel concept!

   Free in Linux spells freedom -- freedom to use Linux, freedom to use the code, freedom to tweak and improve it. Not being a programmer, I still can be happy about many things. For me, freedom has meant that my operating system is transparent, and there are no hidden codes at work in my computer. Nothing about Linux is hidden from me. ... I’ve gained more control over my computer for the first time in my life.”

2. FLOSS protects its users from licensing litigation and management costs. Proprietary vendors make money from the sale of licenses, and are imposing increasingly complex mechanisms on consumers to manage these licenses. For example, Microsoft’s Windows XP requires product activation - a scheme that means that an accumulation of hardware changes requires a new activation code. A license no longer gives unlimited rights to reinstall - if you have hardware trouble, you may end up being forced to re-buy your product. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, businesses are finding that they must buy the same proprietary software more than once.

   Proprietary vendors also litigate against those who don’t comply with their complex licensing management requirements, creating increased legal risks for users. For example, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is a proprietary software industry organization sponsored by Microsoft, Macromedia, and Autodesk, and spends considerable time searching for and punishing companies who cannot prove they are complying. As noted in the SF Gate (Feb. 7, 2002), the BSA encourages disgruntled employees to call the BSA if they know of any license violations. “If the company refuses to settle or if the BSA feels the company is criminally negligent and deliberately ripping off software, the organization may decide to get a little nastier and organize a raid: The BSA makes its case in front of a federal court in the company’s district and applies for a court order. If the order is granted, the BSA can legally storm the company’s offices, accompanied by U.S. marshals, to search for unregistered software.”

   Software Licensing by Andrew Grygus discusses the risks and costs of proprietary licensing schemes in more detail. According to their article, “the maximum penalty is $150,000 per license deficiency; typically, this is negotiated down, and a company found deficient at around $8,000 will pay a penalty of around $85,000 (and must buy the $8,000 in software too).” For example, information services for the city of Virginia Beach, VA were practically shut down for over a month and 5 employees (1/4th of their staff) had to be dedicated to put its licensing in order to answer a random audit demand by Microsoft, at a cost of over $80,000. Eventually the city was fined $129,000 for missing licenses the city had probably paid for but couldn’t match to paperwork. Temple University had to pay $100,000 to the BSA, in spite of strong policies forbidding unauthorized copying.

   To counter these risks, organizations must keep careful track of license purchases. This means that organizations must impose strict software license tracking processes, purchase costly tracking programs, and pay for people to keep track of these licenses and perform occasional audits.

   A related problem is that companies using proprietary software must, in many cases, get permission from their software vendors to sell a business unit that uses the proprietary software, or face legal action. For example, Microsoft has filed objections to Kmart’s proposed $8.4 million sale of Bluelight.com to United Online Inc., citing software licensing as one of their concerns. Microsoft stated that “The licenses that debtors (Kmart) have of Microsoft’s products are licenses of copyrighted materials and, therefore, may not be assumed or assigned with[out] Microsoft’s consent.” Whether or not this is a risk depends on the licensing scheme used; in many cases it appears that the legal “right of first sale” doctrine cannot be applied (for example, there are many different licensing schemes for Windows, so the same action with Windows may be legal or not depending on the licensing scheme used to acquire it).

   In contrast, FLOSS users have no fear of litigation from the use and copying of FLOSS. Licensing issues do come up when FLOSS software is modified and then redistributed, but to be fair, proprietary software essentially forbids this action (so it’s a completely new right). Even in this circumstance, redistributing modified FLOSS software generally requires following only a few simple rules (depending on the license), such as giving credit to previous developers and releasing modifications under the same license as the original program.

   One intriguing example is the musical instrument company Ernie Ball, described in World Trade, May 2002. A disgruntled ex-employee turned them into the Business Software Alliance (BSA); who then arranged to have them raided by armed Federal Marshals. Ernie Ball was completely shut down for a day, and then was required to not touch any data other than what is minimally needed to run their business. After the investigation was completed, Ernie Ball was found to be non-compliant by 8%; Ball argued that it was “nearly impossible to be totally compliant” by their rules, and felt that they were treated unfairly. The company ended up paying a $90,000 settlement, $35,000 of which were Microsoft’s legal fees. Ball then decided at that moment his company would become “Microsoft free.” In one year he converted to a Linux-based network and UNIX “mainframe” using Sun’s StarOffice (Sun’s proprietary cousin to OpenOffice); he now has no Microsoft products at all, and much of the software is FLOSS or based on FLOSS products.

3. FLOSS has greater flexibility. FLOSS users can tailor the product as necessary to meet their needs in ways not possible without source code. Users can tailor the product themselves, or hire whoever they think can solve the problem (including the original developer). Some have claimed that this creates the “danger of forking,” that is, of multiple incompatible versions of a product. This is “dangerous” only to those who think competition is evil - we have multiple versions of cars as well. And in practice, the high cost of maintaining software yourself has resulted in a process in which the change is contributed back to the community. If it’s not contributed (e.g., it solves a problem that needed solving but only for a specialized situation), then it’s still a win for the user - because it solved a user’s problem which would have been unsolved otherwise.

   For example, in 1998 Microsoft decided against developing an Icelandic version of Windows 95 because the limited size of the market couldn’t justify the cost. Without the source code, the Islandic people had little recourse. However, FLOSS programs can be modified, so Icelandic support was immediately added to them, without any need for negotiation with a vendor. In contrast, in July 2004, Welsh support for in the FLOSS OpenOffice.org became available, the first complete office environment available in Welsh. Users never know when they will have a specialized need not anticipated by their vendor; being able to change the source code makes it possible to support those unanticipated needs.

   The IDC study “Western European End-User Survey: 2005 Spending Priorities, Outsourcing, Open Source, and Impact of Compliance” surveyed 625 European companies of over 100 employees. They found that 25% had significant FLOSS operating system (Linux) deployments (beyond limited deployments or pilots), and 33% had significant FLOSS database deployments. The most important cited FLOSS benefit wasn’t lower cost, but was the flexibility of deploying whenever they wanted without having to negotiate anything. In addition, many companies specifically stated that a key advantage of FLOSS was the flexibility provided because it could be customized; this wasn’t one of the multiple-choice answers, yet many companies added it as a comment.

4. Many believe that there are social, moral, or ethical imperatives for using FLOSS. The Free Software Foundation has a set of papers describing their philosophy, i.e., why they believe Free Software is an ethical imperative. These lengthy documents explain themselves in depth, so there’s little need to describe them further here.

5. There is ample evidence that FLOSS encourages, not quashes, innovation. Innovation is a strength, not a liability, for FLOSS. InformationWeek’s survey of business-technology professionals “Open-Source Software Use Joins The Mix”, published in November 2004, found that FLOSS “is believed to create more opportunities for innovation than commercial or proprietary software.” Nearly 60% of the companies with annual revenue of $100 million or more stated that FLOSS creates more opportunities for innovation. Small businesses (less than $100 million), where much innovation takes place, agreed even more strongly; “almost three-quarters report open-source software readily promotes more opportunities for IT innovation.” A later InformationWeek Research Brief “Linux Outlook” published February 2005 surveyed 439 business technology professionals. In this survey, two-thirds contend that open-source spurs more opportunities for technical innovation, and half (47%) say it encourages business innovation. This is consistent with previous surveys of expectations. The February 2001 research paper Distributed Knowledge and the Global Organization of Software Development by Anca Metiu and Bruce Kogut (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) reports on field observations of companies in four countries. They state that, “the open development model opens up the ability to contribute to innovation on a global basis. It recognizes that the distribution of natural intelligence does not correspond to the monopolization of innovation by the richest firms or richest countries. It is this gap between the distribution of ability and the distribution of opportunity that the web will force companies to recognize, and to realign their development strategies. For the young engineer in India, China, or Israel - who cannot or does not want to come to the Silicon Valley, or the Research Triangle, or Munich - is increasingly able to contribute to world innovation.” In 2000, a Forrester Research study interviewed 2,500 IT managers and found that 84% of them forecast that open source software would be the spark behind major innovations throughout the industry

   It’s not just business people and observers of them; software developers themselves report that FLOSS projects are often innovative. According to the BCG study of FLOSS developers, 61.7% of surveyed developers stated that their FLOSS project was either their most creative effort or was equally as creative as their most creative experience. Government employees also report that FLOSS supports innovation; Federal Computer Week (FCW) published the article “Linux use drives innovation: FBI info-sharing project is one of a growing list of open-source successes”. The article declares that the “open-source operating system [Linux]’s flexibility allowed engineers greater freedom to tailor technology to their needs” and that “Linux is well-suited to federal projects with small teams and scarce resources... many Linux applications, such as the Census Bureau’s Fast Facts service, can support an entire enterprise.”

   There are many examples showing how innovation FLOSS occurs. Eric S. Raymond’s widely-read essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar describes one case of this happening in his project, fetchmail. He had been developing a product to do one job, when a user proposed an approach that changed the entire nature of his project. In Raymond’s words, “I realized almost immediately that a reliable implementation of this feature would make [a significant portion of the project] obsolete.” He found that “Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong” and that “the next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.” In February 2005, Roman Kagan noted that the Linux kernel “hotplug” system could be greatly simplified. The maintainer of the hotplug system, Greg K-H, replied by saying “You know, it’s moments like this that I really think the open source development model is the best. People are able to look into a project and point out how stupid the original designers/authors are at any moment in time :) You are completely correct, I love your [approach]. With it, and a few minor changes ... we don’t need _any_ of the module_* programs in the hotplug-ng package I just released. That is wonderful, thank you so much for showing me that I was just working in circles. The ability to modify real-world programs enables all sorts of experimentation; for example, Symphony OS is a modified GNU/Linux distribution designed to try out a radically new approach to user interfaces; from a plethora of experiments, the successful ones get included in future versions. In short, FLOSS enables interaction between developers and users, as well as interaction between developers, that can encourage innovation.

   There's even a whole book about this; Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel notes the value of FLOSS for innovation.

   This is not a new phenomenon; many key software-related innovations have been FLOSS projects. For example, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, stated in December 2001 that “A very significant factor [in widening the Web’s use beyond scientific research] was that the software was all (what we now call) open source. It spread fast, and could be improved fast - and it could be installed within government and large industry without having to go through a procurement process.” The Internet’s critical protocols, such as TCP/IP, have been developed and matured through the use of FLOSS. The Firefox web browser has some very interesting innovations, such as live bookmarks (making RSS feeds look just like bookmark folders, and enabling simple subscription), as well as incorporating innovations from other browsers such as tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. Indeed, many people are working hard to create new innovations for the next version of Firefox.

   Leading innovation expert Professor Eric von Hippel is the head of the management of innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management. He has studied in detail how innovation works, including how it works in the development of FLOSS programs. His studies suggest that FLOSS can significantly enable innovation. In the interview Something for nothing of von Hippel and Karim Lakhani, they report that “Apache and other open-source programs are examples of user-to-user innovation systems.” von Hippel explained that “Users may or may not be direct customers of the manufacturer. They may be in different industries or segments of the marketplace, but they are out in the field trying to do something, grappling with real-world needs and concerns. Lead users are an innovative subset of the user community displaying two characteristics with respect to a product, process or service. They face general needs in a marketplace but face them months or years before the rest of the marketplace encounters them. Since existing companies can’t customize solutions good enough for them, lead users go out there, patch things together and develop their own solutions. They expect to benefit significantly by obtaining solutions to their needs. When those needs are evolving rapidly, as is the case in many high-technology product categories, only users at the front of the trend will have experience today with tomorrow’s needs and solutions. Companies interested in developing functionally novel breakthroughs... will want to find out how to track lead users down and learn from what they have developed...” He closes noting that, “We believe Apache and open source are terrific examples of the lead user innovation process that can take teams and companies in directions they wouldn’t have otherwise imagined.” von Hippel has elsewhere noted that in certain industries approximately 80% of new developments are customer based; vendors ignore customers at their peril. For more information on this work relating to FLOSS, innovation, and user interaction, see Nik Franke and Eric von Hippel’s Satisfying Heterogeneous User Needs via Innovation Toolkits: The Case of Apache Security Software, Karim Lakhani and Eric von Hippel’s How Open Source Software Works: Free User to User Assistance, Eric von Hippel’s Horizontal innovation networks- by and for users, Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh’s Exploring the Open Source Software Phenomenon: Issues for Organization Science (which proposes that FLOSS development is a compound innovation model, containing elements of both private investment and collective action), and Eric von Hippel’s Open Source Shows the Way - Innovation By and For Users - No Manufacturer Required.

   Other academics who study innovation have come to similar conclusions:

   • Joachim Henkel (at Germany’s University of Munich, Institute for Innovation Research) wrote the paper ”The Jukebox Mode of Innovation - a Model of Commercial Open Source Development”. In it, he creates a model of innovation in software, and finds that “free revealing of innovations is a profit-maximizing strategy... a regime with compulsory revealing [e.g., copylefting licenses] can lead to higher product qualities and higher profits than a proprietary regime”. Tzu-Ying Chan and Jen-Fang Lee (at Taiwan’s National Cheng Chi University of Technology & Innovation Management) wrote ”A Comparative Study of Online User Communities Involvement In Product Innovation and Development”, which identified a number of different types of online user communities. They discussed in particular the “user product collaboration innovation community”, noting that firms must play a supporting/complementary role for effective interactions with this community, a role very different from its interactions with many other kinds of communities.
   • Alessandro Nuvolari’s peer-reviewed paper “Open source software development: Some historical perspectives” provides evidence that open source software is a case of what Robert C. Allen has termed “collective invention.” In “collective invention” settings, “rival firms (or independent individual developers) freely release one another pertinent information concerning the solution of non-trivial technical problems. Each firm, in turn, makes use of the this information to incrementally improve on a basic common technological layout.” Nuvolari’s paper compares open source software with two episodes of nineteenth century technical advances to demonstrate this point. He concludes that in industries “where the dynamics of technological change display a cumulative and incremental character, the protection of “commons” of freely accessible knowledge is likely to yield much higher rates of innovation than the enforcement of strong intellectual property rights.” Nuvolari is assistant professor in the Economics of Science and Technology at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands and research fellow at the Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies.

   In 2011, Brian Proffitt's "The new draw of open source: innovation: Open source isn't just alternative; for cutting-edge tech, it's the only game in town", pointed out that "there are things in open source software that you cannot get anywhere else".

   Yuwei Lin’s PhD thesis (at the UK’s University of York, Science and Technologies Studies Unit, Department of Sociology), Hacking Practices and Software Development: A Social Worlds Analysis of ICT Innovation and the Role of Free/Libre Open Source Software examines the social world of FLOSS developers and its implications. Its major findings are (I quote but use American spelling):

   1. As a community of open source practices, the FLOSS social world allows diverse actors to engage in the innovation process and therefore contains more innovation resources than other relatively conventional software models.
   2. The strategic collaboration between the public (i.e., the free software community) and the private (i.e., information technologies corporations) sectors symbolizes a pattern of hybrid innovation that entails complex communications and networks.
   3. Tacit knowledge anchored in everyday experiences is peculiarly valued in a community-based innovation system where social networking and information sharing are undergoing vigorously.
   4. The development of FLOSS democratizes [the] software innovation process and allows lay people to develop their understanding and knowledge of a shared problem/issue, especially through the web, to challenge established views on the issue.

   On September 14, 2004, The Economist (a highly respected magazine) awarded Linus Torvalds an award for innovation, specifically as someone driving the most financially successful breakthrough in computing, for his work on the Linux kernel. His citation declares that this FLOSS project “created a huge following, eventually attracting big industry players such as Oracle, IBM, Intel, Netscape and others. It also spawned several new software companies, including Red Hat, SUSE LINUX and Turbolinux. Today, there are hundreds of millions of copies of Linux running on servers, desktop computers, network equipment and in embedded devices worldwide.” The Committee for Economic Development (a 60-year-old pro-business think tank) reports that “Open source software is increasingly important as a source of innovation; it can be far more reliable and secure than proprietary software because talented programmers around the world can examine the code and try to break its security, without having to worry about hidden backdoors or holes.”

   This history of innovation shouldn’t be surprising; FLOSS approaches are based on the scientific method, allowing anyone to make improvements or add innovative techniques and then make them immediately available to the public. Eric Raymond has made a strong case for why innovation is more likely, not less likely, in FLOSS projects.

   Clearly, if you have an innovative idea, FLOSS makes it very easy to combine pre-existing code in novel ways, modifying them and recombining them in any way you wish. Hosting systems such as SourceForge and Savannah provide easy access to vast amounts of source code. There’s even a specialized search engine to find FLOSS code named Koders.com, allowing for quick reuse of a variety of components. This unfettered access to source code for arbitrary purposes, without royalty restrictions, makes it easy to try out new ideas. The Reuters story “Plugged in - Next Big Tech Ideas May Be Small Ones” by Eric Auchard (April 2, 2005) notes that FLOSS has reduced (by orders of magnitude) the cost of implementing new ideas, making it easier to start new businesses and products so that they can be brought to the marketplace.

   If you look at the actual scientific experiments on innovation, you find very surprising results, ones that help illuminate why FLOSS has so much innovation. RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us is an especially approachable summary of that research. Basically, simple rewards (like "more money") and punishments ("you're fired") results in more and better results for tasks that are simple, and straightforward ‐ where you just follow pre-set rules. But when a task gets more complicated — when it requires some conceptual, creative thinking (like developing software), these kinds of motivators do not work. Yes, they need enough money to live, etc., but humans need more than money. Instead, the three factors that lead to better performance (and personal satisfaction) are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. FLOSS development is often better at enabling these factors, and thus can be especially good at unlocking a lot of innovation.

   In public, Microsoft has long asserted that FLOSS cannot innovate, or at least cannot innovate as well as Microsoft can. At first, the argument seems reasonable: why would anyone innovate if they (or at least their company) couldn’t exclusively receive all the financial benefits? But while the argument seems logical, it turns out to be untrue. In February 2003, Microsoft’s Bill Gates admitted that many developers are building innovative capabilities using FLOSS systems. Microsoft’s own secret research (later leaked as “Halloween I”) found that “Research/teaching projects on top of Linux are easily ‘disseminated’ due to the wide availability of Linux source. In particular, this often means that new research ideas are first implemented and available on Linux before they are available / incorporated into other platforms.” In contrast, when examining the most important software innovations, it’s quickly discovered that Microsoft invented no key innovations, nor was Microsoft the first implementor of any of them. In fact, there is significant evidence that Microsoft is not an innovator at all. Thus the arguments, while sounding logical, ignore how innovation really occurs and what researchers say are necessary. Innovation requires that researchers be able to publish and discuss their work, and that leading-edge users be able to modify and integrate components in novel ways; FLOSS supports these requirements for innovation very well.

   If proprietary approaches were better for research, then you would expect that to be documented in the research community. However, the opposite is true; the paper “NT Religious Wars: Why Are DARPA Researchers Afraid of Windows NT?” found that, in spite of strong pressure by paying customers, computer science researchers strongly resisted basing research on Microsoft Windows. Reasons given were: developers believe Windows is terrible, Windows really is terrible, Microsoft’s highly restrictive non-disclosure agreements are at odds with researcher agendas, and there is no clear technology transition path for OS and network research products built on Windows. This last problem is especially interesting: you’d think that if you could improve a popular product, the improvement would get to users more quickly. But innovation doesn’t work this way usually; most research creates prototypes that aren’t products by themselves, and requires significant interaction between many people before the idea comes to fruition. In proprietary products, usually only the vendor can distribute changes, and publishing the detailed source code explaining the work is prohibited, stifling research. In contrast, NSA’s Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) project could simply take GNU/Linux code, modify it however they liked to try out new concepts, and publish all the results for anyone to productize. In contrast, if an innovation requires the cooperation of a proprietary vendor, it may not happen at all. HP developed new technology for choking off the spread of viruses, but although HP got it to work well in its labs using systems like Linux, they couldn’t duplicate the capability on Windows systems because “we [HP] don’t own Windows.” Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig (the “special master” in Microsoft’s antitrust trial) noted that “Microsoft was using its power to protect itself against new innovation” and that Microsoft’s practices generally threaten technical innovation - not promote it.

   The claim that FLOSS quashes innovation is demonstrably false. There are reports from IT managers that FLOSS encourages innovation, reports from developers that FLOSS encourages innovation, and a demonstrated history of innovation by FLOSS (such as in the development of the Internet and World Wide Web). In contrast, Microsoft fails to demonstrate major innovations itself, there is dissatisfaction by researchers and others about Microsoft’s proprietary approaches, and Microsoft’s own research found that new research ideas are often first implemented and available on FLOSS.

   Indeed, the use of FLOSS-like approaches to spur innovation have spread far beyond software. Wired noted development in 2003 of a new medical system to save lives, which was developed using approaches similar to FLOSS. In short, many people from various backgrounds worked together, with remarkable results.

   This doesn’t mean that having or using FLOSS automatically provides innovation, and certainly proprietary developers can innovate as well. And remember that innovation is not as important as utility; new is not always better! But clearly FLOSS does not impede innovation; the evidence suggests that in many situations FLOSS is innovative, and there is evidence suggesting that FLOSS actively aids innovation.

While I cannot quantitatively measure these issues well, these issues are actually the most important issues to many.

9. Unnecessary Fears

1. Is proprietary software fundamentally better supported than FLOSS? No. There are actually two kinds of support for FLOSS: traditional paid-for support and informal community support. It’s also important to note that proprietary vendors often drop support for their products over time; there is no real recourse for proprietary products users, while there are recourses for FLOSS users.

   There are many organizations who provide traditional support for FLOSS for a fee; since these can be competed (an option not available for proprietary software), you can often get an excellent price for support. Again, an anti-trust lawyer would say that FLOSS support is “contestable.” For example, many GNU/Linux distributions include installation support when you purchase their distribution, and for a fee they’ll provide additional levels of support; examples of such companies include Red Hat, Novell (SuSE), Mandriva (formerly MandrakeSoft), and Canonical Ltd (which supports Ubuntu, a derivative of Debian GNU/Linux). There are many independent organizations that provide traditional support for a fee as well. Some distributions projects are actively supported by a large set of companies and consultants you can select from; examples include Debian GNU/Linux and OpenBSD. The article ‘Team’work Pays Off for Linux evaluated four different technical support services for GNU/Linux systems, and found that “responsiveness was not a problem with any of the participants” and that “No vendor failed to solve the problems we threw at it.” Many other organizations exist to support very specific products; for example, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird support available from decisionOne and MozSource, for many years AdaCore (aka AdaCore Technologies or ACT) has sold commercial support for the FLOSS Ada compiler GNAT, and MySQL AB sells commercial support for its FLOSS relational database system. It’s very important to understand that FLOSS support can be competed separately from the software product; in proprietary products, support is essentially tied to purchase of a usage license.

   In the meantime, users can minimize any ‘fitness for purpose’ risks through evaluation and testing, and by only using production releases of well-known, mature products from reputable distributors.” Indeed, this prediction seems nearly certain, since it’s been happening and accelerating for years.

   As an alternative to paid support, you can also get unpaid support from the general community of users and developers through newsgroups, mailing lists, web sites, and other electronic forums. While this kind of support is non-traditional, many have been very satisfied with it. Indeed, in 1997 InfoWorld awarded the “Best Technical Support” award to the “Linux User Community,” beating all proprietary software vendors’ technical support. Many believe this is a side-effect of the Internet’s pervasiveness - increasingly users and developers are directly communicating with each other and finding such approaches to be more effective than the alternatives (for more on this business philosophy, see The Cluetrain Manifesto). Using this non-traditional approach effectively for support requires following certain rules; for information on these rules, consult “How to ask smart questions” and How to Report Bugs Effectively. But note that there’s a choice; using FLOSS does not require you to use non-traditional support (and follow its rules), so those who want guaranteed traditional support can pay for it just as they would for proprietary software.

   Indeed, proprietary software is often informally supported as well. User groups, magazines, and various organizations have been stood up over many years to support proprietary products, even ones that in theory have a formal support channel. This shows that formal support is often not effective, certainly not as effective as the proprietary vendors wish to pretend. But unlike proprietary software, non-traditional FLOSS support organizations have direct access to the source code and development information - which means they can be much more effective.

   And it’s important to remember that for a proprietary product, the vendor can at any time decide to end support for a product -- while there is always an alternative for FLOSS users. This is especially a risk if a company goes out of business, is bought out, changes to a different market, or if the market becomes too small. But this can happen even when the company is profitable, doesn’t change its basic market, the market is large, and there are many established users. After all, the vendor may have priorities not aligned with yours, and the vendor is usually the only organization that may make improvements and sell the product.

   An extreme example of how a commercial vendor can abandon its users has been Microsoft’s abandonment of the vast number of companies who use Visual Basic 6. Many large organizations have developed large infrastructures that depend on Visual Basic 6, and one survey reports that 52% of all software developers use Visual Basic (at least occasionally); one developer estimates that this plan abandons about 18 million software developers, of which an estimated 6 million are professionals, who developed tens of millions of Visual Basic applications. When Microsoft developed its “.NET” infrastructure, it also created a new product that it called “Visual Basic for .NET” (VB.NET). Unfortunately, VB.NET is completely incompatible with the Visual Basic 6 language so widely used by industry, so the millions of lines of code written using Visual Basic over many years cannot be used with VB.NET without essentially rewriting the programs from scratch. (the migration wizard is essentially useless because there are just so many incompatibilities). A former Microsoft VB product manager, Bill Vaughan, coined the name “Visual Fred” for VB.NET to emphasize how different the new product was from the old one, and the term “Visual Fred” for VB.NET rapidly caught on. This is an enormous expense; if it takes on average $4,000 to to rewrite a Visual Basic application, and only 10% of an estimated 30 million applications need to be rewritten, that means customers will end up paying $12 billion dollars just to rewrite their software (without new functionality). Surveys show that Visual Basic 6 is still far more popular than VB.NET; a 2004 survey found that 80% used Visual Basic 5 or 6, while only 19% used VB.NET. A protest petition has been signed by more than 2,000 people (including 222 MVPs), and many companies have complained about the enormous and completely unnecessary expense of rewriting their programs just because Microsoft stopped supporting the original language. Nevertheless, Microsoft has decided to abandon Visual Basic 6 (mainstream support for VB6 ends on March 31, 2005), in spite of the outcry from most of its users. Since there never was a standard for Visual Basic, and its implementation is proprietary without obvious alternatives, Visual Basic 6 users are stuck; they cannot take over development themselves, as would be possible for an FLOSS program. Instead, the majority of Visual Basic developers are switching to other languages, primarily C# and Java. For example, Evans Data found that of those who weren’t staying with Visual Basic 6, only 37% of Visual Basic 6 users planned to switch to VB.NET; 31% said they plan to move to Java and 39% said they will be migrating to C#. You can see ClassicVB.org for more information. This has the ire of many who normally support Microsoft; Kathleen Dollard said, “It is unconscionable (and should be illegal) for Microsoft to end mainstream support until everyone who made a good faith effort in light of their business environment has made the switch” You could say that this extreme unwanted expense was the just punishment for developers who unwisely chose to use a language with no standard, no alternative implementation, and no mechanism to gain support if the vendor decided to stop supporting the original product. But this is little consolation for those many who have programs written in the now-abandoned Visual Basic 6, since they cannot be handled by the new VB.NET.

   In contrast, many FLOSS programs have been “abandoned” or had major changes in strategy contrary to their user’s interests, but support did not end. Apache grew out of the abandonment of the NCSC web server program -- users banded together and restarted work, which quickly became the #1 web server. The GIMP was abandoned by its original developers, before it had even been fully released; again, users banded together and re-founded the project. The XFree86 project changed its licensing approach to one incompatible with many customer’s requirements and failed to respond to the needs of many users; this led to the founding of another project that replaced it. Of course, if you are the only user of an FLOSS project, it may not be worth becoming the lead of a “follow-on” project -- but you at least have the right to do so. An FLOSS project cannot work too far against the interests of its users, because the users can wrest control away from those who try.

2. Does proprietary software give users more legal rights than FLOSS? Or, isn’t FLOSS legally more risky? No. Some have commented that “with FLOSS you give up your right to sue if things go wrong.” The obvious retort is that essentially all proprietary software licenses also forbid lawsuits - so this isn’t different at all! Anyone who thinks that they can sue Microsoft or other shrink-wrap proprietary vendors when things go wrong is simply fooling themselves. In any case, most users aren’t interested in suing vendors - they want working systems. See “A Senior Microsoft Attorney Looks at Open-Source Licensing”, where Bryan Pfaffenberger argues that “With open-source software... you are, in principle, walking into the deal with your eyes wide open. You know what you’re getting, and if you don’t, you can find someone who does. Open-source licenses enable the community of users to inspect the code for flaws and to trade knowledge about such flaws, which they most assuredly do. Such licenses allow users to create derivative versions of the code that repair potentially hazardous problems the author couldn’t foresee. They let users determine whether the program contains adequate safeguards against safety or security risks. In contrast, the wealthy software firms pushing UCITA are asking us to buy closed-source code that may well contain flaws, and even outright hazards attributable to corporate negligence - but they won’t let us see the code, let alone modify it. You don’t know what you’re getting.” Finally, if the software goes wrong and it’s very important, you can fix it yourself or pay to have it fixed; this option greatly reduces risk, and this option doesn’t exist for proprietary software.

   There is a another legal difference that’s not often mentioned. Many proprietary programs require that users permit software license audits and pay huge fees if the organization can’t prove that every use is licensed. So in some cases, if you use proprietary software, the biggest legal difference is that the vendors get to sue you.

   There are some claims that FLOSS creates special risks to users, but this doesn’t seem to be true in practice. Pillsbury Winthrop LLP noted that “The suggestion that users of [FLOSS] software are more likely to be sued for patent infringement than those that use proprietary software, like Microsoft’s does not appear supported by actual experience. It is interesting to note that while Microsoft has had several dozen patent infringement lawsuits filed against it in the past few years, none have been reported against Linux, the most popular of all [FLOSS] programs.” Linda M. Hamel, General Counsel, Information Technology Division, Commonwealth of Massachusetts concluded that “Use of either open source or proprietary software poses some legal risk to states. States face fewer risks in connection with the use of open source software compared to their private sector counterparts, and the risks that they do face can be managed.” (Groklaw further commented on this). On February 7, 2005, BusinessWeek published an opinion piece by by Stuart Cohen of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL); in that piece, he stated that SCO’s attempt to sue IBM on Linux-related issues resulted in accelerating its popularity and strengthening its legal foundation. He noted that many Linux developers, assisted by such interested parties, went to work to systematically examine every claim SCO put forth, and they investigated and vetted the code in great depth.

   "Best Legal Practices for Open Source Software" by Dennis Kennedy (February 7, 2006) concludes with "Don't be an Open Source ostrich. Open Source software is not likely to go away nor are you likely to avoid it." Indeed, he notes that that "It's easy to find frantic concerns about Open Source software over reasons that apply just as easily to [proprietary] software." He believes a bad on FLOSS is probably "impractical and unwise"; instead, "a reasonable, evolving set of policies and procedures crafted to fit the business needs and corporate risk comfort level of your company will invariably be the best approach to take."

3. Aren’t FLOSS programs simply plagiarized proprietary programs? No. A programmer who has access to the source code of one program could illegally take that code and submit it to another related program. There are good reasons to believe this has happened many times in proprietary programs; since few people can view the source code of two different proprietary programs, some programmers may do it in the (plausible) belief that they won’t be caught. However, it’s unlikely that a programmer would copy code from a proprietary program to an FLOSS program without permission, because (1) the worldwide visibility of most FLOSS source code would make it easy for a proprietary vendor to detect the violation, and (2) the clear record of exactly who submitted the plagiarized code would make it easy to prosecute that lawbreaking programmer.

   A proprietary company could conceivably conspire to insert such code to try to discredit their FLOSS competitor. But the risk of tracing such an attack back to the conspirator is very great; the developer who does it is likely to talk and/or other evidence may provide a trace back to the conspirators. Alternatively, a proprietary company can claim that such an event has happened, without doing it, and then use the false claim to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But in that case, eventually the case will fall apart due to lack of evidence.

   A few years ago The SCO Group, Inc., began claiming that the Linux kernel contained millions of lines of its copyrighted code, and sued several companies including IBM. SCO has vocally supported several lawsuits, funded at least in part by Microsoft (via Baystar and a license purchase with no evidence that it will be used). Yet after repeatedly being ordered by a court to produce its evidence, SCO has yet to produce any evidence that code owned by SCO has been copied into the Linux kernel. Indeed, it’s not even clear that SCO owns the code it claims to own (it’s in dispute with Novell on this point). In addition, Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) did a detailed code analysis, and certified in April 2004 that the Linux kernel is free of copyright infringement. SCO claims that its contracts with IBM give it ownership over IBM-developed code, but previous documents relating to this contract inherited by SCO (such as newsletter explanations from AT&T and a previous court case involving BSD) give extremely strong evidence that this is not true. More information on the SCO vs. IBM case can be found at Groklaw.net.

   In 2004 Ken Brown, President of Microsoft-funded ADTI, claimed that Linus Torvalds didn’t write Linux, and in particular claimed that Torvalds stole much of his code from Minix. Yet it turns out that ADTI had previously hired Alexey Toptygin to find copying between Minix and Linux using automated tools, and Toptygin found that no code was copied from Minux to Linux or from Linux to Minux. Andrew Tanenbaum, the author of Minix, strongly refuted Brown’s unsubstantiated claims in a statement, follow-up, and rebuttal. For example, Tanenbaum stated that “[Linus Torvalds] wrote Linux himself and deserves the credit.” Tanenbaum also discredited Brown’s claim that no one person could write a basic kernel; Tanenbaum noted that there are “six people I know of who (re)wrote UNIX [and] all did it independently.” Other reports find many reasons to believe that ADTI’s claims are false; for example, the Associated Press noted that Recent attacks on Linux come from dubious source.

   There are a vast number of FLOSS programs, almost none of which are involved in any dispute. No reasonable evidence has surfaced to justify the most publicized claims (of SCO and ADTI); these claims can be easily explained as attempts by a vendor to stall a competitor through the courts (see the terms barratry and vexatious litigation) and unfounded claims. There may be some cases, but given the widespread visibility of FLOSS source code, and the lack of plausible cases, they must be extremely rare. Thus, there is strong evidence that people really are (legally) developing FLOSS programs, and not simply copying program source code illegally from proprietary programs.

4. Does FLOSS expose you to greater risk of abandonment? No. Businesses go out of business, and individuals lose interest in products, in both the proprietary and FLOSS world. A major difference, however, is that all FLOSS programs are automatically in escrow - that is, if their original developer stops supporting the product, any person or group can step forward to support it instead. This has been repeatedly demonstrated in FLOSS. For example, the GIMP is a bitmapped graphical editor that was abandoned by its original developers (what’s worse, they abandoned it before its initial release and failed to arrange for anyone else to succeed them). Nevertheless, even in this worst-case situation, after a period of time other users came forward and continued its development. As another example, NCSA abandoned its web server “httpd”, so some of its users banded together to maintain it - its results became Apache, the world’s most popular web server.

5. Are FLOSS licenses enforceable? In particular, is the GPL enforceable? Almost all FLOSS programs are released under some sort of license, and the most popular license is the GPL. A few competitors have claimed, in the past, that these licenses -- in particular the GPL -- are unenforceable. But legal scholars and lawyers who look into the issue generally scoff at such arguments.

   Eben Moglen (professor of law at Columbia University Law School and general counsel of the Free Software Foundation) wrote an article titled Enforcing the GNU GPL, where he describes why the GPL is so easy to enforce -- and why he’s been able to enforce the GPL dozens of times without even going to court. At the time, he stated that “We do not find ourselves taking the GPL to court because no one has yet been willing to risk contesting it with us there.”

   Eben Moglen also gave a keynote address at the University of Maine Law School’s Fourth Annual Technology and Law Conference, Portland, Maine, June 29, 2003, where he explains why it’s so easy to enforce the GPL. He explains it this way: “because of the structure of my license, the defendant’s obligation [is] affirmatively to plead it, if she wants to. After all, if she is distributing, it is either without license, in which case my license doesn’t get tested -- there’s an unlicensed distribution going on and it’s enjoinable -- or the license is pled by the other side .... how interesting... For ten years, I did all of the GPL enforcement work around the world by myself, while teaching full time at a law school. It wasn’t hard, really; the defendant in court would have had no license, or had to choose affirmatively to plead my license: they didn’t choose that route. Indeed, they didn’t choose to go to court; they cooperated, that was the better way... We got compliance all the time.”

   In 2004, the GPL was finally tested in court and found valid. On 14 April 2004, a three-judge panel in German Munich court granted a preliminary injunction to stop distribution of a Sitecom product that was derived from the GPL, yet failed to comply with the GPL. (see also the French article La licence GPL sur un logiciel libre n’est pas une demi-licence!). Soon afterwords, Sitecom Chief Executive Pim Schoenenberger said the company made changes to comply with the GPL. The preliminary injunction was later confirmed on July 23, 2004, along with a significant judgement. John Ferrell of law firm Carr & Ferrell declared that this German decision lends weight to the GPL, and that it “reinforces the essential obligations of the GPL by requiring that if you adopt and distribute GPL code, you must include the GPL license terms and provide source code to users,” just as its license requires.

   In the U.S., the case Drew Technologies, Inc. v. Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc. (SAE) (Civil Action No. 03-CV-74535 DT, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan) involved GPL software. A 2005 settlement left intact a GPL program’s software license. While not as clear a judgement for the GPL as above, the judge clearly took the license seriously, and did not allow the license to simply be nullified.

   The license requirements for common FLOSS licenses are actually easy to comply with, but there is significant evidence that those terms are enforceable. Which is good news for FLOSS users; clear, simple, and consistent requirements make it easy to understand what to do. For developers who depend on licenses like the GPL to keep the code available for improvement, this is also good news.

6. Are there special legal rules about incorporating FLOSS into my programs? No, fundamentally the same rules apply whether you incorporate proprietary or open source software into your program. Fundamentally, you may only include software developed by someone else into your software if you have a license that permits you to do so, and you must follow the requirements of that license. For most proprietary programs, this can only be done by paying per-unit royalty fees and/or limiting your use (such as only using it for educational purposes). If you fail to obey those rules, you can be taken to court for damages, regardless of whether it’s proprietary or FLOSS.

   Many proprietary programs include open source software, so it’s obviously possible to do this legally. Microsoft Windows includes FLOSS components (such as components from the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors which implement Internet-related capabilities), as does Microsoft Office (it uses zlib).

   However, just as with proprietary software, you must examine the license first before you reuse someone else’s software. Some FLOSS programs have use licenses such as BSD, MIT, and similar that explicitly permit you to reuse software in your system without any royalty fees as long as you follow some simple rules. However, you still have to follow rules, for example, some require some sort of credit in the documentation or code itself. These are very low-cost requirements, and meeting them is far cheaper than writing the software yourself!

   The most common FLOSS license is the GPL, which allows you to use the software in arbitrary ways. However, the GPL strictly limits how you’re allowed to combine the software with proprietary software (it does prohibit certain actions). The GPL also requires release of the source code to the recipients of the binary. We’ll discuss the GPL more in the next point.

   Karen Faulds Copenhaver of Black Duck Software’s “Reviewing Use of OSS in the Enterprise” discusses various myths, including the once-common myth that “You cannot use open source software in a proprietary environment”. Instead, she notes that from a developer’s perspective, FLOSS and proprietary code have essentially the same issues: you must understand and fulfill your license obligations, Indeed, she believes that FLOSS compliance will generally be must easier, and that the risk of enforcement is far higher from proprietary code though the same remedies apply (see slide 18). Thus, by slide 19 she notes that organizations developing software of any kind (whether or not the software uses FLOSS components) must know what code is in the code base, must know the obligations of all licensed materials used (so they can fulfill them), and must know whether or not the license obligations of the various components are compatible. They note that organizations who are developing software should embrace FLOSS (slide 36), but when they do, they should meet the obligations of them.

   Sometimes these licenses will be a deciding factor. For example, there are two common GUI toolkits on Linux-based systems: Gtk+ and Qt. Gtk+ is released under the LGPL license, and thus can be used by both FLOSS and proprietary programs without any royalty payments. Qt is available freely under a GPL license, and for a royalty fee under a proprietary license. If you didn’t want to make a royalty payment to Qt’s developers (and/or are concerned about potential future payments and/or how that might empower one company in the future), you could choose to use the Gtk+ library.

   On the other hand, if you’re determined to illegally violate the licenses, then do not make the unwise presumption that you won’t get caught. Since FLOSS source code is widely available, it turns out that it’s often easy to determine if a product has stolen code, and people do actually do such analysis. One developer quickly found and proved that “CherryOS” had blatantly stolen PearPC Code. Netfilter developers have had many successes in enforcing their licenses against people who sell black-box routers and wireless access points with stolen code. The site GPL-violations.org has the goal to resolve GPL violations, amicably where possible, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF)’s Compliance lab handles investigation of alleged violations of the GPL and LGPL and subsequent enforcement when violations are confirmed. Besides being sued by an original developer (for stealing their work), you also won’t be able to sue others if they steal your work, due to legal doctrine called “unclean hands”; If someone has stolen something from you, but you stole to acquire it in the first place, courts will tend to throw you out.

   The bottom line: if you intend to reuse someone else’s software in your own, you must always examine the license first before incorporating it into your system (to make sure its requirements are compatible with yours). This is true whether the code is proprietary or FLOSS. Development organizations normally have a process for evaluating licenses, so the task of evaluating an FLOSS license is just more of the same work they already have to do. If you’re developing proprietary code, just make sure that your developers are legally obligated to go through a vetting process before reusing external code (this is standard practice in the industry). FLOSS licenses generally require that the license accompany the code it covers, so it’s quite easy to get and review any license (it comes with the code you want to use!). If there’s any doubt, there are search engines you can use to check. But this licensing decision is the same sort of decision that must already be made in any software development shop: before reusing code, you must ensure that its licensing requirements are compatible with your requirements, and that you comply with its requirements.

7. Will unintentionally including GPL code in proprietary code force the rest of the product to be GPL’ed? No, though you can choose to do so. The GPL, like most licenses for proprietary software libraries, grants you the right to use code only under certain conditions. Many proprietary libraries require that you pay a fee for each copy, or a large fee for unlimited use. The GPL requires no fee, and indeed doesn’t include many of the restrictions a typical proprietary software license includes. But the GPL does require that, if you include the GPL code as part of your code, you need to release the rest of the code under the GPL.

   So what happens if you are developing a proprietary product, and one of your developers includes GPL code directly into the product without your knowledge? Once that happens, you typically have three options: (1) release the rest under the GPL, (2) remove the GPL’ed code, or (3) arrange for the GPL’ed code to be released to you under a compatible license (this typically involves a fee, and some projects will not be willing to do this). This is not a good situation to be in; make sure that your developers know that they must not steal code from any source, but must instead ensure that the licenses of any software they include in your program (either open source software or proprietary software) is compatible with your licenses. Note that exactly the same thing happens if you incorporate someone else’s proprietary code in your software, with typically even worse results, because proprietary vendors are more likely to sue without working with you and they can often show larger direct monetary losses.

   There are many ways of proprietary and GPL programs can work together, but it must be carefully done to obey the licenses. The Linux kernel is GPL’ed, but proprietary applications can run on top of it (outside the kernel) without any limitations at all. The gcc compiler is GPL’ed, but proprietary applications can be compiled using it. A GPL program can be invoked by a proprietary program, as long as they are clearly separable.

   Indeed, there are a large number of misconceptions about the GPL, more than can be covered here. For more information about the GPL, a useful source is the Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU GPL from the Free Software Foundation (the authors of the GPL).

8. Is FLOSS economically viable? Yes. There are companies that are making money on FLOSS, or using FLOSS to support their money-making activities. Many papers have been written about how to make money using FLOSS, such as Eric S. Raymond’s “The Magic Cauldron” and Donald K. Rosenberg’s “How to make money with open-source software.” The IT Manager’s Journal article from May 2004 by John C. Koenig describes “Seven open source business strategies for competitive advantage” (i.e., seven business strategies using open source software). Bruce Perens’ “The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source” also provides useful insights. FLOSS isn’t compatible with some business models, but FLOSS is certainly compatible with or supports other models. Capitalism does not guarantee that businesses can remain unchanged in changing environments.

   For example, HP reported in January 2003 that it had annual sales of $2 billion linked to GNU/Linux. IBM reported in 2002 that they had already made almost all of their $1 billion investment in Linux back in only one year - i.e., as profit. James Boyle’s response “Give me liberty and give me death?” makes the extraordinary observation that “IBM now earns more from what it calls ‘Linux-related revenues’ than it does from traditional patent licensing, and IBM is the largest patent holder in the world.”

   The 2004 article “Firefox fortune hunters” notes that “new businesses are cropping up to provide organizations ranging from museums to software companies to the U.S. Department of Defense with Mozilla-based applications -- for a fee.” “Business is pretty crazy right now,” said Pete Collins of the Mozdev Group, “With the popularity of Firefox and the economy rebounding, we’ve been swamped. We don’t even advertise--clients find us and provide us with work.”

   The Financial Times Story “Could Linux dethrone the software king?” from January 21, 2003 analyzes some of the financial issues of FLOSS.

   Joel Spolsky’s “Strategy Letter V” notes that “most of the companies spending big money to develop open source software are doing it because it’s a good business strategy for them.” His argument is based on microeconomics, in particular, that every product in the marketplace has substitutes and complements. A substitute is another product you might buy if the first product is too costly, while a complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Since demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease, smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements. For example, an automobile manufacturer may invest to reduce the cost of gas refinement - because if gas is cheaper, they’ll sell more cars. For many companies, such as computer hardware makers and service organizations, supporting an FLOSS product turns a complementary product into a commodity - resulting in more sales (and money) for them.

   Although many FLOSS projects originally started with an individual working in their spare time, and there are many FLOSS projects which can still be described that way, the “major” widely-used projects tend to no longer work that way. Instead, most major FLOSS projects have large corporate backing with significant funds applied to them. This shift has been noted for years, and is discussed in papers such as Brian Elliott Finley’s paper Corporate Open Source Collaboration?.

   Also, looking only at companies making money from FLOSS misses critical issues, because that analysis looks only at the supply side and not the demand side. Consumers are saving lots of money and gaining many other benefits by using FLOSS, so there is a strong economic basis for its success. Anyone who is saving money will fight to keep the savings, and it’s often cheaper for consumers to work together to pay for small improvements in an FLOSS product than to keep paying and re-paying for a proprietary product. A proprietary vendor may have trouble competing with a similar FLOSS product, because the FLOSS product is probably much cheaper and frees the user from control by the vendor. For many, money is still involved - but it’s money saved, not money directly acquired as profit. Some FLOSS vendors have done poorly financially - but many proprietary software vendors (and restaurants!) have also done poorly too, and that doesn’t mean that FLOSS never works. Luckily for consumers, FLOSS products are not tied to a particular vendor’s financial situation as much as proprietary products are.

   Fundamentally, software is economically different than physical goods; it is infinitely replicable, it costs essentially nothing to reproduce, and it can be developed by thousands of programmers working together with little investment (driving the per-person development costs down to very small amounts). It is also durable (in theory, it can be used forever) and nonrival (users can use the same software without interfering with each other, a situation not true of physical property). Thus, the marginal cost of deploying a copy of a software package quickly approaches zero. This explains how Microsoft got so rich so quickly (by selling a product that costs nearly nothing to replicate), and why many FLOSS developers can afford to give software away. See “Open Source-onomics: Examining some pseudo-economic arguments about Open Source” by Ganesh Prasad, which counters “several myths about the economics of Open Source.” People are already experimenting with applying FLOSS concepts to other intellectual works, and it isn’t known how well FLOSS concepts will apply to other fields. Yochai Benkler’s 2002 Yale Law Journal article, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm” argues that FLOSS development is only one example of the broader emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment called “commons-based peer-production” (to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets). He states that its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands. He also argues that this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production (computers and communications capabilities) is widely distributed instead of concentrated. These advantages are that (1) it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural production processes (a smaller “information opportunity cost” in assigning the best person for a given job), and (2) there are substantial increasing returns to allow larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and collaboration enterprises (because property and contract constraints have been removed). In short, it is clear that making economic decisions based on analogies between software and physical objects is not sensible, because software has many economic characteristics that are different from physical objects.

   One very interesting presentation is Brent C. Williams' Open Source Business Models: A Wall Street Look at a Wild 2006 and the Prospects for Even More Fun in 2007. He examines Oracle Linux, the Microsoft-Novell deal, and Red Hat's stock price, and has lots of interesting insights.

   Who Says You Can’t Make Money with Open Source? (30 June 2011) by Jim Zemlin (Executive Director of the Linux Foundation) points out differences over the ten years from 2001 to 2011. Microsoft, which sometimes works with FLOSS but also tries to directly compete with it, has lost value; an investor who put $100K in Microsoft ten years ago would now have $69K. Red Hat, whose only business is providing service and support for FLOSS, has provided an 8X return over the S&P 500, and expects to have a billion dollars in revenue in 2011. IBM (which builds services and products around FLOSS) has had a 43% increase in value over those ten years.

9. Will FLOSS destroy the software industry? Won’t programmers starve if many programs become FLOSS? No; increasingly FLOSS is commercially developed and supported. It’s certainly possible that many FLOSS products will eliminate their proprietary competition, but that’s the nature of competition. If FLOSS approaches pose a significant threat to proprietary development approaches, then proprietary vendors must either find ways to compete or join the FLOSS movement. No one mourns the loss of buggy whip manufacturers, who were driven out of business by a superior approach to transportation (cars). Heinlein noted that no one is guaranteed protection against change in Life-Line (1939): “There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. “

   Eric Raymond’s “The Magic Cauldron” describes many ways to make money with FLOSS. One particularly interesting note is that there is evidence that 95% of all software is not developed for sale. For the vast majority of software, organizations must pay developers to create it anyway. Thus, even if FLOSS eliminated all shrink-wrapped programs, it would only eliminate 5% of the existing software development jobs. And, since the FLOSS programs would be less expensive, other tasks could employ developers that are currently too expensive, so widespread FLOSS development would not harm the ability of developers to make a living. The Open Source Initiative has an article on why programmers won’t starve, and again, Bruce Perens’ “The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source” also provides useful insights.

   FLOSS doesn’t require that software developers work for free; many FLOSS products are developed or improved by employees (whose job is to do so) and/or by contract work (who contract to make specific improvements in FLOSS products). If an organization must have a new capability added to an FLOSS program, they must find someone to add it... and generally, that will mean paying a developer to develop the addition. That person may be internal to the organization, someone already involved in the program being modified, or a third party. The difference is that, in this model, the cost is paid for development of those specific changes to the software, and not for making copies of the software. Since copying bits is essentially a zero-cost operation today, this means that this model of payment more accurately reflects the actual costs (since in software almost all costs are in development, not in copying).

   There are several different systems for connecting people willing to pay for a change with people who know how to make the change. A common approach is to use your own employees to make the change necessary for what you want. But there are alternatives. Bounty systems (also called sponsor systems or pledge systems) are systems where a user asks for an improvement and states a price they’re willing to pay for that improvement. Typical bounty systems allow others to join in, with the goal of accumulating enough of a bounty to entice a developer to implement the improvement. Some bounty systems are run by individual projects; others are third-party bounty systems that work like independent auction houses, connecting users with third-party developers. Many FLOSS projects run their own bounty systems, such as the Mozilla projects, the GNOME project, Horde Asterisk, Lime Wire, and i2p.

   Bounty systems are sometimes directly supported by the project’s bug tracking tools. For example, the Mantis bug tracking system includes a sponsorship option. Using this option, every time people report a bug or feature request, they can include an amount they’re willing to pay for it. That means that any project that uses the Mantis bug tracker (including projects like Plucker) automatically includes a bounty system. I expect that more bug/improvement tracking systems will include this capability in the future, since it easily integrates into the existing project processes, and it supports direct interaction between users and developers. The widely-used “Bugzilla” bug/feature tracking system, doesn’t include a bounty system as of April 2005, but a bounty system for Bugzilla has been proposed.

   Some users and governments offer a bounty from their own sites that describe what they want; Mark Shuttleworth’s bounties are good example. Software in the Public Interest funds specific FLOSS projects. Organizations that run bounty-like programs for FLOSS include opensourcexperts.com’s bounty list and the list run by the Public Software Fund. There are also more general organizations that support third-party bounties or group fund-raising activities, such as Ideacradle.com and dropcash.com. Somewhat confusingly, the term “security bug bounty system” is often used for the system where anyone who reports a security defect is paid a certain amount; Mozilla also has a security bug bounty programs.

   Of course, the reverse can happen: Someone can propose to do something, if people will raise a certain amount of capital for it. Fundable.org supports allowing people to post funding requirements, such as proposing to implement a new capability in an FLOSS project for a certain amount of money. This approach has been used to support FLOSS; Newsforge describes how Fundable.org was used to quickly raise funds so Frederico Caldeira Knabben could port his FLOSS html editor to the Apple Macintosh’s Safari.

   Another approach, primarily used when trying to transform a proprietary software into an FLOSS program (by buying the software from its previous owner) has been called a “software ransom”; users pool their money together with the purpose of paying the owner to release the (existing) product as FLOSS. For example, Blender was released as FLOSS through a software ransom (termed the “Free Blender” campaign).

   Indeed, there has been a recent shift in FLOSS away from volunteer programmers and towards paid development by experienced developers. Again, see Ganesh Prasad’s article for more information. Brian Elliott Finley’s article “Corporate Open Source Collaboration?” stated that “Now corporate America is getting involved in the development process. This seems to be a common trend amongst individuals, and now corporations, as they move into the Open Source world. That is that they start out as a user, but when their needs outstrip existing software, they migrate from being mere users to being developers. This is a good thing, but it makes for a slightly different slant on some of the dynamics of the process.” AOL decided to spin off the Mozilla project as a separate organization; not only does the separate organization employ several full-time employees, but other organizations have worked to hire Mozilla workers. Fundamentally, paying software developers is similar to paying for proprietary licenses, except you only have to pay for improvements (instead of paying for each copy), so many organizations appear to have found that it’s worthwhile. The Boston Consulting Group/OSDN Hacker Survey (January 31, 2002) surveyed users of SourceForge and found that 33.8% of the FLOSS developers were writing OSS code for “work functionality” (i.e., it was something they did as part of their employment). It also provided quantitative evidence that FLOSS developers are experienced; it found that FLOSS developers had an average age of 30 and that they averaged 11 years of programming experience.

   In 2004, Government Computer News reported in July 2004 on a presentation by Andrew Morton, who leads maintenance of the the Linux kernel in its stable form, and confirmed the trend towards paid FLOSS developers. Morton spoke at a meeting sponsored by the Forum on Technology and Innovation, to address technology-related issues, held by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), Sen. Ron Wyden (D- Ore.) and the Council on Competitiveness. Morton noted that “People’s stereotype [of the typical Linux developer] is of a male computer geek working in his basement writing code in his spare time, purely for the love of his craft. Such people were a significant force up until about five years ago ...” but contributions from such enthusiasts, “is waning... Instead, most Linux kernel code is now generated by corporate programmers.” Morton noted that “About 1,000 developers contribute changes to Linux on a regular basis... Of those 1,000 developers, about 100 are paid to work on Linux by their employers. And those 100 have contributed about 37,000 of the last 38,000 changes made to the operating system.” The article later notes “Even though anyone can submit changes, rarely does good code come from just anyone. Morton noted that it is rare that a significant change would be submitted from someone who is completely unknown to the core developers. And all submitted code is inspected by other members of the group, so it is unlikely some malicious function may be secretly embedded in Linux... Far from being a project with a vast numbers of contributors, about half of those 37,000 changes are made by core developer team of about 20 individuals, Morton said.”

   This trend has continued. The Linux Foundation's December 2010 report "Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It" (by Jonathan Corbet, Greg Kroah­Hartman, and Amanda McPherson) found that 70% of the Linux kernel developers are provably being paid to do this development (and I believe the real figure is much higher).

   The September 3, 2004 article Peace, love and paychecks gives one of many examples of this trend. Network Appliance (NetApp) pays significant money to one of the Linux lieutenants (Myklebust), as well as developing code for Linux, for a very simple reason: money. “What’s in it for [NetApp] is sales; it can sell into the Linux market. This is not about philanthropy. There is plenty of mutual benefit going on here,” says Peter Honeyman. The article notes that “Big companies pick up the tab for Linux development because the system helps them sell hardware and consulting services. HP claims $2.5 billion in Linux-related revenue in 2003, while IBM claims $2 billion. Red Hat, which distributes a version of the Linux operating system, generated $125 million in revenues last fiscal year and carries a market value of $2.3 billion. Last year sales of Linux servers grew 48% to $3.3 billion, and by 2008 Linux server sales could approach $10 billion, according to market researcher IDC.” NetApp earned $152 million on sales of $1.2 billion, its Linux payoff is significant. Linux now contains bits of code written by NetApp’s programmers, so that NetApp works particularly well with Linux. As a result, “it has won business it wouldn’t have otherwise at Oracle, Pixar, Southwest Airlines, ConocoPhillips and Weta Digital, the effects studio behind Lord of the Rings.” For fast-moving projects like the Linux kernel, the entire development process is supportive of developers of kernel improvements and drivers who contribute to the codebase... and not to those who try to rig the system and make proprietary kernel drivers (proprietary applications are fine). One person noted, “the kernel developers all like how this [development process] is working. No stable internal-kernel [application programmer interface], never going to happen, get used to it (syscalls won’t break).” Drivers outside of the official Linux kernel tree will typically become useless almost immediately; thus, developers must get their device drivers released as FLOSS and into the main kernel immediately, or the development process will rush away from you. Proprietary components are treated as if they don’t exist, and if you don’t support the community, people generally don’t care. Organizations who try to acquire ownership of the kernel through licensing games quickly discover that their efforts are discarded.

   BusinessWeek ran a lengthy cover story on January 2005 called “Linux Inc.” which described the whole GNU/Linux development process, and related business models, in detail.

   There are many other examples of this transition to paid-for FLOSS development. For example, Nokia funded Matthew Allum to rapidly improve the Matchbox Window Manager (to support Nokia’s N770 Internet Tablet).

   Walt Scacchi, a research scientist at the University of California at Irvine’s Institute for Software Research, studies the FLOSS, and found that salaries are 5-15% higher for core contributors to popular FLOSS projects. The article Firefox fortune hunters quotes Scacchi, who explained that “These people are in demand... software developers who are identified as core contributors [to popular FLOSS projects] are likely to have market opportunities that conventional software developers would not have. If you’ve contributed to a software system used by millions of people, you’ve demonstrated something that most software developers have not done.”

   The Investors.com article ”Open-Source Success Roiling Software Field” by Ken Spencer Brown (Sep. 21, 2005) discusses the continued and increasing commercialization of FLOSS. The article reports that “For every multimillion-dollar software program being sold, there’s a good chance that at least one free alternative can do the same thing, at a fraction of the cost.” He describes the transition this way: “In many ways, open source and its best-known product, Linux, have shed their counterculture roots and gone pro. Most of Linux’s current programmers work for companies that want a say in the software’s development.” He also notes that today, many FLOSS products are developed by venture-capital based companies, “and venture capitalists all want their money back -- and them some.” The reason is simple: “Contrary to popular belief, most business users insist on using paid-for versions of open-source software or add-on support.” He quotes James Thomas, product marketing director at Business Objects, as saying, “Open source is a business model, and people forget that.” Brown notes that “almost every large public tech company has embraced open source to one degree or another.”

   Robert Westervelt reported in SearchVB (a resource specializing in Microsoft’s Visual Basic!) reported that security, web services and Linux jobs continue to dominate the IT help wanted ads in 2004, and are projected to remain among the hottest skill and certification areas in 2005. Tony Iams, principal analyst with D.H. Brown Associates Inc., said that “Linux for a long time had been targeted for edge of network type applications, but it’s taking on support for a much broader range of applications... For a while, it looked like the future was Windows, but now there is a larger demand for a more hands-on understanding for the Unix and Linux philosophy of managing workloads.” The Free Software Foundation (FSF)’s Jobs in Free Software page is one of many places where companies and potential employees can find each other to work on FLOSS projects, but it certainly not the only such place.

   Nathan Eddy's "Report: Open Source Adoption Increases App Dev Pay" (2008) quotes consulting company Bluewolf. Michael Kirven, co-founder and principle, says that "There's been a huge wave of people embracing open source technologies... [its availability] has far outstripped the people trained for them". They found that developers with a specialization in those technologies are in a position to ask for a 30 or 40 percent pay increase... LAMP is everywhere now &mdash... [and are] becoming a hot commodity."

   Corporate support of FLOSS projects is not a new phenomenon. The X window system began in 1984 as a cooperative effort between MIT and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and by 1988 a non-profit vendor consortium had been established to support it. The Apache web server began in 1995, based on previous NCSA work. In other words, both X and Apache were developed and maintained by consortias of companies from their very beginning. Other popular FLOSS projects like MySQL, Zope, and Qt have had strong backing from a specific commercial company for years. But now there is more corporate acceptance in using FLOSS processes to gain results, and more understanding of how to do so. And as more FLOSS projects gain in maturity, it is more likely that some project will intersect with a given company’s needs.

   It seems unlikely that so many developers would choose to support an approach that would destroy their own industry, and there are a large number of FLOSS developers. On January 28, 2003, Sourceforge.net all by itself reported that it had 555,314 registered users on its FLOSS development site, and many of the largest FLOSS projects are not hosted by Sourceforge.net (including the Linux kernel, the gcc compilation system, the X-Windows GUI system, the Apache web server, the Mozilla web browser, and the OpenOffice.org document management suite). Unfortunately, there seems to be no data to determine the number of FLOSS developers worldwide, but it is likely to be at least a million people and possibly many, many more.

   FLOSS enables inexperienced developers to gain experience and credibility, while enabling organizations to find the developers they need (and will then pay to develop more software). Often organizations will find the developers they need by looking at the FLOSS projects they depend on (or on related projects). Thus, lead developers of an FLOSS project are more likely to be hired by organizations when those organizations need an extension or support for that project’s program. This gives both hope and incentive to inexperienced developers; if they start a new project, or visibly contribute to a project, they’re more likely to be hired to do additional work. Other developers can more easily evaluate that developer’s work (since the code is available for all to see), and the inexperienced developer gains experience by interacting with other developers. This isn’t just speculation; one of Netscape’s presenters at FOSDEM 2002 was originally a volunteer contributor to Netscape’s Mozilla project; his contributions led Netscape to offer him a job (which he accepted).

   Of course, FLOSS certainly has an impact on the software industry, but in many ways it appears quite positive, especially for customers. Since customers are the ones directly funding the specific improvements they actually want (using money and/or developer time), market forces push FLOSS developers directly towards making the improvements users actually want. Proprietary vendors try to identify customer needs using marketing departments, but there’s little evidence that marketing departments are as effective as customers themselves at identifying customer needs. In FLOSS development, customers demonstrate which capabilities are most important to them, directly, by determining what they’ll fund. Another contrast is that proprietary developers’ funding motivations are not always aligned with customers’ motivations. Proprietary development has strong financial incentives to prevent the use of competing products, to prevent inter-operation with competing products, and to prevent access to copies (unless specifically authorized by the vendor). Thus, once a proprietary product becomes widely used, its vendor sometimes devotes increasing efforts to prevent use, inter-operation, and copying, instead of improving capabilities actually desired by customers and even if those mechanisms interfere with customer needs. This trend is obvious over the decades of the software industry; dongles, undocumented and constantly changing data protocols and data formats, copy-protected media, and software registration mechanisms which interfere with customer needs are all symptoms of this difference in motivation. Note that an FLOSS developer loses nothing if their customer later switches to a competing product (whether FLOSS or proprietary), so an FLOSS developer has no incentive to insert such mechanisms.

   And many companies have been created to exploit FLOSS. No doubt many will fail, just like many restaurants fail, but those who succeed should do well. The Star Tribune notes that starting a software company used to be hard work -- now people take FLOSS products, combine them to solve specific problems, and sell them (with support) at a large profit.

   Karen Shaeffer has written an interesting piece, Prospering in the Open Source Software Era, which discusses what she views to be the effects of FLOSS. For example, FLOSS has the disruptive effect of commoditizing what used to be proprietary property and it invites innovation (as compared to proprietary software which constrained creativity). She thinks the big winners will be end users and the software developers, because “the value of software no longer resides in the code base - it resides in the developers who can quickly adapt and extend the existing open source code to enable businesses to realize their objectives concerned with emerging opportunities. This commoditization of source code represents a quantum step forward in business process efficiency - bringing the developers with the expertise into the business groups who have the innovating ideas.”

   The article "Zen and the Art of the Six-Figure Linux Salary" (September 30, 2008) notes that upper-level Linux jobs are not only lucrative, but becoming more so, due to demand.

10. Is FLOSS compatible with Capitalism? Yes. Years ago some tried to label FLOSS as “communistic” or “socialistic” (i.e., anti-capitalist), but that rhetoric has failed. One article explaining why FLOSS and capitalism are compatible is Ganesh Prasad’s How Does the Capitalist View Open Source?. This paper shows that FLOSS is quite consistent with capitalism: it increases wealth without violating principles of property ownership or free will. The developer of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, noted that U.S. copyright law specifically notes the exchange of copyrighted material as financial gain. US Code, Title 17 (copyrights), Chapter 1, Section 101: “Definitions” says that, “The term ‘financial gain’ includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.” He notes that this is part of the very fundamentals of copyright law. What’s more, he notes that the GPL license (the most popular FLOSS license) “is designed so that people receive the value of other people’s copyrighted works in return [for] their own contributions. That is the fundamental idea of the whole license - everything else is just legal fluff... the notion that the GPL has, of ‘exchange of receipt of copyrighted works,’ is actually explicitly encoded in U.S. copyright law. It’s not just a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up...” See also the information on economic viability and starving programmers for more.

11. If only FLOSS programs exist in a software category, will that completely eliminate competition? No. Oddly enough, FLOSS programs sometimes compete with each other in a given functional area. The text editors emacs (primarily GNU emacs) and vi (primarily vim) have dueled for decades. Sendmail is still a popular program for delivering email, but it has competition from other FLOSS programs such as Postfix and Exim. The desktop environments GNOME and KDE compete with each other, as do the OS kernels of Linux and the BSDs. Generally, competing FLOSS projects must distinguish themselves from each other to succeed (e.g., through user interface philosophies, design approaches, characteristics like security, licensing strategies, and so on), but of course that’s true for competing proprietary programs too. Also, competing FLOSS programs generally try to stay compatible with each other (because their customers demand it) and sometimes even help each other with technical problems. For example, freedesktop.org provides a forum to encourage cooperation among open source desktops for the X Window System (such as KDE and GNOME), and is part of the Free Standards Group which tries to accelerate the use and acceptance of open source technologies through the development, application and promotion of standards. In addition, even if there is one product, multiple organizations can compete for maintenance and support (e.g., GNU/Linux distributors do this). Thus, even if FLOSS eliminates all proprietary programs in a given category, that would still not eliminate competition.

12. Are FLOSS program compatible with standards? Yes.

    FLOSS programs can implement standards, just like proprietary programs can. FLOSS often implement relevant standards better than proprietary products. The reason is simple: FLOSS projects have no financial incentive to ignore or subvert a standard. A proprietary software maker’s duty is to maximize profits. Proprietary makes may choose to do this by ignoring standards or creating proprietary extensions to standards; once customers depend on these proprietary interfaces, they will find it very difficult to switch to a different product, even if it’s better. In contrast, FLOSS projects are generally supported directly by their users, who want to employ standards to maintain access to their data, simplify inter-operation with others, and simplify integration into their own environments.

    I have sometimes noted that FLOSS projects often end up creating executable specifications or executable standards. Traditional (paper) standards cannot be directly used by users, and always include ambiguities that are difficult to resolve later. In contrast, FLOSS programs can be used directly be users -- thus they help users more directly -- yet because their implementations are transparent, they can clarify any ambiguities in the documented standards. As FLOSS has grown, various bodies have worked to develop standards to support interoperability. This includes the Free Standards Group, Free Desktop.org, Linux Standard Base, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and X.org. There is also a great deal of interaction with standards-making groups such as the IETF and the W3C. See also my discussion on single source solutions.

13. Is FLOSS a “destroyer of intellectual property”? No. It’s true that Microsoft’s Jim Allchin has claimed that OSS is an intellectual-property destroyer and that it’s somehow “un-American”. But you can use FLOSS products (e.g., a word processor) to develop private and proprietary information, and you can keep the information as confidential and proprietary as you want. What you can’t do is use someone else’s material in a way forbidden by law... and this is true for all software, not just FLOSS.

    One interesting case is the “General Public License” (GPL), the most common FLOSS license. Software covered by the GPL can be modified, and the modified code can be used in house without obligations. If you release that modified software, you must include an offer for the source code under the same GPL license. Basically, the GPL creates a consortium; anyone can use and modify the program, but anyone who releases the program (modified or not) must satisfy the restrictions in the GPL that prevent the program and its derivatives from becoming proprietary. Since the GPL is a legal document, it can be hard for some to understand. Here is one less legal summary (posted on Slashdot):

    This software contains the intellectual property of several people. Intellectual property is a valuable resource, and you cannot expect to be able to use someone else’s intellectual property in your own work for free. Many businesses and individuals are willing to trade their intellectual property in exchange for something of value; usually money. For example, in return for a sum of money, you might be granted the right to incorporate code from someone’s software program into your own.

    The developers of this software are willing to trade you the right to use their intellectual property in exchange for something of value. However, instead of money, the developers are willing to trade you the right to freely incorporate their code into your software in exchange for the right to freely incorporate your code [which incorporates their code] into theirs. This exchange is to be done by way of and under the terms of the GPL. If you do not think that this is a fair bargain, you are free to decline and to develop your own code or purchase it from someone else. You will still be allowed to use the software, which is awfully nice of the developers, since you probably didn’t pay them a penny for it in the first place.

    Microsoft complains that the GPL does not allow them to take such code and make changes that it can keep proprietary, but this is hypocritical. Microsoft doesn’t normally allow others to make and distribute changes to Microsoft software at all, so the GPL grants far more rights to customers than Microsoft does.

    In some cases Microsoft will release source code under its “shared source” license, but that license (which is not FLOSS) is far more restrictive. For example, it prohibits distributing software in source or object form for commercial purposes under any circumstances. Examining Microsoft’s shared source license also shows that it has even more stringent restrictions on intellectual property rights. For example, it states that “if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software for a person’s use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically,” and “the patent rights Microsoft is licensing only apply to the Software, not to any derivatives you make.” A longer analysis of this license and the problems it causes developers is provided by Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (bero). The FSF has also posted a press release on why they believe the GPL protects software freedoms.

    It’s true that organizations that modify and release GPL’ed software must yield any patent and copyright rights for those additions they release, but such organizations do so voluntarily (no one can force anyone to modify GPL code) and with full knowledge (all GPL’ed software comes with a license clearly stating this). And such grants only apply to those modifications; organizations can hold other unrelated rights if they wish to do so, or develop their own software instead. Since organizations can’t make such changes at all to proprietary software in most circumstances, and generally can’t redistribute changes in the few cases where they can make changes, this is a fair exchange, and organizations get far more rights with the GPL than with proprietary licenses (including the “shared source” license). If organizations don’t like the GPL license, they can always create their own code, which was the only option even before GPL’ed code became available.

    Although the GPL is sometimes called a “virus” by proprietary vendors (particularly by Microsoft) due to the way it encourages others to also use the GPL license, it’s only fair to note that many proprietary products and licenses also have virus-like effects. Many proprietary products with proprietary data formats or protocols have “network effects,” that is, once many users begin to use that product, that group puts others who don’t use the same product at a disadvantage. For example, once some users pick a particular product such as a proprietary OS or word processor, it becomes increasingly difficult for other users to use a different product. Over time this enforced use of a particular proprietary product also spreads like a virus.

    Certainly many technologists and companies don’t think that the GPL will destroy their businesses. Many seem too busy mocking Microsoft’s claims instead (for an example, see John Lettice’s June 2001 article “ Gates: GPL will eat your economy, but BSD’s cool”). After all, Microsoft sells a product with GPL’ed components, and still manages to hold intellectual property (see below).

    Perhaps Microsoft means the GPL “destroys” intellectual property because the owners of competing software may be driven out of business. If so, this is hypocritical; Microsoft has driven many companies out of business, or bought them up at fractions of their original price. Indeed, sometimes the techniques that Microsoft used have later been proven in court to be illegal. In contrast, there is excellent evidence that the GPL is on very solid legal ground. “Destruction” of one organization by another through legal competition is quite normal in capitalistic economies.

    The GPL does not “destroy” intellectual property; instead, it creates a level playing field where people can contribute improvements voluntarily to a common project without having them “stolen” by others. You could think of the GPL as creating a consortium; no one is required to aid the consortium, but those who do must play by its rules. The various motivations for joining the consortium vary considerably (see the article License to FUD), but that’s true for any other consortium too. It’s understandable that Microsoft would want to take this consortium’s results and take sole ownership of derivative works, but there’s no reason to believe that a world where the GPL cannot be used is really in consumers’ best interests.

    The argument is even more specious for non-GPL’ed code. Microsoft at one time protested about open source software, but indeed, they are a key user of open source software; key portions of Microsoft Windows (including much of their Internet interfacing software) and Microsoft Office (such as compression routines) include open source software. In 2004, Microsoft released an installation tool, WiX, as open source software on SourceForge. Indeed, the release of WiX as FLOSS appears to be quite a success; after 328 days on SourceForge, the WiX project has on the order of 120,000 downloads, and about two-thirds of the bugs logged have been fixed. Stephen R. Walli, formerly of Microsoft, reports that there’s a core of half a dozen developers working predominantly on their own time (so Microsoft doesn’t have to pay them). Yet Windows development customers are “happy and directly involved in the conversation with Microsoft employees. One stunning submission came from a developer that built a considerable tutorial on WiX. I did a quick page estimate and it looks like this developer gave the WiX project at least a month of his life.”

    Microsoft now actively develops and maintains several FLOSS projects, including Windows Installer XML (WiX), Windows Template Library (WTL) project, and FlexWiki. Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft’s shared-source program, said the company “will expand its open-source programs over time, but is moving slowly as it tries to learn how to participate in open-source communities.”

14. Is there really a lot of FLOSS software? Yes. Freshmeat.net counts over 21,000 software branches of FLOSS software as of October 2002. Sourceforge.net hosts 55,424 FLOSS projects all by itself (as of January 28, 2003). The dmoz list of just OS counts 114 FLOSS OSes; this includes old systems (re-enabling their support), experiments, and specialized projects. There’s little reason to believe that this counts all FLOSS software, but it certainly indicates there’s a large amount of it. These projects vary in value and quality, of course, just as proprietary programs do, but all of these FLOSS projects can be the basis of future work.

15. Is having the ability to view and change source code really valuable/important for many people? Surprisingly, yes. It’s certainly true that few people need direct access to source code; only developers or code reviewers need the ability to access and change code. But not having access to how your computer is controlled is still a significant problem. Bob Young of Red Hat uses the analogy of having your car’s hood welded shut to explain why even non-technical users need access to the source code. Here is his explanation, in his own words:

    Open source gives the user the benefit of control over the technology the user is investing in... The best analogy that illustrates this benefit is with the way we buy cars. Just ask the question, “Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?” and we all answer an emphatic “No.” So ask the follow-up question, “What do you know about modern internal-combustion engines?” and the answer for most of us is, “Not much.”

    We demand the ability to open the hood of our cars because it gives us, the consumer, control over the product we’ve bought and takes it away from the vendor. We can take the car back to the dealer; if he does a good job, doesn’t overcharge us and adds the features we need, we may keep taking it back to that dealer. But if he overcharges us, won’t fix the problem we are having or refuses to install that musical horn we always wanted -- well, there are 10,000 other car-repair companies that would be happy to have our business.

    In the proprietary software business, the customer has no control over the technology he is building his business around. If his vendor overcharges him, refuses to fix the bug that causes his system to crash or chooses not to introduce the feature that the customer needs, the customer has no choice. This lack of control results in high cost, low reliability and lots of frustration.

    To developers, source code is critical. Source code isn’t necessary to break the security of most systems, but to really fix problems or add new features it’s quite difficult without it. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has often claimed that most developers don’t need access to OS source code, but Graham Lea’s article “Bill Gates’ roots in the trashcans of history” exposes that Gates actually extracted OS source code himself from other companies by digging through their trash cans. Mr. Gates said, “I’d skip out on athletics and go down to this computer center. We were moving ahead very rapidly: Basic, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the OS listings from the trash and studying those.” If source code access isn’t needed by developers, why did he need it? Obviously, there’s a significant advantage to developers if they can review the source code, particularly of critical components such as an operating system.

    See also the discussion on the greater flexibility of FLOSS.

16. Is FLOSS really just an anti-Microsoft campaign? No. Certainly there are people who support FLOSS who are also against Microsoft, but it’d be a mistake to view FLOSS as simply anti-Microsoft.

    Microsoft already depends on FLOSS software in its own applications; Windows’ implementation of the basic Internet protocols (TCP/IP) was derived from FLOSS code, and its Office suite depends on the FLOSS compression library “zlib.”. More recently, Microsoft admitted that critical infrastructure for its forthcoming Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition will be FLOSS; as the eWeek article notes, it would have been difficult for them to compete otherwise. Microsoft could, at any time, release programs such as its OSes as FLOSS, take an existing FLOSS OS and release it, or provide applications for FLOSS systems. There is no licensing agreement that prevents this (though it certainly would be radically different than their current business processes, so no one expects this to happen any time soon). Indeed, FLOSS leaders often note that they are not against Microsoft per se, just some of its current business practices, and many have repeatedly asked Microsoft to join them (e.g., see Free Software Leaders Stand Together).

    In many cases FLOSS is developed with and for Microsoft technology. On June 21, 2002, SourceForge listed 831 projects that use Visual Basic (a Microsoft proprietary technology) and 241 using C# (a language that originated from Microsoft). A whopping 8867 projects are listed as working in Windows. This strongly suggests that there are many FLOSS developers who are not “anti-Microsoft.”

    Microsoft has said that it’s primarily opposed to the GPL, but Microsoft sells a product with GPL’ed components. Microsoft’s Windows Services for Unix includes Interix, an environment which can run UNIX-based applications and scripts on the Window NT and Windows 2000 OSes. There’s nothing wrong with this; clearly, there are a lot of Unix applications, and since Microsoft wants to sell its OSes, Microsoft decided to sell a way to run Unix applications on its own products. But many of the components of Interix are covered by the GPL, such as gcc and g++ (for compiling C and C++ programs). (Microsoft seems to keep moving information about this; here is a stable copy). The problem is not what Microsoft is doing; as far as I can tell, they’re following both the letter and the spirit of the law in this product. The problem is that Microsoft says no one should use the GPL, and that no one can make money using the GPL, while simultaneously making money using the GPL. Bradley Kuhn (of the FSF) bluntly said, “It’s hypocritical for them to benefit from GPL software and criticize it at the same time.” Microsoft executives are certainly aware of this use of the GPL; Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie specifically acknowledged this use of GPL software when he was questioned on it. Kelly McNeill noted this dichotomy between claims and actions in the June 22, 2001 story “Microsoft Exposed with GPL’d Software!” A more detailed description about this use of the GPL by Microsoft is given in The Standard on June 27, 2001. Perhaps in the future Microsoft will try to remove many of these GPL’ed components so that this embarrassing state of affairs won’t continue. But even if these components are removed in the future, this doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft has managed to sell products that include GPL-covered code without losing any of its own intellectual property rights.

    In more recent years, Microsoft has begun to take a much more enlightened stand on FLOSS. Bill Hilf has explained, “Do I really care if it’s open source or not if it sells our infrastructure?” (This is from the article “Cracking Open the Door to Open Source” by Carolyn A. April, Redmond Magazine, March 2007, pp. 26-36; this quote is on page 28.) Indeed, Microsoft has been increasingly encouraging FLOSS projects, even in some cases products that compete with Microsoft products. Why? Because use of those products encourages the sale of other Microsoft products. Hilf reports, with great candor, “Some people think that we’re doing these deals to appear more ‘friendly’, and that’s not it at all. It’s all about growing our business.” This includes projects like WiX, IronPython, and even the entire Microsoft-sponsored CodePlex website for developing FLOSS programs.

    It's also worth noting the Microsoft - Novell deal. Brett Smith (Free Software Foundation Licensing Engineer) states that in this deal, "Microsoft provides coupons for SUSE to companies, who then go to Novell to redeem the coupons and get their copy of the software. Those coupons procure the conveyance of lots of free software... Microsoft is already conveying GPLed software under this agreement."

    That being said, there are certainly many people who are encouraging specific FLOSS products (such as Linux) so that there will be a viable competition to Microsoft, or who are using the existence of a competitor to obtain the best deal from Microsoft for their organization. This is nothing unusual - customers want to have competition for their business, and they usually have it in most other areas of business. Certainly there is a thriving competing market for computer hardware, which has resulted in many advantages for customers. The New York Times’ position is that “More than two dozen countries - including Germany and China - have begun to encourage governmental agencies to use such “open source” software ... Government units abroad and in the United States and individual computer users should look for ways to support Linux and Linux-based products. The competition it offers helps everyone.”

17. I’ve always assumed there’s no free lunch; isn’t there some catch? If there is an FLOSS product that meets your needs, there really isn’t a catch. Perhaps the only catch is misunderstanding the term “free.” The GPL includes this (haiku) text: “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.” I.E., FLOSS is not necessarily cost-free. In practice, it’s still often a bargain.

    Naturally, if you want services besides the software itself (such as guaranteed support, training, and so on), you must pay for those things just like you would for proprietary software. If you want to affect the future direction of the software - especially if you must have the software changed in some way to fit it to your needs - then you must invest to create those specific modifications. Typically these investments involve hiring someone to make those changes, possibly sharing the cost with others who also need the change. Note that you only need to pay to change the software - you don’t need to pay for permission to use the software, or a per-copy fee, only the actual cost of the changes.

    For example, when IBM wanted to join the Apache group, IBM discovered there really was no mechanism to pay in money. IBM soon realized that the primary “currency” in FLOSS is software code, so IBM turned the money into code and all turned out very well.

    This also leads to interesting effects that explains why many FLOSS projects start small for years, then suddenly leap into a mode where they have a rapidly increasing functionality and user size. For any application, there is a minimum level of acceptable functionality; below this, there will be very few users. If that minimum level is large enough, this creates an effect similar to an “energy barrier” in physics; the barrier can be large enough that most users are not willing to pay for the initial development of the project. However, at some point, someone may decide to begin the “hopeless” project anyway. The initial work may take a while, because the initial work is large and there are few who will help. However, once a minimum level of functionality is reached, a few users will start to use it, and a few of them may be willing to help (e.g., because they want the project to succeed or because they have specialized needs). At some point in this growth, it is like passing an energy barrier; the process begins to become self-sustaining and exponentially increasing. As the functionality increases, the number of potential users begins to increase rapidly, until suddenly the project is sufficiently usable for many users. A percentage of the userbase will decide to add new features, and as the userbase grows, so do the number of developers. As this repeats, there is an explosion in the program’s capabilities.

10. FLOSS on the desktop: Client computing

FLOSS programs have been competing for many years in the server market, and are now well-established in that market. FLOSS programs have been competing for several years in the embedded markets, and have already begun to significantly penetrate those markets as well.

In contrast, FLOSS programs currently have only a small client (desktop and laptop) market share. This is unsurprising; FLOSS only began to become viable for client computing in 2002, and it takes time for any software to mature, be evaluated, and be deployed. Since FLOSS is a brand new contender in the client market, it has only begun penetrating into that market. However, FLOSS use on client systems has grown significantly, and there are reasons to think that will grow even more significantly in the future.

A few definitions are necessary first, before examining the issue in more depth. Many users’ only direct experience with computers is through their desktop or laptop computers running “basic client applications” such as a web browser, email reader, word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software (the last three together are often called an “office suite”), possibly with additional client applications, and all of these must have a graphical user interface and be supported by an underlying graphical environment. Such computers are often called “client” computers (even if they are not using the technical approach called the “client-server model”). Another term also used is the “desktop”, even if the computer is not on a desk.

The small FLOSS desktop market share should not be surprising, because viable FLOSS client applications only became available in 2002. As a practical matter, client systems must be compatible with the market leader, for example, the office suite must be able to read and write documents in the Microsoft Office formats. Before 2002 the available FLOSS products could not do this well, and thus were unsuitable for most circumstances. Clearly, FLOSS client applications cannot be considered unless they are already available.

One point less understood is that FLOSS operating systems (like GNU/Linux) could not really compete with proprietary operating systems on the client until FLOSS (and not proprietary) basic client applications and environment were available. Clearly, few users can even consider buying a client system without basic client applications, since that system won’t meet their fundamental requirements. There have been proprietary basic client applications for GNU/Linux for several years, but they didn’t really make GNU/Linux viable for client applications. The reason is that a GNU/Linux system combined with proprietary basic client applications still lacks the freedoms and low cost of purely FLOSS systems, and the combination of GNU/Linux plus proprietary client applications has to compete with established proprietary systems which have many more applications available to them. This doesn’t mean that GNU/Linux can’t support proprietary programs; certainly some people will buy proprietary basic client applications, and many people have already decided to buy many other kinds of proprietary applications and run them on a GNU/Linux system. However, few will find that a GNU/Linux system with proprietary basic client applications has an advantage over its competition. After all, the result is still proprietary, and since there are fewer desktop applications of any kind on GNU/Linux, many capabilities have been lost, little has been gained, and the switching costs will dwarf those minute gains. There is also the problem of transition. Many organizations will find it too traumatic to immediately switch all client systems to an FLOSS operating system; it is often much easier to slowly switch to FLOSS basic client applications on the pre-existing proprietary operating system, and then switch operating systems once users are familiar with the basic client applications. Thus, the recent availability of FLOSS basic client applications has suddenly made FLOSS operating systems (like GNU/Linux) far more viable on the client.

First, let’s look at the available market share figures. According to the June 2000 IDC survey of 1999 licenses for client machines, GNU/Linux had 80% as many client shipments in 1999 as Apple’s MacOS (5.0% for Mac OS, 4.1% for GNU/Linux). More recent figures in 2002 suggest that GNU/Linux has 1.7% of the client OS market. Clearly, the market share is small at this early stage. Obviously, while this shows that there are many users (because there are so many client systems), this is still small compared to Microsoft’s effective monopoly on the client OS market. IDC reported that Windows systems (when they are all combined) accounted for 92% of the client operating systems sold.

However, there are many factors that suggest that the situation is changing: FLOSS basic client software is now available, there’s increasing evidence of their effectiveness, Microsoft is raising prices, and organizations (including governments) want open systems:

1. FLOSS basic client software is available. Back in 1997 I forecast that GNU/Linux would be “ready for the desktop” in 2002-2003 (5 years later). My forecast appears correct; FLOSS applications and environments matured in 2002 where they are finally functionally competitive on the client. In 2002, Mozilla finally released version 1.0 of their suite (including a web browser, email reader, and other tools), and the first reasonably usable version of OpenOffice.org, the first practically useful FLOSS office suite, was released in 2002 as well. Desktop environments matured as well; in 2002 both the GNOME and KDE projects released capable, more mature versions of their desktop environments. In addition the WINE product (a product that allows FLOSS systems to run Windows programs) was finally able to run Microsoft Office 97, suggesting that although WINE is still immature, it may be sufficient to run some Windows applications developed internally by some organizations. In 2005, the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email programs were released as a next generation of the Mozilla work.

   There are other plausible alternatives for client applications as well, such as Evolution (an excellent mail reader), Abiword (a lighter-weight but less capable word processor which also released its version 1.0 in 2002), Gnumeric (a spreadsheet), and KOffice (an office suite).

   However, I will emphasize OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird, for two reasons. First, they also run on Microsoft Windows, which makes it much it easier to transition users from competitors (this enables users to migrate a step at a time, instead of making one massive change). Second, they are full-featured, including compatibility with Microsoft’s products; many users want to use fully-featured products since they don’t want to switch programs just to get a certain feature. In short, it looks like there are now several FLOSS products that have begun to rival their proprietary competitors in both usability and in the functionality that people need, including some very capable programs.

2. There is increasing evidence of FLOSS client software effectiveness. The MOXIE study of January 2003 randomly acquired 100 documents from the Internet in the Microsoft Office word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software formats. Their leading FLOSS contender, OpenOffice.org version 1.0.1, did well; it was able to successfully use 97%, 98%, and 94% of the documents (of the respective formats). The study concluded that “the current state of interoperability is reasonably good, although there is significant room for improvement.” Since that time, the OpenOffice.org developers have specifically worked to improve interoperability with Microsoft Office, and it’s reasonable to expect that the figures are significantly higher now.

3. Microsoft has raised its prices. Microsoft is changing many of its practices, resulting in increasing costs to its customers. It has changed its licensing so that one copy of Windows cannot be used for both home and office. Microsoft has switched its largest customers to a subscription-based approach (called “Licensing 6”), greatly increasing the costs to its customers. TIC/Sunbelt Software Microsoft Licensing Survey Results (covering March 2002) reports the impact on customers of this new licensing scheme. 80% had a negative view of the new licensing scheme, noting, for example, that the new costs for software assurance (25% of list for server and 29% of list for clients) are the highest in the industry. Of those who had done a cost analysis, an overwhelming 90% say their costs will increase if they migrate to 6.0, and 76% said their costs would increase from 20% to 300% from what they are paying now under their current 4.0 and 5.0 Microsoft Licensing plans. Indeed, 38% of those surveyed said that they are actively seeking alternatives to Microsoft products. Licensing 6.0 can also significantly harm organizations trying to sell off a part of its operations. The program requires accelerated software maintenance payments when the computers that are covered under the license are sold off - but Microsoft is no longer obligated to provide maintenance even if the contract is fully paid.

   Gartner’s review of Star Office (Sun’s variant of OpenOffice.org) also noted that Microsoft’s recent licensing policies may accelerate moving away from Microsoft. As Gartner notes, “This [new license program] has engendered a lot of resentment among Microsoft’s customers, and Gartner has experienced a marked increase in the number of clients inquiring about alternatives to Microsoft’s Office suite... enterprises are realizing that the majority of their users are consumers or light producers of information, and that these users do not require all of the advanced features of each new version of Office... unless Microsoft makes significant concessions in its new office licensing policies, Sun’s StarOffice will gain at least 10 percent market share at the expense of Microsoft Office by year-end 2004 (0.6 probability).” They also note that “Because of these licensing policies, by year-end 2003, more than 50 percent of enterprises will have an official strategy that mixes versions of office automation products - i.e., between multiple Microsoft Office versions or vendor products (0.7 probability).”

4. Organizations (including governments) want open systems. Organizations, including governments, do not want to be locked into products and services from a single vendor. Multiple vendors mean competition between suppliers, generally driving down costs and increasing quality. See the separate section on governments and FLOSS.

There are some interesting hints that GNU/Linux is already starting to gain on the client. Some organizations, such as TrustCommerce and the city of Largo, Florida, report that they’ve successfully transitioned to using Linux on the desktop.

Many organizations have found a number of useful processes for making this transition practical. Many start by replacing applications (and not the operating system underneath) with FLOSS replacements. For example, they might switch to Mozilla as a web browser and email reader, OpenOffice.org for an office suite. Organizations can also move their infrastructure to web-based solutions that don’t care about the client operating system. Eventually, they can start replacing operating systems (typically to a GNU/Linux distribution), but still using various mechanisms to run Microsoft Windows applications on them. Various products allow users to run Microsoft Windows applications on GNU/Linux, including Windows application servers, Wine, win4lin, VMWare, and so on.

There’s already some evidence that others anticipate this; Richard Thwaite, director of IT for Ford Europe, stated in 2001 that an open source desktop is their goal, and that they expect the industry to eventually go there (he controls 33,000 desktops, so this would not be a trivial move). It could be argued that this is just a ploy for negotiation with Microsoft - but such ploys only work if they’re credible.

There are other sources of information on FLOSS or GNU/Linux for clients. Desktoplinux.com is a web site devoted to the use of GNU/Linux on the desktop; they state that “We believe Linux is ready now for widespread use as a desktop OS, and we have created this website to help spread the word and accelerate the transition to a more open desktop, one that offers greater freedom and choice for both personal and business users.”

Bart Decrem’s Desktop Linux Technology & Market Overview, funded by Mitch Kapor, gives a detailed analysis and prognostication of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Paul Murphy discusses transitioning large companies to Linux and Intel (”Lintel”) on the desktop, and concludes that one of the biggest risks is trying to copy a Windows architecture instead of exploiting the different capabilities GNU/Linux offers.

Indeed, it appears that many users are considering such a transition. ZDNet published survey results on August 22, 2002, which asked “Would your company switch its desktop PCs from Windows to Linux if Windows apps could run on Linux?” Of the more than 15,000 respondents, 58% said they’d switch immediately; another 25% said they’d consider dumping Windows in favor of Linux within a year. While all such surveys must be taken with a grain of salt, still, these are not the kind of responses you would see from users happy with their current situation. They also noted that ZDNet Australia found that 55% of the surveyed IT managers were considering switching from Microsoft products. Most people do not expect that this transition, if it happens, will happen quickly: it is difficult to change that many systems. But the fact that it’s being considered at all is very intriguing. A number of opinion pieces, such as Charlie Demerjian’s “The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft” argue that a major IT industry shift toward FLOSS is already occurring, across the board.

Many analysts believe Microsoft has extended Windows 98 support because it’s worried that Windows 98 users might switch to GNU/Linux.

There are certainly challenges for FLOSS desktops, even though they are successfully used and deployed right now. Software patents (an extremely controversial practice) makes it illegal in some countries to create or use FLOSS implementations of some functions, particularly audio or video display. Digital Rights Management, aka Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), also make it difficult to deploy FLOSS implementations. World Domination 201 discusses some of the challenges to FLOSS on the desktop. Nevertheless, many people are deploying and using FLOSS desktops.

11. Usage Reports

As discussed earlier, the City of Largo, Florida supports 900 city employees using GNU/Linux, saving about $1 million a year. A BusinessWeek online article notes that Mindbridge shifted their 300-employee intranet software company from Microsoft server products and Sun Solaris to GNU/Linux; after experiencing a few minor glitches, their Chief Operating Officer and founder Scott Testa says they now couldn’t be happier, and summarizes that “...we’re saving hundreds of thousands of dollars between support contracts, upgrade contracts, and hardware.” Amazon.com saved millions of dollars by switching to GNU/Linux. Oracle’s Chairman and CEO, Larry Ellison, said that Oracle will switch to GNU/Linux to run the bulk of its business applications no later than summer 2002, replacing three Unix servers. A travel application service provider saved $170,000 in software costs during the first six months of using GNU/Linux (for both servers and the desktop); it also saved on hardware and reported that administration is cheaper too. CRN’s Test Center found that a GNU/Linux-based network (with a server and 5 workstations) cost 93% less in software than a Windows-based network, and found it to be quite capable. The article Linux as a Replacement for Windows 2000 determined that “Red Hat Linux 7.1 can be used as an alternative to Windows 2000... You will be stunned by the bang for the buck that Linux bundled free ‘open source’ software offers.”

Windows to Linux: a corporate success story describe the experience of Amauta, a small Ecuadorian start-up focused on Web applications and network service integration.

"Running only on Open Source Software" is a 2008 article on according to Smartleaf of Cambridge, Mass. They're a small company (around 25 people), but they manage more than $6 billion in others' assets (their product is a financial account management system). According to Ritter, Smartleaf uses open-source software rather than purchasing "closed" proprietary software wherever possible. They said, "Building a Microsoft-based infrastructure to replicate what we do with open source would double the cost of new hires' desktops, and spending a lot more each year in various licensing costs", and since Microsoft Windows' automation tools are poor, using Windows would cause their administration costs to deoubl. They believe "open-source software is more reliable and secure and maintained," though they have not collected the quantitative data to support that.

Educational organizations have found FLOSS software useful. The K12 Linux Terminal Server Project has set up many computer labs in the U.S. Northwest in elementary, middle, and high schools. For example, St. Mary’s School is a 450-student Pre-K through 8th grade school in Rockledge, Florida that applying GNU/Linux using their approach. Their examples show that kids don’t find GNU/Linux that hard to use and quite able to support educational goals. For example, third graders put together simple web pages about their favorite Saints using a variety of FLOSS programs: they logged into GNU/Linux systems, typed the initial content using Mozilla Composer (an FLOSS web page editor), drew pictures of the Saints using The Gimp (an FLOSS drawing program), and shared the results with Windows users using Samba. The page Why should open source software be used in schools? gives various examples of educational organizations who have used FLOSS programs, as well as linking to various general documents on why educational organizations should use FLOSS. The letter from the Kochi Free Software Users’ Group to the Government of Kerala and others also summarizes some of the issues, especially why governments should specify standards (and not products) for educational use. The Faculty Senate of the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, approved a resolution strongly supporting the use of FLOSS instead of proprietary software. The Northwest Educational Technology Consortium has an interest set of information on FLOSS on its website, in the section Making Decisions About Open Source Software (OSS) for K-12.

Many financial organizations use FLOSS. In 2005, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China’s biggest bank, signed an agreement with Turbolinux to integrate Linux across its banking network; this follows a September 2004 announcement by the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) that it would be moving to Linux thin-client terminals based on an optimized Red Hat Linux distribution. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange credits its migration to commodity Intel-based servers and Linux with cutting costs and reducing a critical 100 milliseconds off the time required to complete each trade. Online brokerage E*Trade is moving its computer systems to IBM servers running GNU/Linux, citing cost savings and performance as reasons for switching to GNU/Linux (the same article also notes that clothing retailer L.L. Bean and financial services giant Salomon Smith Barney are switching to GNU/Linux as well). Merrill Lynch is switching to GNU/Linux company-wide, and are hoping to save tens of millions of dollars annually within three to five years. Adam Wiggins reports on TrustCommerce’s successful transition to Linux on the desktop. An April 22, 2002 report on ZDNet, titled “More foreign banks switching to Linux”, stated that New Zealand’s TSB bank “has become the latest institution to adopt the open-source Linux OS. According to reports, the bank is to move all its branches to the Linux platform... in Europe, BP and Banca Commerciale Italiana feature among the big companies that have moved to Linux. According to IBM, as many as 15 banks in central London are running Linux clusters.” They also mentioned that “Korean Air, which now does all its ticketing on Linux, and [motor home] manufacturer Winnebago, are high-profile examples.” The Federal Aviation Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Herndon, Virginia is currently installing a system to support 2,000 concurrent users on Red Hat Linux. The system, known as the National Log, will act as a central clearinghouse database for users in air traffic centers across the country. ComputerWorld reported in October 2002 an increasing use of GNU/Linux on Wall Street - Merrill Lynch reports that a majority of new projects are interested in GNU/Linux, for example, and the article references a TowerGroup (of Needham, MA) estimate that GNU/Linux is currently deployed on 7% of all servers in North American brokerage firms. TowerGroup also forecasts that GNU/Linux use will grow at an annual rate of 22% in the securities server market between 2002 and 2005, outpacing growth in Windows 2000, NT and Unix deployments.

Some organizations are deploying GNU/Linux widely at the point of sale. Many retailer cash registers are switching to GNU/Linux, according to Information Week (”Cash Registers are Ringing up Sales with Linux” by Dan Orzech, December 4, 2000, Issue 815); on September 26, 2002, The Economist noted that “Linux is fast catching on among retailers.” According to Bob Young (founder of Red Hat), BP (the petroleum company) is putting 3,000 Linux servers at gas stations. Zumiez is installing open-source software on the PCs at all its retail locations, and expects that this will cut its technology budget between $250,000 and $500,000 a year; note that this includes using Evolution for email, Mozilla for web browsing (to eliminate the need for printed brochures and training manuals), and an open source spreadsheet program. Sherwin-Williams, the number one U.S. paint maker, plans to convert its computers and cash registers (not including back office support systems) in over 2,500 stores to GNU/Linux and has hired IBM to do the job; this effort involves 9,700 NetVista desktop personal computers,

FLOSS is also prominent in Hollywood. Back in 1996, when GNU/Linux was considered by some to be a risk, Digital Domain used GNU/Linux to generate many images in Titanic. After that, it burst into prominence as many others began using it, so much so that a February 2002 article in IEEE Computer stated that “it is making rapid progress toward becoming the dominant OS in ... motion pictures.” “Shrek” and “Lord of the Rings” used GNU/Linux to power their server farms, and now DreamWorks SKG has switched to using GNU/Linux exclusively on both the front and back ends for rendering its movies. Industrial Light & Magic converted its workstations and render farm to Linux in 2001 while it was working on Star Wars Episode II. They stated that “We thought converting to Linux would be a lot harder than it was” (from their SGI IRIX machines). They also found that the Linux systems are 5 times faster than their old machines, enabling them to produce much higher quality results. They also use Python extensively (an FLOSS language), as well as a number of in-house and proprietary tools. Disney is also shifting to GNU/Linux for film animation.

Many remote imaging systems use GNU/Linux. When a remote imaging system was placed at the North Pole, reporters noted that the Linux mascot was a penguin and announced that Penguins invade the North Pole.

There are many large-scale systems. In October 2002, Chrysler Group announced it’s using a Linux cluster computer for crash simulation testing and analysis in an effort to make safer cars and trucks. Their configuration uses 108 workstations, each with 2 processors, so the system uses 216 computers all running Red Hat Linux, and expect to improve simulation performance by 20% while saving about 40% in costs.

FLOSS is widely used by Internet-based companies. Google uses over 6,000 GNU/Linux servers. Yahoo! is increasing its already-massive use of FLOSS. Yahoo claims it is the “World’s most trafficked Internet destination,” justified based on Nielsen/NetRatings of August 2002. Yahoo had 201 million unique users, 93 million active registered users, over 4500 servers, and over 1.5 billion page views a day. Yahoo noted that FLOSS already runs their business (e.g., Perl, Apache, FreeBSD, and gcc), and they’ve recently decided to move from their proprietary in-house languages to PHP (an FLOSS language). Afilias has switched the registration database for the .org Internet domain from the proprietary Oracle to the FLOSS PostgreSQL database program; .org is the fifth largest top-level domain, with more than 2.4 million registered domain names.

Bloor Research announced in November 2002 that they believe GNU/Linux is ready to support large enterprise applications (i.e., it’s “enterprise ready”). They reached this conclusion after examining its scalability, availability, reliability, security, manageability, flexibility, and server consolidation characteristics, They concluded that “Linux now scales well on Intel hardware, and by taking advantage of [fail-over] extensions from Linux distributors and Grid suppliers, high availability can be achieved. Linux is proven to be reliable, especially for dedicated applications, and its open source nature ensures that it is at least as secure as its rivals.” Only 3 years earlier Bloor had said GNU/Linux wasn’t ready.

Librarians have also found many advantages to FLOSS.

One interesting usage story is the story of James Burgett’s Alameda County Computer Resource Center, one of the largest non-profit computer recycling centers in the United States. Its plant processes 200 tons of equipment a month in its 38,000-square-foot warehouse. It has given thousands of refurbished computers to disadvantaged people all over the world, including as human rights organizations in Guatemala, the hard-up Russian space program, schools, and orphanages. All of the machines have GNU/Linux installed on them.

Indeed, for well-established products like GNU/Linux, very strong cases can be made for considering them. On October 18, 2002, Forrester Research reported that “Linux is now ready for prime time.” They stated that “CIOs have many new reasons to be confident that they’ll get quality Linux support from their largest application vendors and systems integrators,” referencing Amazon, Oracle, Sun, and IBM, among others who have made commitments that increase confidence that GNU/Linux is ready for deployment.

Indeed, these uses are becoming so widespread that Microsoft admits that FLOSS competition may force Microsoft to lower its prices, at least in the server market. Microsoft noted this in its 10-Q quarterly filing, stating that “To the extent the open source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the company’s products may decline, the company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline.”

Summaries of government use in various countries are available from Infoworld and IDG.

Several organizations collect reports of FLOSS use, and these might be useful sources for more information. Linux International has a set of Linux case studies/success stories. Mandriva maintains a site recording the experiences of business users of the Mandrake distribution. Red Hat provides some similar information. Opensource.org includes some case studies.

The Dravis Group LLC published in April 2003 Open Source Software: Case Studies Examining its Use, examining several specific use cases in depth. Their study of several different organizations deploying FLOSS concluded the following:

1. Cost is a significant factor driving adoption of open source software.
2. Control and flexibility are considered benefits as well.
3. Implementation of open solutions is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
4. Open source extends across the entire software stack.
5. Product support is not a significant concern.
6. Open source is not a magic solution.
7. Open standards may be more important than open source.

12. Governments and FLOSS

Practically all governments use FLOSS extensively, some develop FLOSS as well, and many have policies or are considering policies related to FLOSS. Motivations vary; for many governments, the overriding rationale for considering FLOSS is simply to reduce costs. Such governments will still take a variety of other factors into account such as reliability, performance, and so on, just like a commercial firm would do. Some governments may also consider the special privileges granted to them by FLOSS; e.g., there are direct advantages to users if they can examine the source code, modify the software to suit them, or redistribute the software at will.

In contrast, some governments also consider FLOSS as a way of supporting other national policies. Here is a list of some of the other considerations that have been reported by various governments:

1. supporting industrial policy -- a government may choose to support FLOSS to encourage the development of local companies who can train, support, and tailor products. Proprietary software products can only be maintained by a single company, who are often foreign and do not allow the best software jobs to be performed in that country (and only that company can maintain the product).
2. increasing competition / reducing dependence on, or control by, any one company -- a government may wish to prevent any one company from completely controlling the computing infrastructure of the government or its country; this is especially of concern to many if that one company is foreign. This is not necessarily the same as supporting industrial policy; the goal may be to simply support improved competition, foreign or not. After all, the effective monopolies in various software markets can be viewed as a market failure that requires correction. Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace argues that “code is law” -- as computers become increasingly embedded in our world, what their code does, allows, and prohibits controls what we may or may not do in very a powerful way. “If code is law, who are the lawmakers? What values are being embedded in the code? Both questions are fundamentally about sovereignty. Who should be building this [electronic] world, and who should be specifying the values that this world will build into itself?” Governments may be increasingly skeptical of a world where increasingly its laws are rendered irrelevant by the controls of code from a single company. Proprietary vendors can also threaten governments into doing what they want, by threatening to withhold the product from that country -- are only possible because of the monopoly powers granted to proprietary vendors. They can also threaten to pull out of countries, a threat again made stronger because of their monopoly power.
3. security -- many are concerned about the security of software they depend on. Often proprietary products are bought and later found to be full of security vulnerabilities; FLOSS products at least provide governments with the option of detailed review of the source code, and to fix problems themselves without waiting for the vendor. Microsoft does have a “shared source” program for its operating system, allowing governments to look at source code, but this program does not generally permit the worldwide analysis and discussion that FLOSS permits, nor does it permit changes and redistribution by end-users. In many cases, the proprietary vendor is foreign or has foreign developers, which for some governments raises additional concerns -- can the foreign company’s product be trusted? For example, a special key in Microsoft Windows called NSAKEY was identified years ago, and whether or not this was a “back door” into Windows, it did reveal that this was a concern of many governments. Obviously, any developer can make a mistake leading to a security flaw, and a malicious developer could write subversive FLOSS software as well. But many believe the additional (worldwide) transparency provided by FLOSS, and the ability to repair and redistribute FLOSS programs immediately, provides additional protection.
4. record longevity -- FLOSS reveals exactly how data is stored, so that important data is not lost. Governments using proprietary data formats risk loss of critical records if the company folds or stops supporting a particular format, stops supporting a particular version of a format. Unfortunately, this occurs distressingly often.
5. transparency of government data -- FLOSS enables complete review of exactly what is done and what data is stored, so that the public can freely receive that data without being required to buy products from any particular vendor.
6. localization -- FLOSS can also be trivially localized, a critical advantage where there are languages with a smaller number of speakers. With FLOSS, users do not need to convince a vendor to support their language, they can simply add that capability themselves. An interview about OpenOffice.org discusses some of these points.

For example, the United States federal government has a policy of neutrality; they choose proprietary or FLOSS programs simply considering costs and other traditional measures. In contrast, Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez (a Peruvian Congressman) has written a detailed letter explaining in detail he believes it is beneficial (and necessary) for the Peruvian government to prefer FLOSS; his list of rationale was “Free access to public information by the citizen, permanence of public data, and security of the state and citizens” (which are the rationales of transparency, record longevity, and security above).

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has developed detailed analysis of FLOSS policies worldwide, including their 2004 survey of the FLOSS positions of various governments worldwide. The Open Source and Industry Alliance (OSAIA)’s “Roundup of Selected OSS Legislative Activity WorldWide” (aka Policy Tracker) surveys government OSS policies in 2003 and 2004. The widely-cited Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS): Survey and Study includes a great deal of information about public sector use of FLOSS. An older but broad survey was published in 2001 by CNet. More information about governments and FLOSS can be found at the Center of Open Source and Government (eGovOS) web site. The The Norwegian Board of Technology (an independent public think tank) has a global country watch on Open Source policy. The 2002 Brookings Institute’s “Government Policy toward Open Source Software” has a collection of essays about government and FLOSS. Tom Adelstein’s July 2005 article argues that “Major governments outside the United States either have adopted Linux and open-source software or have begun the process that will lead to adoption”; it includes several statistics and examples.

Robin Bloor’s January 2005 article noted that many countries now have a stated policy of a preference for FLOSS; countries where this is the case, in some areas of government IT use, include Bahrain, Belgium, China and Hong Kong, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal, Philippines and South Africa. He also noted that nearly all “governments have R&D projects which are investigating the practicality of Open Source for government use which will, in all probability lead to local policy guidelines at some point which favour open source.” A 2002 New York Times article noted that “More than two dozen countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, including China and Germany, are now encouraging their government agencies to use ‘open source’ software”. Robert Kramer of CompTIA (Computer Technology Industry Association) says that political leaders everywhere from California to Zambia are considering legislating a preference for Open Source software use; he counted at least 70 active proposals for software procurement policies that prefer FLOSS in 24 countries as of October 2002. There are certainly debates on the value of FLOSS preferences (even a few FLOSS advocates like Bruce Perens don’t support mandating a government preference for FLOSS), but clearly this demonstrates significant positive interest in FLOSS from various governments.

Tony Stanco’s presentation “On Open Source Procurement Policies” briefly describes why he believes governments should consider FLOSS. Ralph Nader’s Consumer Project on Technology gives reasons he believes the U.S. government should encourage FLOSS. The paper Linux Adoption in the Public Sector: An Economic Analysis by Hal R. Varian and Carl Shapiro (University of California, Berkeley; 1 December 2003) makes several interesting points about FLOSS. This paper uses some odd terminology, for example, it uses the term “commercial software” where it means “closed source software” (this poor terminology choice makes the paper’s discussion on commercial open source software unnecessarily difficult to understand). But once its terminology is understood, it makes some interesting points. It notes that:

1. “The Linux operating system has achieved a ‘critical mass’ sufficient to assure users that it will be available and improved for years to come, reducing the risk to users and to software developers.
2. ... users adopting Linux are less likely to face “lock-in” than those adopting proprietary platform software, and they retain greater control over their own computing environments. These benefits are especially salient in complex computing environments ... as often occurs in the public sector.
3. Open source software, such as Linux, typically uses open interfaces [that] typically lead to a larger, more robust, and more innovative industry and therefore software with open interfaces should be preferred by public sector officials, as long as it offers comparable quality to proprietary alternatives.
4. Because Linux is open source platform software, adoption of Linux can help spur the development of a country’s software sector, in part by promoting the training of programmers that enables them to develop applications that run on the Linux platform. The adoption of the Linux platform may well promote the economic development of commercial software to run in that environment.
5. Fears that the licensing terms associated with Linux discourage the development of commercial software are misplaced... we expect mixed computing environments involving open source software and commercial software, that employ both open and proprietary interfaces, to flourish in the years ahead.

Governments can also approach FLOSS differently for different circumstances. Governments need software to perform their own tasks, of course. Many governments are trying to increase the availability of computers (to reduce the “digital divide”), and many see FLOSS as a useful way to help do that (e.g., Walter Bender, director of MIT’s Media Lab, has recommended that Brazil install FLOSS on thousands of computers that will be sold to the poor, and not proprietary software; “Free software is far better on the dimensions of cost, power and quality.”). And governments sometimes wish to influence their internal commercial markets to improve their competitiveness. Many militaries are applying FLOSS, for a variety of reasons.

Governmental organizations that choose to switch to FLOSS products can find a variety of documents to aid them. Tom Adelstein has a short article on how to employ FLOSS inside governments (dated January 2005). The International Open Source Network (IOSN) has a great deal of information about FLOSS, and aids developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region in applying FLOSS; they’ve produced documents such as FOSS education primer. IOSN is an initiative of the United Nations (UN) Development Programme’s (UNDP) Asia Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP), and is supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada. The Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) Open Source Migration Guidelines (November 2003) and German KBSt’s Open Source Migration Guide (July 2003) have useful information about such migrations (though both are slightly dated, for example, some of the limitations they note have since been resolved).

It’s also worth noting that there’s a resurging interest by governments to require the use of standards for data storage and data protocols that can be implemented by anyone, without any discrimination against an implementor. This desire is often not connected to FLOSS, and predates the rise of FLOSS in the marketplace. After all, governments have had a strong interest in non-discriminatory standards for decades, simply to prudently conduct business. For example, on on June 27, 2005, Morten Andreas Meyer, the Norwegian Minister of Modernization, announced at a press conference in Oslo that “Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable n communication between citizens and government.” Massachusetts’ Eric Kriss noted that what the state really wants is “open formats”, by which they mean “specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying Open Standard developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body or de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty free, and nondiscriminatory terms.” As they note, governments need to be able to access records 300 years later, and the risk of data loss if they use a proprietary format is very great. But such government goals do dovetail nicely with the use of FLOSS programs; FLOSS programs can implement open standards far more easily than they can implement any secret pre-existing formats, and FLOSS source code aids in documenting a format.

Many countries favor or are considering favoring FLOSS in some way, such as Peru, the UK, and Taiwan. In Venezuela, presidential decree 3,390 establishes that all systems of the public administration should preferentially use FLOSS (libre software); the Ministry of Science and Technology must give the Presidency plans and programs to support this. (see an English translation)

A key issue in most governments is localization (e.g., to a particular locale’s language and other conventions). In proprietary systems, the vendor must typically be convinced to support a given local, or the program will simply be unavailable. In FLOSS, anyone can perform the localization -- and typically such efforts are achieved by many working together. However, there must be an effort to do localization, and in some locales some basic steps must be taken first (e.g., there must be agreed-on words for computer terms). The United Nations Development Programme-Asia Pacific Development’s “Free/Open Source Software: Localization” gives a “broad perspective on the localization of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) for the benefit of policy- and decision-makers in developing countries,” and includes several case studies.

The following sections describe some government actions in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. There is also a section on some attempts or perceived attempts to prevent government consideration of FLOSS. However, this information is by no means complete; this is simply a sample of some of the ongoing activities.

12.1 United States

There are many government users of FLOSS in the United States, and a variety of related policies, studies, and recommendations. This includes departments and agencies of the federal government, as well as state and local governments. Many have advocated additional use or changes in approach. A summary of some of this information is below.

12.1 U.S. - General use and development

First, let's discuss the general use and development of FLOSS in U.S. governments.

The U.S. federal government has a formal policy of neutrality, that is, FLOSS and proprietary software must be considered using the same criteria, as noted in Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memorandum M-04-16 “Software Acquisition” of July 1, 2004. This mirrors the earlier 2003 FLOSS policy of the U.S. Department of Defense, which clearly states that FLOSS and proprietary are both acceptable but must follow the same rules. Both also note that the license requirements for FLOSS are different than proprietary software, so acquirers should make sure they understand the license requirements since they may be different from what they’re used to. The United States’ Federal Enterprise Architecture includes the Technical Reference Model (TRM), and TRM version 1.1 (August 2003) includes both Linux and Apache.

The (U.S.) President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC)’s report, the Recommendations of the Panel on Open Source Software For High End Computing, recommends that the U.S. “Federal government should encourage the development of open source software as an alternate path for software development for high end computing.” See the separate discussion on MITRE Corporation’s business case study of OSS (which emphasized use by the U.S. government, especially the U.S. military).

A NASA technical report describes in detail an approach for NASA to release some of its software as open source software.

The U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) National Technical Alliance, through the National Center for Applied Technology (NCAT) consortium, funded the Open Source Prototype Research (OSPR) project. Under the OSPR project ImageLinks Inc., Tybrin Inc., Kodak Inc., and Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech) performed evaluations of open source software development practices and demonstrated the technological advantages of Open Source Software. The OSPR final report includes those evaluations, a survey, and various related documents; these are actually rather extensive. The final report concludes:

Open Source Software development is a paradigm shift and has enormous potential for addressing government needs. Substantial technology leverage and cost savings can be achieved with this approach. The primary challenge will be in establishing an organizational structure that is able to employ OSS methodology...

Often, some government organization has to build some software to help implement a regulation, and it only makes sense to share that software (instead of every other organization paying to rebuild it). Making the software FLOSS simplifies this kind of sharing. The Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC) is a “voluntary collaboration between public sector entities and non-profit academic institutions. The Collaborative was created for the purpose of encouraging the sharing, at no cost, of computer code, developed for and by government entities where the redistribution of this code is allowed. Government entities, defined as a federal, state or local government, an authority or other sub-national public sector entity of the United States, can join the GOCC as Members.” Another government project, the Component Organization and Registration Environment (CORE), is a “government source for business process and technical components. CORE.GOV is the place to search for and locate a specific component that meets your needs, or to find components you can customize to meet your unique requirements.” The EUROPA - IDABC project has a similar role in Europe.

A 2007 survey found that open source software was gaining traction in the U.S. government. "More than half of all U.S. government executives have rolled out open-source software at their agencies, and 71 percent believe their agency can benefit from open-source software... Fifty-five percent of respondents said their agencies have been involved or are currently involved in an open-source implementation." Other results were that "29 percent of respondents who haven't adopted open-source software plan to do so in the next six to 12 months", "88 percent of those in intelligence agencies said that their agencies can benefit from open source", and "Ninety percent of the respondents who have implemented open-source software said they believe their agency benefits." To be fair, this survey of 218 IT decision-makers in the U.S. government was commissioned by the Federal Open Source Alliance, a group "pushing the use of open-source software in government". The alliance is made up of Intel, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Red Hat. It's worth noting that Intel and HP make money whether or not FLOSS is used.

It's worth noting that some U.S. government agencies have specific processes for FLOSS. For example, NASA has a program for releasing some programs as FLOSS.

Federal Computer Week’s Linux Use Drives Innovation notes that FBI officials started a project that became the Emergency Response Network (ERN), a Linux-based information-sharing system specifically to support emergency responses. Jo Balderas, YHD Software’s chief executive officer, said that by using widely-used FLOSS, “we can deliver fast, easy, cost-effective technology that has successfully addressed many of the information-sharing challenges that are obstacles to homeland security.”

Jim Stogdill is CTO at Gestalt, and his blog "limnthis" discusses FLOSS and government (primarily U.S. government).

The paper Open Source and These United States by C. Justin Seiferth summarizes that:

The Department of Defense can realize significant gains by the formal adoption, support and use of open licensed systems. We can lower costs and improve the quality of our systems and the speed at which they are developed. Open Licensing can improve the morale and retention of Airmen and improve our ability to defend the nation. These benefits are accessible at any point in the acquisition cycle and even benefit deployed and operational systems. Open Licensing can reduce acquisition, development, maintenance and support costs and increased interoperability among our own systems and those of our Allies.

More recently, The U.S. Department of Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has certified Linux distributor Red Hat’s Advanced Server operating system as a “Common Operating Environment” (COE), meaning the server product meets the agency’s software security and interoperability specification.

The U.S. Congress' National Defense Authorization Act (2009) says: "The committee is concerned by the rising costs and decreasing security associated with software development for information technology systems. These rising costs are linked to the increasing complexity of software, which has also resulted in increasing numbers of system vulnerabilities that might be exploited by malicious hackers and potential adversaries. The committee encourages the department to rely more broadly on (open-source software) and establish it as a standard for intra-department software development.".

U.S. state governments have widely used FLOSS too. The Center for Digital Government’s 2003 “Best of the Web” awards named the top 5 state web sites as Utah, Maine, Indiana, Washington, and Arkansas. Four of the five winning state web sites use FLOSS programs to implement their site. The only state in the top five not using FLOSS was Washington - Microsoft’s home state.

Some states, such as Massachusetts, have a formal policy encouraging the use of open standards. It is often easier to deploy FLOSS, if you choose to do so, if you’re already using open standards; it’s much more difficult to change to either a proprietary or FLOSS product if you’re stuck using proprietary standards.

The 2004 report of the California Performance Review, a report from the state of California, urges that “the state should more extensively consider use of open source software#&8221;, stating that FLOSS “can in many cases provide the same functionality as closed source software at a much lower total cost of ownership”.

California’s Air Resources Board (ARB) has had a great deal of experience with FLOSS; their web page on ARB’s Open Source Initiatives provides much more information.

Stanislaus County has saved significant amounts of money through smart migration to FLOSS programs like Linux and JBoss. Richard Robinson, the director of strategic business technology (not the county’s CEO), once worked at Accenture (Anderson Consulting) and has been working hard to identify the county’s needs and meet them. In two years, he’s reduced costs in his department by 30-65% depending on how you measure it. In 2002, 2% of the county’s servers used Linux; by 2004, 25% use Linux, and next year that’s expected to increase to 33%.

12.1.2 Specific Examples of FLOSS Development

Here are some specific examples of U.S. government-developed FLOSS:

1. GNAT (GPL + extensions), an Ada compiler. Original development was funded by the Air Force. GNAT is now commercially supported., The license is, in practice, similar to the LGPL.
2. SELinux (GPL), a major security enhancement to Linux. It is now included in the Linux kernel, so it's primarily supported by the Linux kernel project. Red Hat (and others) deploy it.
3. Expect (public domain), a scripting language. The NIST Expect site and SourceForge Expect site have more information.
4. There's a lot of government-sponsored OSS in the geospatial tools domain. See the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, including the Open Source Software Image Map (OSSIM) project.
5. "Workforce Connections" and EZRO (GPL). Development funded by Dept. of Labor. The contractor who actually developed it is DevIS. There's a nice article about it in the "DoD SoftwareTech News", June 2007, pp. 32-35 by Peter Gallagher.
6. Evergreen, an open source, enterprise-class library management developed by the Georgia Public Library Service. There is a Linux.com article about Evergreen
7. GiG Lite and World Wide Consortium for the Grid (W2COG) are working in this direction.
8. See NASA's FLOSS programs.
9. rVooz (Apache 2.0) "is an Open and collaborative project designed to make dynamic connections between people who with shared context whether geo-spatial, structural, or any other form. rVooz is a software suite designed to make contextual connections, or 'contextions,' between people who may or may not have a priori knowledge of each other. It is designed to bring people together even if they don't have each other in their buddy lists or know each other's phone numbers." Comments on rVooz.
10. Delta3D (LGPL) is a "widely used and well-supported open source game and simulation engine... [it is a] fully-featured game engine appropriate for a wide variety of uses including training, education, visualization, and entertainment. Delta3D is unique because it offers features specifically suited to the Modeling and Simulation and DoD communities such as High Level Architecture (HLA), After Action Review (AAR), large scale terrain support, and SCORM Learning Management System (LMS) integration." You can learn more from the July 2006 issue of JDMS and limnthis.
11. A lot of U.S. government-funded research produces open source software. There's just too much to list. This includes the original TCP/IP suite developed for the BSDs, a key event that enabled the development of the Internet.

Hamel's "Open-Source Collaboration in the Public Sector: The Need for Leadership and Value" examined some FLOSS existing efforts and found (unsurprisingly) that leadership matters. Highlights: "Collaborations with a strong leadership structure, and more importantly a single leader who is persistent, passionate and willing to spend a great deal of time maintaining and improving the organization are much more likely to succeed. Value is also a critical component, and requires that efforts meet the wants and needs of members and clients, whether they be in the form of software, documentation, research or even policy advocacy." Focusing on a few most useful projects is critical: "a conscious effort to focus energy on a small number of projects in early stages may be an important component in creating value for members of collaborative efforts." A FLOSS project requires collaboration to be successful, and collaboration requires that the project gain the trust of potential users/developers; "In this research I found that leadership, face-to-face contact, and the legal framework were the primary factors leading to trust. A willingness and ability to evolve, which may be tied to creating products of value to clients and members, might also be an important factor in developing a successful collaboration." Those statements, at least, seem very sound.

The "Open Technology Development" work produced a roadmap and has a Open Technology web site.

12.2 Europe

The massive Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU (November 20, 2006) summarizes a vast number of economics-related FLOSS statistics. Here are a few of the many interesting conclusions it draws:

1. “FLOSS applications are first, second or third-rung products in terms of market share in several markets”
2. “The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is projected to continue for several more years.”
3. “The existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131.000 real person-years of effort”
4. “Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010.”
5. “Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software... represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue”
6. “FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investment”
7. “Doubling the rate of FLOSS take-up in Europe would result in a software share of investment at 1.5% of GDP, reducing but not closing this investment gap with the US”

The Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) programme is managed by the European Commission, with a mission to “coordinate the establishment of Trans-European telematic networks between administrations.” IDA has developed a vast amount of FLOSS information, including an extraordinary amount of information specific to Europe. IDA’s Open Source Observatory provides a great deal of FLOSS background information, FLOSS news, European FLOSS case studies, FLOSS events (both European and abroad), and other material. IDA also provides The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines to describe how to migrate from proprietary programs to FLOSS programs. The authors state that “There are many reasons for Administrations to migrate to OSS. These include: the need for open standards for e-Government; the level of security that OSS provides; the elimination of forced change; the cost of OSS. All these benefits result in far lower [Information Technology] costs.” Another paper of interest to governments considering FLOSS is Paul Dravis’ “Open Source Software: Perspectives for Development”, developed for the World Bank Group. The Consortium for Open Source in the Public Administration aims to analyze the effects of introducing open data standards and Open Source software for personal productivity and document management in European public administrations.

In 2002 an independent study was published by the European Commission. Titled ”Pooling Open Source Software”, and financed by the Commission’s Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) programme, it recommends creating a clearinghouse to which administrations could “donate” software for re-use. This facility would concentrate on applications specific to the needs of the public sector. More specifically, the study suggests that software developed for and owned by public administrations should be issued under an open source license, and states that sharing software developed for administrations could lead to across-the-board improvements in efficiency of the European public sector.

In October 2002, the European Commission awarded Netproject a pilot contract valued at EUR250,000 to examine deployment of FLOSS in government departments.

It's worth noting that many people believe that Europe and the U.S. tend to approach FLOSS differently. Larry Augustine went to a European conference and outlined what he considered to be major differences in the typical U.S. and European outlooks on FLOSS.

As reported in the Washington Post on November 3, 2002, Luis Millan Vazquez de Miguel, the minister of education, science and technology in a western region of Spain called Extremadura, is heading the launch of a government campaign to convert all the area’s computer systems (in government offices, businesses and homes) from the Windows operating system to GNU/Linux. Vazquez de Miguel said over 10,000 desktop machines have already been switched, with 100,000 more scheduled for conversion in the next year. The regional government paid a local company $180,000 to create a set of freely available software, and invested in a development center that is creating customized software. “So far, the government has produced 150,000 discs with the software, and it is distributing them in schools, electronics stores, community centers and as inserts in newspapers. It has even taken out TV commercials about the benefits of free software.” The Post also discussed some of the reasons some governments are turning to FLOSS. “Among the touchiest issues that Microsoft faces outside the United States is the uneasiness some countries have expressed about allowing an American company to dominate the software industry in their country. ‘Non-U.S. governments in particular view open source as a way to break the stranglehold against Microsoft. If Microsoft owns everything their countries, their own companies can’t get a foothold in the software industry,’ said Ted Schadler, an analyst for Forrester Research Inc.” Some Spanish government systems and those belonging to the telecommunications company Telefonica recently were shifted to Linux partly because of security concerns. In Florence, legislators talked of breaking the ‘the computer science subjection of the Italian state to Microsoft.’ “

Germany intends to increase its use of FLOSS. IBM signed a Linux deal with Germany; Germany’s Interior Minister, Otto Schilly, said the move would help cut costs, improve security in the nation’s computer networks, and lower dependence on any one supplier.

Munich, Germany (the third largest German city) has decided to migrate all of its 14,000 computers in public administration to GNU/Linux and other FLOSS office applications, dropping Microsoft’s Windows in the process. USA Today gives a detailed discussion of how this decision was made. Here’s more information about the Munich approach. The GNU/Linux system bid had a somewhat higher cost than the lowest cost Microsoft bid, but when looking at the details, the claim that Microsoft was lower cost appears misleading -- Microsoft’s bid was significantly different than the GNU/Linux bid. For example, in Microsoft’s bid, the Windows systems wouldn’t be upgraded for 6 years. Who doesn’t upgrade for 6 years? If Munich had agreed to that in 1998, in 2004 they’d still be running only Windows 98 and NT 4.0. Also, in Microsoft’s low bid, many systems would only get the word processor Word, not a full office suite (GNU/Linux systems typically come with complete office application suites at no additional cost, important for people who suddenly need to read presentations and spreadsheets). Also, some have noted that many of the costs for the GNU/Linux approach can be viewed as a “removing Microsoft” cost rather than the cost of using GNU/Linux per se; delaying the switch could have made the cost of switching later even larger due to increased lock-in. It’s likely, however, that this decision was made with a long-term view of many issues, not solely by cost.

In 2003, the “Open Source and Open Source Software for the Dutch government” (OSSOS) program started. By December 2006 the OSSOS program was reporting successes. Ten large municipalities representing 2.7 million individuals, including Amsterdam and The Hague, had signed a manifest. Instead of emphasizing open source software per se, they emphasized four goals: Supplier independence, interoperability, transparency and verifiability, and digital durability. While not flatly forbidding proprietary software, FLOSS meets these criteria better than proprietary software.

In France, the French police are switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, according to the French industry news service Toolinux. More specifically, the group making this switch is the “Gendarmerie Nationale française”, who act as police in the French countryside but are technically part of the French Army. According to the report, by the end of January 2005 about 35,000 PCs and workstations will be to be equipped with the FLOSS office suite; by summer 2005 the number is to reach 80,000. The French police expect to save more than two million euros by switching.

Finnish MPs are encouraging the use of GNU/Linux in government systems.

Statskontoret, the Swedish Agency for Public Management, has performed a feasibility study on free and open source software and came to very positive conclusions (see the report in English or Swedish).

On October 10, 2002, the Danish Board of Technology released a report about the economic potential in using Open Source software in the public administration. The report showed a potential savings of 3.7 billion Danish Kroners (500 million Euros) over four years. A pilot project in the Hanstholm municipality determined that switching the office suite from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org and StarOffice did not increase their number of problems and that each user only needed 1 to 1.5 hours of training to learn the new office suite. The municipality will now use OpenOffice.org and StarOffice on all workplaces (200 in all) and will save 300,000 Danish Kroners (about 40,000 Euros) each year in license fees. They will still use Microsoft Windows as their OS. You may want to see the Danish government’s report on FLOSS.

In July 2002, UK Government published a policy on the use of Open Source Software. This policy had the following points:

1. UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.
2. UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
3. UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.
4. UK Government will consider obtaining full rights to bespoke software code or [customizations] of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software it procures wherever this achieves best value for money.
5. UK Government will explore further the possibilities of using OSS as the default exploitation route for Government funded R&D software.

As follow-on work, the United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) performed “proof of concept” trials of Open Source Software (OSS) in a range of public bodies. In October 2004 summarized its key findings taking into account information from elsewhere. Their Government Open Source Software Trials Final Report is publicly available, and has some very interesting things to say. A brief news article describes the report. The report concludes that:

• Viability of OSS: Open Source software is a viable and credible alternative to proprietary software for infrastructure implementations, and for meeting the requirements of the majority of desktop users;
• Obstacles to implementation: The main obstacles to widespread implementation of Open Source software are: for desktop applications, the current lack of complex functionality which can affect ease of migration and interoperability for some [organizations]; and for business applications, the lack of Open Source products to compete with large-scale proprietary enterprise-level products; no significant obstacles were noted for the adoption of Open Source in infrastructure developments;
• Costs and benefits: Adoption of Open Source software can generate significant savings in hardware and software costs for infrastructure implementation, and reduce the licensing costs and hardware refresh requirements for desktop implementation;
• Lessons learned: Adoption of Open Source, particularly for the desktop, requires investment in planning, training of users, development of skills for implementation and support, and detailed consideration of migration and interoperability issues.

The UK report recommended that public sector bodies should:

1. examine carefully the technical and business case for implementation of Open Source software and the role which OSS could play in current and future projects, working with their outsourced IT providers where appropriate;
2. review the potential for server consolidation, comparing the benefits of OSS with proprietary solutions;
3. consider the potential costs and benefits of migration to an OSS desktop for transaction users, (potentially in conjunction with use of “thin client” architecture solutions);
4. identify the role of open standards in future IS/IT strategy and policy, in conformance with the e-Government Interoperability Framework (eGIF);
5. consider requirements for the development of skills in Open Source development, deployment and operation within the [organization], and review the availability of such skills in their outsourced IT service providers;
6. review their current infrastructure and applications - in collaboration with their outsourced IT providers where relevant - well in advance of any planned procurement or renewal, and determine whether current technologies and IT policies inhibit future choice; and if so consider what steps may be necessary to prevent future “lock in”;
7. consider the benefits of incremental change by diversifying OSS use beyond the server platform to products like Email, LDAP, Web and Internet Browser.

In 2005 the U.K. government announced that it is backing a new initiative called the “Open Source Academy”, which is aimed at promoting the use of open-source software in the public sector (by local UK governments), and providing a forum for those working in the public sector to test and use such software. It is funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) under its e-Innovations investment program. One justification cited for the Open Source Academy was a Dutch study published in January 2005 by the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology, which reported that 32% of local authorities in the U.K. use FLOSS, compared with 71% in France, 68% in Germany, and 55% in the Netherlands. Andy Hopkirk, head of research and development at the National Computing Centre (NCC), wasn’t sure that that the U.K. was “lagging so far behind on open source”, but did admit that “There is a cultural difference between the U.K. and rest of the world -- the U.K. is conservative in the uptake of new things and has a let’s-wait-and-see attitude. There is also the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.” There seems to be a widespread perception that U.K. use is lower not because the software is inappropriate, but because the U.K. local governments are so risk-averse that they cannot seize opportunities when they become available. Thus, the “Open Source Academy” has the goal of ensuring that local authorities know about their alternatives, and it also “provides an opportunity for local authorities to get the resources as well as the time and space to try things out without risking their own infrastructures... It’s a type of sand-pit area.” InfoWorld reported that “Participants in the Open Source Academy are hoping that the program will help the U.K. government catch up with the rest of Europe in implementing open-source software as part of government projects.” More information on the Open Source Academy is available in the eGov monitor and InfoWorld.

12.3 South/Central America

Brazil’s government is planning to switch 300,000 computers to Linux says a January 2005 story; various activists are encouraging such a switch. Indeed, as noted in my Travelogue on the the 6th International Free Software Conference (FISL 6.0) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Brazil is hotbed of FLOSS activity. You can find more information in O Impacto do Software Livre e de Código Aberto na Indústria de Software do Brasil (loosely translated, “The Impact of Free Software and Open Source in the Brazilian Software Industry”)

Peru has contemplated passing a law requiring the use of FLOSS for public administration (government); rationale for doing so, besides saving money, include supporting “Free access to public information by the citizen, Permanence of public data, and the Security of the State and citizens.” Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez (a Peruvian Congressman) has written a detailed letter explaining in detail the rationale for the proposed law and why he believes it is beneficial (and necessary) for the government. In particular, he argues that this is necessary to provide basic guarantees by the government: Free access to public information by the citizen, permanence of public data, and security of the state and citizens. Marc Hedlund written has a brief description of the letter; an English translation is available (from Opensource.org, GNU in Peru, UK’s “The Register”, and Linux Today); there is a longer discussion of this available at Slashdot. Whether or not this law passes, it is an interesting development.

12.4 Other Countries

The Korean government announced that it plans to buy 120,000 copies of Hancom Linux Deluxe this year, enough to switch 23% of its installed base of Microsoft users to open source equivalents; by standardizing on GNU/Linux and HancomOffice, the Korean government expects savings of 80% compared with buying Microsoft products (HancomOffice isn’t FLOSS, but GNU/Linux is). Taiwan is starting a national plan to jump-start the development and use of FLOSS. The The Ministry of Defence in Singapore has installed OpenOffice.org on 5,000 PCs as of November 2004, and is planning to deploy it on a further 15,000 within the next 18 months after that.

Sun Microsystems has announced a deal with China to provide one million Linux desktops, and mentioned that China “has pledged to deploy 200 million copies of open standards-based desktop software”.

South Africa’s government departments are being officially encouraged to stop using (expensive) proprietary software, and to use FLOSS instead. This is according to a January 15, 2003 announcement by Mojalefa Moseki, chief information office with the State Information Technology Agency (Sita). South Africa plans to save 3 billion Rands a year (approximately $338 million USD), increase spending on software that stays in their country, and increase programming skill inside the country. South Africa reports that its small-scale introductions have already saved them 10 million Rands (approximately $1.1 million USD). More information is available at Tectonic (see also South African minister outlines OSS plans). The state of Oregon is considering an FLOSS bill as well. Japan has earmarked 1 billion yen for a project to boost operating systems other than Microsoft Windows - it is expected to be based on FLOSS, particularly Linux, and both South Korea and China are coordinating with Japan on it. In December 2003, Israel’s government suspended purchases of new versions of Microsoft office software and began actively encouraging the development of an open-source alternatives (especially OpenOffice.org). Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam called for his country’s military to use FLOSS to ward off cybersecurity threats; as supreme commander of the Indian armed forces, this is a directive he can implement.

Sri Lanka declared the week beginning September 5, 2005, to be “Free and Open Source Software Week”.

Brendan Scott’s Research Report: Open Source and the IT Trade Deficit of July 2004 found that in just Australia, the costs of just the closed source operating system were causing an Australian trade deficit of $430 million per year.

The Australian Government Information Management Office released in 2005 “A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies”.

More recently, in 2008 the The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report 2008 was published, which is an excellent summary (including many quantitative figures) of the state of FLOSS in Australia. In April 2008, Kate Lundy (Labor's ACT senator) publicly noted that Australian IT developers are being stifled by the dominance of US software companies that hold on to government business through vendor lock-in, claiming that it is "a market failure resulting in very little competitive tension, and very little innovation... the money spent on licence fees is effectively dead money because it's not going into innovation." Senator Lundy said departments should look at the annual cost of fees for the right to use software and consider whether the money might be better spent on developing products based on open standards; "then agencies can look at creating a more competitive environment that allows open-source software to compete, based on open standards."

The Canadian Association for Open Source is actively involved in Canadian policy issues, working “to protect the right of the owners of digital technology to make their own software choices, and further to seek to remove any legal or other barriers that would favour non-FLOSS software over FLOSS.”

There have been many discussions about the advantages of FLOSS in less developed countries. Heinz and Heinz argue in their paper Proprietary Software and Less-Developed Countries - The Argentine Case that the way proprietary software is brought to market has deep and perverse negative consequences regarding the chances of growth for less developed countries. Danny Yee’s Free Software as Appropriate Technology argues that Free Software is an appropriate technology for developing countries, using simple but clear analogies. Free as in Education: Significance of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software for Developing Countries, commissioned by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, examines the significance of FLOSS and related concepts for developing countries. The non-governmental organizations OneWorld Finland and the Service Centre for Development Cooperation (KEPA) maintain the FLOSS for Development website, which identifies other analyses of FLOSS to support their goal, “To find out if and how Free/Libre and Open Source software is useful for developing countries in their efforts to achieve overall development, including bridging the digital divide.”

12.5 Countering Government Use of FLOSS

Many proprietary companies compete with FLOSS products. The rise of competition in IT markets, particularly in places where there hadn’t been competition before, has had the general beneficial effect of lowering the costs of software to governments. Even simply threatening to use a different supplier is often enough to gain concessions from all vendors, and since governments are large customers, they often gain large concessions. And of course all companies work to provide information on their products that puts them in the best possible light. Competing in terms of technical capabilities, cost, support, and so on is a normal part of government acquisition, and not further considered here.

However, there have been some efforts (or at least perceived efforts) to prevent government use of FLOSS, or forbid use of the most common FLOSS license (the GPL). Generally these efforts have not had much success.

As described in “Geek activism” forces Congress to reconsider Open Source, in 2002 a letter from the U.S. Congress unrelated to FLOSS was modified by Representative Adam Smith from Washington state. Smith’s largest campaign donation source is Microsoft Corporation. The modifications added statements strongly discouraging the use of the GPL. The letter was originally signed by 67 Congressmen, but as an Associated Press piece notes, “Smith’s attack on open-source drew an angry response from one of the original authors of the letter, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on technology and procurement policy. “We had no knowledge about that letter that twisted this position into a debate over the open source GPL issues,” said Melissa Wojciak, staff director of the subcommittee. Wojciak added that Davis supports government funding of open-source projects.” At the end, “Many staffers of the 67 Congressman who signed are now claiming they didn’t know what they were signing and the letter has been withdrawn.” Information Week also picked up the story. Also in 2002, the Washington Post reported in 2002 that there had been an aggressive lobbying effort to squelch use of FLOSS in the the U.S. Department of Defense. The effort didn’t work; the DoD released an official policy of neutrality.

So many governments have begun officially requiring that FLOSS options be considered, or enacting preferences for FLOSS, that Microsoft has sponsored an organization called the Initiative for Software Choice. Many observers believe the real purpose of this organization is to prevent governments from considering the advantages or disadvantages of a software license when they procure software, to prevent governments from requiring consideration of FLOSS products, and to encourage the use of standards that inhibit the use of FLOSS. Indeed, Microsoft has invested large sums of money to lobby against FLOSS, according to CIO magazine.

An opposing group, founded by Bruce Perens, is SincereChoice.org, which advocates that there be a “fair, competitive market for computer software, both proprietary and Open Source.” Bruce Perens has published an article discussing why he believes “Software Choice” is not what it first appears to be.

This doesn’t mean that governments always choose FLOSS; quite the contrary. Indeed, most governments are quite conservative in their application of FLOSS implementations. Articles such as Linux in Government: In Spite of Endorsements, Government Linux Projects Still Treading Water and Not So Fast, Linux discuss some of the roadblocks and reasons governments don’t use FLOSS in various situations.

Interestingly, FLOSS has forced Microsoft to be more open with its code to various governments. Bloomberg’s January 14, 2003 article “Microsoft Has New Plan to Share Code With Government” announces that Microsoft Corporation “will expand sharing of the code underlying its Windows programs to help governments and agencies such as Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) improve computer security.” It notes that “Microsoft is facing competition from the Linux operating system, which lets customers view and modify its source code. In the government sector in particular, Microsoft has lost contracts to Linux, analysts said. More than 20 countries are looking at legislative proposals that mandate considering or using Linux in government computers... [and Microsoft has] begun to make the code available to governments, as well as key customers and partners, in an effort to compete with Linux.”

13. Other Information

Here are some other related information sources:

1. There are several general information sites about FLOSS or Unix that might be of interest, such as the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Open Source Initiative website, and the Linux.org site. George Mason University’s Exploring and Collecting History Online (ECHO) project has a useful collection in its material on A Free and Open History of Free and Open Source Software, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Free / Open Source Research Community website also maintains a useful collection of research papers. An older paper is John Kirch’s paper, Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX. ( also archived at the Internet Archives). The book The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond examines FLOSS development processes and issues. A useful collection of many FLOSS writings, including the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is in the Open Source Reader. Peter Wayner’s book Free For All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-tech Titans describes the history and rise of FLOSS, and includes interviews with many key leaders; the book can be either downloaded electronically without fee or purchased as a hardcover book. Ganesh C. Prasad has published The Practical Manager’s Guide to Linux. Dan Kegel’s “The Case for Linux in Universities” discusses why students need exposure to GNU/Linux at universities (and thus why universities should support and encourage this). The paper Our Open Source / Free Software Future: It’s Just a Matter of Time argues that within the next few years, the standard de-facto OS that nearly everyone uses, as well as much of the commodity software in widespread use, will be FLOSS. You can see a collection of general information about FLOSS at my web page listing FLOSS references.
2. MITRE Corporation has examined the application of FLOSS to military systems. Their July 2001 report, A Business Case Study of Open Source Software, concludes that “open source methods and products are well worth considering seriously in a wide range of government applications, particularly if they are applied with care and a solid understanding of the risks they entail. OSS encourages significant software development and code re-use, can provide important economic benefits, and has the potential for especially large direct and indirect cost savings for military systems that require large deployments of costly software products.” They also recommend following the following steps to determine whether to use OSS or proprietary products: assess the supporting OSS developer community, examine the market, conduct a specific analysis of benefits and risks, compare the long-term costs, and choose your strategy. MITRE has received a Leadership Award from the non-profit Potomac Forum for showing that OSS can provide substantial advantages over proprietary software, particularly when reliability and long-term support are key requirements.

   After that, in the Washington Post article Open-source Fight Flares at Pentagon, it was reported that “Microsoft Corp. is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant, according to officials familiar with the campaign...” But the effort backfired.

   MITRE Corporation report, presumably in response to such efforts, prepared a second report at the request of the Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). The report was titled “Use of Free and Open Source Software in the US Dept. of Defense” and was originally dated May 10, 2002, publicly released on October 28, 2002, and was updated slightly in 2003. This report concluded that FLOSS use in the DoD is widespread and should be expanded. This MITRE report concluded that “banning [FLOSS] would have immediate, broad, and strongly negative impacts on the ability of many sensitive and security-focused DoD groups to defend against cyberattacks.” The report also found that the GPL so dominates in DoD applications that a ban on just the GPL would have the same strongly negative impacts as banning all FLOSS. MITRE noted that FLOSS “plays a far more critical role in the DoD than has been generally recognized.” In a two-week survey period MITRE identified a total of 115 FOSS applications and 251 examples of their use. MITRE concluded that “Neither the survey nor the analysis supports the premise that banning or seriously restricting [FLOSS] would benefit DoD security or defensive capabilities. To the contrary, the combination of an ambiguous status and largely ungrounded fears that it cannot be used with other types of software are keeping [FLOSS] from reaching optimal levels of use.” It short, MITRE found that FLOSS is widely used, and should be even more widely used. On May 28, 2003, the DoD issued a formal memo placing FLOSS on a level playing field with proprietary software (titled simply “Open Source Software (OSS) in the DoD” ), without imposing any additional barriers beyond those already leveled on its software.

   The Post article also noted that “at the Census Bureau, programmers used open-source software to launch a Web site for obtaining federal statistics for $47,000, bureau officials said. It would have cost $358,000 if proprietary software were used.”

3. The European Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS): Survey and Study is a large multi-part report examining FLOSS from a number of different vantage points. The report is divided into the following (besides its summary and raw data):
   • Part I: Use of Open Source Software in Firms and Public Institutions,
   • Part II: Firms’ Open Source Activities: Motivations and Policy Implications
   • Part II B: Open Source Software in the Public Sector: Policy within the European Union
   • Part III: Basics of Open Source Software Markets and Business Models
   • Part IV: Survey of Developers
   • Part V: Source Code Survey
4. Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) released in 2004 the large paper Open Source: Open for Business reporting many advantages to employing FLOSS.
5. Microsoft has been trying to claim that open source is somehow dangerous, and indeed is its leading critic, yet the Wall Street Journal’s Lee Gomes found that “Microsoft Uses Open-Source Code Despite Denying Use of such Software.” Here are some interesting quotes from his article:

   ... But Microsoft’s statements Friday suggest the company has itself been taking advantage of the very technology it has insisted would bring dire consequences to others. “I am appalled at the way Microsoft bashes open source on the one hand, while depending on it for its business on the other,” said Marshall Kirk McKusick, a leader of the FreeBSD development team.

   More recently Microsoft has targeted the GPL license rather than all FLOSS licenses, claiming that the GPL is somehow anti-commercial. But this claim lacks evidence, given the many commercial companies (e.g., IBM, Sun, and Red Hat) who are using the GPL. Also, see this paper’s earlier note that Microsoft itself makes money by selling a product with GPL’ed components. The same article closes with this statement:

   In its campaign against open-source, Microsoft has been unable to come up with examples of companies being harmed by it. One reason, said Eric von Hippel, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who heads up a research effort in the field, is that virtually all the available evidence suggests that open source is “a huge advantage” to companies. “They are able to build on a common standard that is not owned by anyone,” he said. “With Windows, Microsoft owns them.”

   (Eric von Hippel gave an interview in 2008.) Other related articles include Bruce Peren’s comments, Ganesh Prasad’s How Does the Capitalist View Open Source?, and the open letter Free Software Leaders Stand Together.
6. Indeed, many who have analyzed general information technology (IT) trends or Microsoft’s actions have concluded that strongly depending on Microsoft’s products is now a dangerous strategy. 2003 And Beyond by Andrew Grygus examines the IT industry from a small business point of view, and identifies a large number of dangers from depending on a Microsoft-based infrastructure. Fundamentally, Microsoft is working hard to increase customer dependency, and charges exorbitantly once the customer cannot practically switch.
7. Microsoft inadvertently advocated FLOSS in leaked documents called the ”Halloween” documents. The original first two Halloween documents found that FLOSS was far more effective than they wished to admit. Halloween 7 gives results of one of their surveys, again, with many positive comments about FLOSS.
8. Another leaked internal Microsoft document is Converting a UNIX .COM Site to Windows (by David Brooks). This document describes lessons learned when converting Hotmail from the FLOSS FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows after Microsoft purchased Hotmail, including advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and ends up identifying a large number of advantages of their competition. For example, it noted that “entrepreneurs in the startup world are generally familiar with one version of UNIX (usually through college education), and training in one easily converts to another.” An article in The Register summarizes many of the advantages of the Unix approach given in the paper.
9. Several documents were written to counter Microsoft’s statements such as those in Microsoft’s “Linux Myths”. This includes LWN’s response and Jamin Philip Gray’s response, and the FUD-counter site. The shared source page argues that Microsoft’s “shared source” idea is inferior to open source. Richard Stallman’s The GNU GPL and the American Way counters the amusing claim by Microsoft that the GPL was “un-American.” The letter Free Software Leaders Stand Together argues against the statements by Craig Mundie. You can find many general sites about Microsoft, including Cloweth’s site.
10. In a story full of ironies, in 2002 Microsoft and Unisys teamed up in a well-funded marketing campaign against Unix, in part to try to revive Unisys’ sagging sales of Windows-based products. The 18-month, $25 million campaign, dubbed “We have the Way Out,” specifically attacked the Unix offerings of Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, but since the major FLOSS OSes are Unix or Unix-like, it attacks them as well. In a delicious irony, it was revealed that the anti-Unix campaign website is powered by Unix software - in this case, FreeBSD (an FLOSS version of Unix) and the FLOSS Web server Apache. Once this was publicly revealed, Microsoft and Unisys quickly switched to a Windows-based system.. and then the website failed to operate at all for several days. If that wasn’t enough, Andrew Orlowski reported in The Register a further analysis of this website, noting that port 3306 was open on their website - a port primarily used by MySQL and Postgres. In other words, it appears that their anti-Unix site was still using FLOSS software (not Microsoft’s own database) that is primarily deployed on Unix-like systems. Even their original imagery turns out to have had serious problems; the campaign’s original graphic showed a floor almost wholly covered in mauve paint (Sun Microsystem’s color), and the alternative offered was to jump through a window. Many literate readers will recognize this symbol (the act of throwing out through, or of being thrown out of, a window) as defenestration, a way of killing rulers and also a popular way of inviting kings to commit suicide in 17th century Europe. In other words, this imagery suggests that you should use the window[s] to commit suicide (!). Leon Brooks then analyzed the site further - and found that the “way out” site used JSP (a technology fathered by Sun, Unix specialists). He also found that the site violated many standards; the site’s content failed the W3C validation suites (Microsoft is a member of the W3C), and uses a Windows-only character set that is not only non-standard, but actively conflicts with an important international standard (and ironically one which Microsoft is actively promoting). If using only Windows is so wonderful, why can’t the advocacy site conform to international standards? The real problem here, of course, is that trying to convince people that Unix is to be avoided at all costs - while using Unix and then having serious problems when trying to use an alternative - is both ironic and somewhat hypocritical.

    But by August 2004, Unisys decided to adopt Linux on its ES7000 Intel processor-based servers, responding to customer demand. In a 2005 interview, Unisys’ Steve Rawsthorn admitted “Not having Linux in our kitbag precluded us from some bids... It got to the point we were being asked for it [Linux], and we had to do it.”

11. “How Big Blue Fell For Linux” is an article on how IBM transitioned to becoming a major backer. IBM announced that it planned to invest $1 Billion in GNU/Linux in 2001 all by itself (see the IBM annual report). In 2002 IBM reported that they had already made almost all of the money back; I and others are a little skeptical of these claims, but it’s clear that IBM has significantly invested in GNU/Linux and seem to be pleased with the results (for an example, see their Linux-only mainframe). This is not just a friendly gesture, of course; companies like IBM view FLOSS software as a competitive advantage, because FLOSS frees them from control by another organization, and it also enables customers to switch to IBM products and services (who were formerly locked into competitor’s products). Thankfully, this is a good deal for consumers too. In 2002, IBM had 250 employees working full time to improve Linux.
12. For a scientifically unworthy but really funny look at what people who use the various OSes say, take a look at the Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter. It counts how many web pages make statements like “Linux rocks”. It’s really barely an opinion poll, but if nothing else it’s great for a laugh.
13. There have been several academic studies of FLOSS. Stefan Koch maintains a Free/Open Source Software Academic Bibliography which has pointers to many. One academic study is “A Framework for Open Source Projects” (a Master Thesis in Computer Science by Gregor J. Rothfuss) describes a framework for describing Open Source projects, introducing notions of actors, roles, areas, processes and tools, and depicts their interrelationships. The goal was to provide a conceptual foundation and a help for organizing and managing Open Source projects.
14. Several studies examine developers (instead of the programs they write), including “A Quantitative Profile of a Community of Open Source Linux Developers”, Herman, Hertel and Niedner’s study (based on questionnaires), and the Who Is Doing It (WIDI) study. The European Free/Libre and Open Source Software Survey (FLOSS) has a large amount of information on developers. The paper Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla examines two major open source projects, the Apache web server and the Mozilla browser, and using archives (such as source code change history and problem reports) they quantify aspects of developer participation, core team size, code ownership, productivity, defect density, and problem resolution intervals for these projects. The Boston Consulting Group/OSDN Hacker Survey (release 0.73, July 21, 2002) made some interesting observations by sampling SourceForge users. For example, it gives evidence that open source developers can be divided into four groups (based on their motivations for writing FLOSS software):
    1. Believers (19%): believe source code should be open.
    2. Learning and Fun (29%): for non-work needs and intellectual stimulation.
    3. Hobbyists (27%): need the code for a non-work reason.
    4. Professionals (25%): for work needs and professional status.
    Journalists sometimes like to romanticize FLOSS developers as being mostly teenage boys with little experience, but the survey didn’t support that view. Young people doing important development is certainly a great story, and it certainly happens. For example, 13-year-old Elizabeth Garbee will give a presentation on extending Tuxracer. But the study found that the open source developers surveyed are mostly experienced professionals, having an average of 11 years of programming experience; the average age was 28.

    The paper “Altruistic individuals, selfish firms? The structure of motivation in Open Source Software” by Andrea Bonaccorsi and Cristina Rossi (First Monday, January 2004) discusses a 2002 survey of 146 Italian firms supplying FLOSS, and compared that with surveys of individual programmers. It found significant differences between motivations of individuals and firms, with firms emphasizing economic and technological reasons. The top reasons (in order) of FLOSS-supplying firms were (1) because OSS allows small enterprises to afford innovation, (2) because contributions and feedback from the Free Software community are very useful in fixing bugs and improving software, (3) because of the reliability and quality of OSS, (4) because the firm wants to be independent of the price and licence policies of large software companies, and (5) because we agree with the values of the Free Software movement.

15. If you determine that you wish to start an FLOSS project, there are some documents available to aid you. This includes the Free Software Project Management HOWTO and Software Release Practice HOWTO. You should also read The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
16. Other evaluations include the Gartner Group and GNet evaluations.

For general information on FLOSS, see my list of Open Source Software / Free Software (FLOSS) references at http://dwheeler.com/oss_fs_refs.html

14. Conclusions

FLOSS has significant market share in many markets, is often the most reliable software, and in many cases has the best performance. FLOSS scales, both in problem size and project size. FLOSS software often has far better security, perhaps due to the possibility of worldwide review. Total cost of ownership for FLOSS is often far less than proprietary software, especially as the number of platforms increases. These statements are not merely opinions; these effects can be shown quantitatively, using a wide variety of measures. This doesn’t even consider other issues that are hard to measure, such as freedom from control by a single source, freedom from licensing management (with its accompanying risk of audit and litigation), Organizations can transition to FLOSS in part or in stages, which for many is a far more practical transition approach.

Realizing these potential FLOSS benefits may require approaching problems in a different way. This might include using thin clients, deploying a solution by adding a feature to an FLOSS product, and understanding the differences between the proprietary and FLOSS models. Acquisition processes may need to change to include specifically identifying FLOSS alternatives, since simply putting out a “request for proposal” may not yield all the viable candidates. FLOSS products are not the best technical choice in all cases, of course; even organizations which strongly prefer FLOSS generally have some sort of waiver process for proprietary programs. However, it’s clear that considering FLOSS alternatives can be beneficial.

Of course, before deploying any program you need to evaluate how well it meets your needs, and some organizations do not know how to evaluate FLOSS programs. If this describes your circumstance, you may wish to look at the companion articles How to Evaluate FLOSS Programs and the Generally Recognized as Mature (GRAM) list.

This paper cannot possibly list all the possible FLOSS programs that may be of interest to you. However, users of Windows who are looking for desktop software often try programs such as OpenOffice.org (FLOSS office suite), Firefox (FLOSS web browser), and Thunderbird (FLOSS mail browser). Projects like The OpenDisc project (formerly The OpenCD project) create CDs or DVDs that include those (and other) FLOSS programs for Windows with nice installers and so on. Many FLOSS programs aren’t available for Windows, though, or do not work as well on Windows. Those interested in trying out GNU/Linux operating system often start with a simple CD that doesn’t touch their hard drive, such as Gnoppix or Knoppix. They then move on to various Linux distributions such as Red Hat (inexpensive Fedora Core or professionally-supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Novell/SuSE, Mandriva (formerly MandrakeSoft), or Ubuntu (nontechnical users may also be interested in pay-per-month distributions like Linspire, while technically knowledgeable users may be interested in distributions like Debian).

FLOSS options should be carefully considered any time software or computer hardware is needed. Organizations should ensure that their policies encourage, and not discourage, examining FLOSS approaches when they need software.

Appendix A. About Open Source Software / Free Software (FLOSS)

This appendix gives more information about open source software / free software (FLOSS): definitions related to FLOSS, (of source code, free software, open source software, and various movements), motivations of developers and developing companies, history, license types, FLOSS project management approaches, and forking.

A.1 Definitions

There are official definitions for the terms “Free Software” (as the term is used in this text) and “open source software”. However, understanding a few fundamentals about computer software is necessary before these definitions make sense. Software developers create computer programs by writing text, called “source code,” in a specialized language. This source code is often mechanically translated into a format that the computer can run. As long as the program doesn’t need to be changed (say, to support new requirements or be used on a newer computer), users don’t necessarily need the source code. However, changing what the program does usually requires possession and permission to change the source code. In other words, whoever legally controls the source code controls what the program can and cannot do. Users without source code often cannot have the program changed to do what they want or have it ported to a different kind of computer.

The next two sections give the official definitions of Free Software and Open Source Software (though in practice, the two definitions are essentially the same thing); I then discuss some related definitions, and contrast the terms “Free Software” and “Open Source Software”.

A.1.1 Definition of Free Software

FLOSS programs have existed since digital computers were invented, but beginning in the 1980s, people began to try capture the concept in words. The two main definitions used are the “free software definition” (for free software) and the “open source definition” (for open source software). Software meeting one definition usually meets the other as well. Since the term “free software” came first, we’ll examine its definition first.

The Free Software Definition is published by Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation. Here is the key text of that definition:

“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission. You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way. The freedom to use a program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job, and without being required to communicate subsequently with the developer or any other specific entity.

The text defining “free software” is actually much longer, explaining further the approach. It notes that “Free software does not mean non-commercial. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important.”

Many people emphasize the freedom to choose between software applications, but there’s also been a lot of discussion noting that when one person makes a choice, it can often reduce the freedom of others to make choices. Editorial: The fifth freedom gives one perspective on this.

A.1.2 The Open Source Definition

Open source software is officially defined by the open source definition:

Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of “patch files” with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

7. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program’s being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program’s license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.

9. The License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

10. No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

A.1.3 Other Related Definitions and License Issues

The Open Source Definition was actually derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG); those original guidelines are still maintained and used by the widely-used and influential Debian project. Thus, the Debian guidelines are nearly identical to the Open Source Definition, yet Debian tends to use the term “Free Software” in its materials.

In addition, the debian-legal mailing list discusses licensing issues in great depth, in an effort to evaluate licenses based on the freedoms they grant or do not grant. The DFSG and Software License FAQ states that “The DFSG is not a contract. This means that if you think you’ve found a loophole in the DFSG then you don’t quite understand how this works. The DFSG is a potentially imperfect attempt to express what free software means to Debian.”

The DFSG and Software License FAQ also defines three additional “tests” used on the debian-legal mailing list to help them evaluate whether or not a license is “Free” (as in freedom). These tests aren’t the final word, but because they’re described as scenarios, they are sometimes easier for people to understand (and I quote the Debian FAQ here):

1. The Desert Island test. Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be Free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.
2. The Dissident test. Consider a dissident in a totalitarian state who wishes to share a modified bit of software with fellow dissidents, but does not wish to reveal the identity of the modifier, or directly reveal the modifications themselves, or even possession of the program, to the government. Any requirement for sending source modifications to anyone other than the recipient of the modified binary - in fact any forced distribution at all, beyond giving source to those who receive a copy of the binary - would put the dissident in danger. For Debian to consider software Free it must not require any such excess distribution.
3. The Tentacles of Evil test. Imagine that the author is hired by a large evil corporation and, now in their thrall, attempts to do the worst to the users of the program: to make their lives miserable, to make them stop using the program, to expose them to legal liability, to make the program non-Free, to discover their secrets, etc. The same can happen to a corporation bought out by a larger corporation bent on destroying Free software in order to maintain its monopoly and extend its evil empire. The license cannot allow even the author to take away the required freedoms!

And there are practical issues that arise too:

1. GPL compatibility is very desirable. The GPL is by far the most popular FLOSS license. Thus, an FLOSS license that isn’t compatible with the GPL causes many practical problems, because the vast amount of GPL software can’t be combined with it. Indeed, if a specification cannot be implemented by software released under the GPL, it essentially discriminates against FLOSS business models in general because so much FLOSS is released under the GPL. Choosing a GPL-compatible license (such as the BSD-new, MIT/X, LGPL, or GPL license) is often the safest course. See my paper for more information on why selecting a GPL-compatible license is important for FLOSS projects.
2. Having many FLOSS licenses (”license proliferation”) is undesirable. Bruce Perens’ article “The Open Source Definition” explained back in 1999 that “Do not write a new license if it is possible to use one of [small set of common licenses listed in the paper]. The propagation of many different and incompatible licenses works to the detriment of Open Source software because fragments of one program cannot be used in another program with an incompatible license.” New licenses also make it hard for customers and developers to understand what their requirements are. More recently, there have been increasingly active steps to discourage creating new FLOSS licenses (which are typically corporate vanity licenses), instead of using one of a small set of licenses that are already in wide use. For more information, see comments by Danese Cooper (Intel and secretary/treasurer for the Open Source Initiative (OSI)) and Chris DiBona (Google), as well as the article “HP exec calls for fewer open-source licenses” by Robert McMillan (ComputerWorld, August 6, 2004).
3. Choice-of-law and choice-of-venue requirements are very undesirable. Many developers strongly object to licenses that specify that the licensee must agree to be judged by the laws of a specific jurisdiction and/or be judged at a specific location. This was a key problem, for example, for the older Python licenses. The problem is that choice-of-law and choice-of-venue requirements create superfluous incompatibilities with any other licenses with choice-of-law and/or choice-of-venue restrictions (which would, in practice, always be different from each other). A goal of FLOSS licenses is to allow software to be combined and modified in new, innovative ways, and such statements interfere with that goal.
4. Advertizing clauses are very undesirable. Some old licenses, like the old BSD license, required that credit be given to developers in certain ways, e.g., whenever a product is advertized. When there’s only one developer, that doesn’t sound too bad. But imagine what happens as more developers get involved -- suddenly each advertisement has to individually list (say) 20,000 people! These kinds of licenses don’t scale well as more people become involved, and major FLOSS projects can involve large numbers of developers. Crediting developers in the source code is very common practice, of course, but that’s not the same thing.

A technical discussion examining the freedom of a license might compare the license against the Free Software Definition (all four freedoms), the Open Source Definition (every point) and/or the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the tests (scenarios) above, as well as considering practical concerns like the ones above. An example of such analysis is Mark Shewmaker’s August 2004 examination of the Microsoft Royalty Free Sender ID Patent License.

A.1.4 Open Source Movement and Free Software Movement

As a practical matter, the definitions given above for free software and open source software are essentially the same. Software meeting the criteria for one generally end up meeting the other definition as well; indeed, those who established the term “open source” describe their approach as marketing approach to Free Software. However, to some people, the connotations and motives are different between the two terms.

Some people who prefer to use the term “free software” intend to emphasize that software should always meet such criteria for ethical, moral, or social reasons, emphasizing that these should be the rights of every software user. Such people may identify themselves as members of the “free software movement”. Richard Stallman is a leader of this group; his arguments are given in his article Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”

Some people are not persuaded by these arguments, or may believe the arguments but do not think that they are effective arguments for convincing others. Instead, they prefer to argue the value of FLOSS on other grounds, such as cost, security, or reliability. Many of these people will prefer to use the term “open source software”, and some may identify themselves as part of the “open source movement”. Eric Raymond was one of the original instigators of the name “open source” and is widely regarded as a leader of this group.

Is the “free software movement” a subset of the “open source movement”? That depends on how the “open source movement” is defined. If the “open source movement” is a general term describing anyone who supports OSS or FS for whatever reason, then the “free software movement” is indeed a subset of the “open source movement”. However, some leaders of the open source movement (such as Eric Raymond) specifically recommend not discussing user freedoms, and since this is the central principle of the free software movement, the two movements are considered separate groups by many.

The Free/Libre and Open Source Software Survey (FLOSS), part IV, summarizes a survey of FLOSS developers (primarily European developers), and specifically examined these terms. In this study, 48.0% identified themselves as part of the “Free Software”, community, 32.6% identified themselves as part of the “open source” community, and 13.4% stated that they did not care. A slight majority (52.9%) claimed that the movements different in principle, but the work is the same, while 29.7% argued that the movements were fundamentally different, and 17.3% do not care at all about the differences. After examining the data, the surveyors determined that FLOSS developers could be divided into six groups:

1. developers who assign themselves to the Free Software community and who see fundamental differences between the two communities (18%).
2. developers who consider themselves as part of the Open Source community and who perceive fundamental differences between the two communities (9%).
3. developers who assign themselves to the Free Software community and who perceive only principle differences between the two communities, but consider work in the two communities the same (26%).
4. developers who assign themselves to the Open Source community and see principle, but no fundamental differences between the two communities (17%).
5. developers who assign themselves to either the Free Software or the Open Source Software community, but are not bothered by differences between the two communities (9%).
6. developers who do not care to which community they belong (20%).

This difference in terminology and motivation can make it more difficult for authors of articles on FLOSS (like this one). The motivations of the different movements may be different, but since practice the developers usually work together, it’s very useful to have a common term that covers all groups. Some authors choose to use one of the terms (such as OSS). Other authors use some other term merging the two motivations, but as of this time there is no single merged term used by everyone. This article uses the merged term FLOSS.

A.2 Motivations

This leads to a more general and oft-asked question: “Why do developers contribute to FLOSS projects?” The short answer is that there are many different motivations.

The Boston Consulting Group/OSDN Hacker Survey (release 0.73, July 21, 2002) made some interesting observations by sampling SourceForge users. The top motivations given for participating in FLOSS development were as follows:

1. intellectually stimulating (44.9%)
2. improves skill (41.3%)
3. work functionality (33.8%)
4. code should be open (33.1%)
5. non-work functionality (29.7%)
6. obligation from use (28.5%)

1. Believers (19%): believe source code should be open.
2. Learning and Fun (29%): for non-work needs and intellectual stimulation.
3. Hobbyists (27%): need the code for a non-work reason.
4. Professionals (25%): for work needs and professional status.

Many businesses contribute to FLOSS development, and their motivations also vary. Many companies develop FLOSS to sell support - by giving away the product, they expect to get far more support contracts. Joel Spolsky’s “Strategy Letter V” notes that “most of the companies spending big money to develop open source software are doing it because it’s a good business strategy for them.” His argument is based on microeconomics, in particular, that every product in the marketplace has substitutes and complements. A substitute is another product you might buy if the first product is too costly, while a complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Since demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease, smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements. For many companies, supporting an FLOSS product turns a complementary product into a commodity, resulting in more sales (and money) for them.

One widely-read essay discussing commercial motivations is Eric Raymond’s The Magic Cauldron. The European Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS): Survey and Study has additional statistics on the motivations of individuals and corporations who develop FLOSS.

A.3 History

In the early days of computing (approximately 1945 to 1975), computer programs were often shared among developers, just as FLOSS practitioners do now.

Steven M. Bellovin reported (in 2006), “I do remember SHARE, early Usenix, DECUS, and more, where sharing software and system modifications was a way of life. Indeed, ‘bring a blank tape’ was the standard advice when attending early Usenix meetings... The notion of closed source software products didn’t really catch on until IBM unbundled its operating system from its hardware sales, in the early-to-mid 1970s. Before that, though systems weren’t what we know as open source, anyone who cared had the source tapes, and changes were freely distributed.”

At a 1965 Fall Joint Computer Conference, the paper Introduction and Overview of the Multics System by F. J. Corbato’ and V. A. Vyssotsky made this interesting statement about the Multics system, whose software cost an extraordinary amount of money to develop for the time:

“It is expected that the Multics system will be published when it is operating substantially. ... Such publication is desirable or two reasons: First, the system should withstand public scrutiny and criticism volunteered by interested readers; second, in an age of increasing complexity, it is an obligation to present and future system designers to make the inner operating system as lucid as possible so as to reveal the basic system issues. ... it is presumptuous to think that the initial system can successfully meet all the requirements that have been set. The system will evolve under the influence of the users and their activities for a long time and in directions which are hard to predict at this time... It is expected that most of the system additions will come from the users themselves and the system will eventually become the repository of the procedure and data knowledge of the community.”

While the Multics software wasn’t released at that time, their rationale for recommending it is intriguingly consonant with the reasons many FLOSS programs are released today.

An important development to FLOSS was the start of the ARPAnet, the early form of the Internet. Another critical development was the operating system Unix, developed by AT&T researchers, and distributed as source code (with modification rights) for a nominal fee. Indeed, the interfaces for Unix eventually became the basis of the POSIX suite of standards.

However, as years progressed, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, software developers increasingly closed off their software source code from users. This included the Unix system itself; many had grown accustomed to the freedom of having the Unix source code, but AT&T suddenly increased fees and limited distribution, making it impossible for many users to change the software they used and share those modifications with others.

Richard Stallman, a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, found this closing of software source code intolerable. In 1984 he started the GNU project to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which would be Free Software (free as in freedom, not as in price, as described above). In 1985, Stallman established the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to work to preserve, protect and promote Free Software; the FSF then became the primary organizational sponsor of the GNU Project. The GNU project developed many important software programs, including the GNU C compiler (gcc) and the text editor emacs. A major legal innovation by Stallman was the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), a widely popular FLOSS software license. However, the GNU project was stymied in its efforts to develop the “kernel” of the operating system. The GNU project was following the advice of academics to use a “microkernel architecture,” and was finding it difficult to develop a strong kernel using this architecture. Without a kernel, the GNU project could not fulfill their goal.

Meanwhile, the University of California at Berkeley had had a long relationship with AT&T’s Unix operating system, and Berkeley had ended up rewriting many Unix components. Keith Bostic solicited many people to rewrite the remaining key utilities from scratch, and eventually managed to create a nearly-complete system whose source code could be freely released to the public without restriction. The omissions were quickly filled, and soon a number of operating systems were developed based on this effort. Unfortunately, these operating systems were held under a cloud of concern from lawsuits and counter-lawsuits for a number of years. Another issue was that since the BSD licenses permitted companies to take the code and make it proprietary, companies such as Sun and BSDI did so - continuously siphoning developers from the openly sharable code, and often not contributing back to the publicly available code. Finally, the projects that developed these operating systems tended to be small groups of people who gained a reputation for rarely accepting the contributions by others (this reputation is unfair, but nevertheless the perception did become widespread). The descendants of this effort include the capable operating systems NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD, as a group called the *BSDs. However, while they are both used and respected, and proprietary variants of these (such as Apple Mac OS X) are thriving, another FLOSS effort quickly gained the limelight and much more market share.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds began developing a small operating system kernel called “Linux”, at first primarily for learning about the Intel 80386 chip. Unlike the BSD efforts, Torvalds eventually settled on the GPL license, which forced competing companies working on the kernel code to work together. Advocates of the *BSDs dispute that this is an advantage, but even today, major Linux distributions hire key kernel developers to work together on common code, in contrast to the corresponding commercial companies to the *BSDs which often do not share their improvements to a common program. Torvalds made a number of design decisions that in retrospect were remarkably wise: using a traditional monolithic kernel design (instead of the “microkernel approach” that slowed the GNU project), using the the Intel 386 line as the primary focus, working to support user requests (such as “dual booting”), and supporting hardware that was technically poor but widely used. And finally, Torvalds stumbled into a development process rather different from traditional approaches by exploiting the Internet. Torvalds’ new process looked rather different than more traditional approaches. He publicly released new versions extremely often (sometimes more than once a day, allowing quick identification when regressions occurred), and he quickly delegated areas to a large group of developers (instead of sticking to a very small number of developers). Instead of depending on rigid standards, rapid feedback on small increments and Darwinian competition were used to increase quality.

When the Linux kernel was combined with the already-developed GNU operating system components and some components from other places (such as from the BSD systems), the resulting operating system was surprisingly stable and capable. Such systems were called GNU/Linux systems or simply Linux systems. Note that there is a common misconception in the media that needs to be countered here: Linus Torvalds never developed the so-called “Linux operating system”. Torvalds was the lead developer of the Linux kernel, but the kernel is only one of many pieces of an operating system; most of the GNU/Linux operating system was developed by the GNU project and by other related projects.

In 1996, Eric Raymond realized that Torvalds had stumbled upon a whole new style of development, combining the sharing possibilities of FLOSS with the speed of the Internet into a new development process. His essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar identifies that process, in a way that others could try to emulate the approach. The essay was highly influential, and in particular convinced Netscape to switch to an FLOSS approach for its next generation web browser (the road for Netscape was bumpy, but ultimately successful).

In spring of 1997, a group of leaders in the Free Software community gathered, including Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly, and Larry Wall. They were concerned that the term “Free Software” was too confusing and unhelpful (for example, many incorrectly thought that the issue was having no cost). The group coined the term “open source” as an alternative term, and Bruce Perens developed the initial version of the “open source definition” to define the term. The term “open source” is now very widely used, but not universally so; Richard Stallman (head of the FSF) never accepted it, and even Bruce Perens switched back to using the term “Free Software” because Perens felt that there needed to be more emphasis on user freedom.

Major Unix server applications (such as the FLOSS Apache web server) were easily moved to GNU/Linux or the *BSDs, since they all essentially implemented the POSIX standards. As a result, GNU/Linux and the *BSDs rapidly gained significant market share in the server market. A number of major initiatives began to fill in gaps to create completely FLOSS modern operating systems, including graphical toolkits, desktop environments, and major desktop applications. In 2002, the first user-ready versions of capable and critical desktop applications (Mozilla for web browsing and OpenOffice.org for an office suite) were announced.

You can learn more about the history of FLOSS from material such as Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution and Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans by Peter Wayner,

A.4 Licenses

There are dozens of FLOSS licenses, but the vast majority of FLOSS software uses one of the four major licenses: the GNU General Public License (GPL), the GNU Lesser (or Library) General Public License (LGPL), the MIT (aka X11) license, and the BSD-new license. Indeed the Open Source Initiative refers to these four licenses as the classic open source licenses. The GPL and LGPL are termed “copylefting” licenses ( also called “protective” licenses), that is, these licenses are designed to prevent (protect) the code from becoming proprietary.

Here is a short description of these licenses:

1. The GPL allows anyone to use the program and modify it, but prevents code from becoming proprietary once distributed and it also forbids proprietary programs from “linking” to it.
2. The MIT and BSD-new licenses let anyone do almost anything with the code except sue the authors. One minor complication: there are actually two “BSD” licenses, sometimes called “BSD-old” and “BSD-new”; new programs should use BSD-new instead of BSD-old.
3. The LGPL is a compromise between the GPL and the MIT/BSD-new approaches, and was originally intended for code libraries. Like the GPL, LGPL-licensed software cannot be changed and made proprietary, but the LGPL does permit proprietary programs to link to the library, like the MIT/BSD-new licenses.

Note that all of these licenses (the GPL, MIT, BSD-new, and LGPL) permit the commercial sale and the commercial use of the software, and many such programs as sold and used that way. See Perens’ paper for more information comparing these licenses.

The most popular FLOSS license by far is the GPL. For example, Freshmeat.net reported on April 4, 2002 that 71.85% of the 25,286 software branches (packages) it tracked are GPL-licensed (the next two most popular were LGPL, 4.47%, and the BSD licenses, 4.17%). Sourceforge.net reported on April 4, 2002 that the GPL accounted for 73% of the 23,651 “open source” projects it hosted (next most popular were the LGPL, 10%, and the BSD licenses, 7%). In my paper More than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux’s Size, I found that Red Hat Linux, one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, had over 30 million physical source lines of code in version 7.1, and that 50.36% of the lines of code were licensed solely under the GPL (the next most common were the MIT license, 8.28%, and the LGPL, 7.64%). If you consider the lines that are dual licensed (licensed under both the GPL and another license, allowing users and developers to pick the license to use), the total lines of code under the GPL accounts for 55.3% of the total. My paper on GPL compatibility discusses these figures further, and discusses why, if you choose to develop FLOSS code, you should strongly consider using a licensing approach that is compatible with the GPL.

There are whole books about software licensing in general, or FLOSS licensing in particular, if you wish to delve into this topic in depth. One book about FLOSS licensing is Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing by Andrew M. St. Laurent.

A.5 Management Approaches

There is no single approach to managing an FLOSS project, just as there is no single approach to managing proprietary projects. Management approaches are strongly influenced by the size and scope of the project, as well as the leadership styles of those managing the project.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar argues for a particular style of development, termed the “bazaar” style. In this approach, there are a large number of small, incremental releases, and a large number of developers can send in patches for proposed improvements. The releases need to compile and run (to some extent), so that developers can test and improve them. Not all FLOSS projects work this way, but many do.

It is useful to examine the management approaches of successful projects to identify approaches that may work elsewhere. Here are a few:

1. Linux kernel. The Linux kernel’s development process is based on a hierarchy of four levels: ordinary developers, maintainers, trusted lieutenants, and the benevolent dictator. Ordinary developers can propose changes, but usually they submit their proposals to a maintainer of a particular component of the kernel; the maintainers then send their sets up to a trusted lieutenants, who then sends it up to the benevolent dictator (currently Linus Torvalds). At each stage testing can take place. The benevolent dictator writes code and issues general direction, but his primary job is to be the integrator and arbiter of changes. In the past (and probably again in the future) there were two branches, the “stable” and “development” branches, where occasionally the development branch would become the new stable branch. As of the end of 2004, the kernel development process has been modified so that someone else (Andrew Morton at the end of 2004) manages a “development” stage, and once Torvalds determines a specific change is ready, it’s brought into the main stable version. Linux distributions then take the stable branch, test it further, and select the “best” version of the stable branch. BusinessWeek named Linus Torvalds as one of the best managers of 2004.
2. Apache. The Apache web server project, in contrast, is run by a group. At the top is the “Apache HTTP Server Project Management Committee (PMC)” a group of volunteers who are responsible for managing the Apache HTTP Server Project. Membership in the Apache PMC is by invitation only and must be approved by consensus of the active Apache PMC members. Membership can be revoked by a unanimous vote of all the active PMC members other than the member in question. Most changes are approved by consensus.

   An action item requiring consensus approval must receive at least 3 binding +1 votes and no vetos (a “-1” vote). An action item requiring majority approval must receive at least 3 binding +1 votes and more +1 votes than -1 votes (i.e., a majority with a minimum quorum of three positive votes).

   Ideas must be review-then-commit; patches can be commit-then-review. With a commit-then-review process, they trust that the developer doing the commit has a high degree of confidence in the change. Doubtful changes, new features, and large-scale overhauls need to be discussed before being committed to a repository.

   See the Apache Voting Rules for more detailed information.

3. Perl. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall, but he no longer wishes to have to always have the job of integrating patches. Thus, there is a notional “patch pumpkin” that must be acquired to change Perl. In Moody’s Rebel Code, Wall explains that “we have essentially a chief integrator who is called the pumpkin holder.” Moody adds that this “integration involves taking the approved patches and adding them into the main Perl source code.” Larry Wall, as original developer, can veto any change. More information about the patch pumpkin (as it has currently evolved) is available from perl.com.
4. Sourceforge-based Applications. Many FLOSS projects are supported by SourceForge, which includes the CVS tool for configuration management. Typically, those who have write access to the repository simply make their updates; others who do not have such access post their requests or patches to the bug tracking database (or mailing list) and ask one of those with write access to include it. There are typically only a few people with direct write access, so conflicts are rare and CVS supports resolving the occasional conflict.

Successful FLOSS projects generally have a large number of contributors. A small proportion of the contributors write a majority of the code, but the value of the rest should not be underestimated; the fact that many others are reviewing the system, to identify or fix special bugs, enables the other developers to be more productive (because someone else, who looks at the project in a different way, can find or fix a bug faster, relieving the majority developers to do other things).

Large groups can be surprisingly effective at converging to good answers. An interesting analysis of this concept in general is given in “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations” by James Surowiecki. Groklaw reviewed this book.

A.6 Forking

A fork is a competing project based on a version of the pre-existing project’s source code. All FLOSS projects can be “forked”; the ability to create a fork is fundamental to the definition of FLOSS.

Simply creating or releasing a variant of a project’s code does not normally create a fork unless there’s an intent to create a competing project. Indeed, releasing variants for experimentation is considered normal in a typical FLOSS development process. Many FLOSS projects (such as the Linux kernel development project) intentionally have “fly-offs” (also called “bake-offs”) where different developers implement different competing approaches; the results are compared and the approach that produces the best results (the “winner”) is accepted by the project. These “fly-offs” are often discussed in evolutionary terms, e.g., the “winning mutation” is accepted into the project and the alternatives are abandoned as “evolutionary dead ends”. Since all parties intend for the “best” approach to accepted by the project, and for the other approaches to be abandoned, these are not forks.

What is different about a fork is intent. In a fork, the person(s) creating the fork intend for the fork to replace or compete with the original project they are forking.

Creating a fork is a major and emotional event in the FLOSS community. It similar to a call for a “vote of no confidence” in a parliament, or a call for a labor strike in a labor dispute. Those creating the fork are essentially stating that they believe the project’s current leadership is ineffective, and are asking developers to vote against the project leadership by abandoning the original project and switching to their fork. Those who are creating the fork must argue why other developers should support their fork; common reasons given include a belief that changes are not being accepted fast enough, that changes are happening too quickly for users to absorb them, that the project governance is too closed to outsiders, that the licensing approach is hampering development, or that the project’s technical direction is fundamentally incorrect.

Most attempts to create forks are ignored, for there must be a strong reason for developers to consider switching to a competing project. Developers usually resist supporting FLOSS forks: they divide effort that would be more effective when combined, they make support and further development more difficult, and they require developers to discuss project governance rather than improving the project’s products. Developers can attempt to support both projects, but this is usually impractical over time as the projects diverge. Eric Raymond, in Homesteading the Noosphere, argues that a prime motivation in FLOSS development is reputation gain through the use of a gift culture, and that forking significantly interferes with this motivation.

There are four different possible outcomes of a fork attempt (ignoring "both fail"), and all of them have occurred in the history of FLOSS. These outcomes, along with historical examples, are:

1. The death of the fork (example: libc/glibc). This is by far the most common outcome; indeed, many forks never receive enough support to “die”.
2. A re-merging of the fork with the original (example: gcc/egcs). This is where the projects rejoin each other (though one or the other is typically the dominant source of the combined effort).
3. The death of the original (example: XFree86 gets replaced by X.org, Mambo gets replaces by Joomla).
4. Successful branching -- both succeed, typically catering to different communities (examples: GNU emacs / xemacs, OpenBSD).

1. glibc vs. libc. When the Linux kernel was first being developed, the kernel developers took the FSF’s GNU C library (now called glibc) and created their own fork of it (called libc). Both were licensed under the LGPL. At the time, the Linux kernel developers thought that the FSF’s development process for the C library was too slow and not responding to their needs. Thus, they created a forked version of GNU libc version 1.07.4 (which had been released February 17, 1994). In this case, however, the original GNU C library project (led by the FSF) surpassed the forked project over time. Over the next few years the original glibc increasingly offered far better standards conformance, multi-threading, higher performance, and more features than the forked libc project. Elliot Lee briefly describes this history. In this case, the fork was abandoned after several years; in 1997 through 1998 nearly all GNU/Linux systems switched from libc back to glibc.
2. gcc vs. egcs. The GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) is a collection of important compilers, including a C++ compiler; the main compilers are licensed under the GPL. In 1997, there were disagreements over the development approach and slow development speed of gcc. In particular, many were dissatisfied with the FSF-appointed gcc maintainer, who was very slow to accept changes. Cygnus (headed by Michael Tiemann) decided to create a fork of the project named egcs, and invited others to join. Egcs worked at an accelerated pace, and soon surpassed the original gcc project. In April 1999 the rift was healed; the FSF agreed to switch to using the egcs code for gcc, and the egcs project agreed to dissolve itself and take over the original gcc project. In this case, the fork ended with the forking project’s results “taking over” the original project.
3. Free86 vs. X.org. The XFree86 project historically led development of a popular X server. An X server is a critical component for implementing a graphical user interface in a typical Unix-like system. The XFree86 project traditionally licensed the vast majority of its code used the simple “MIT/X” open source license that is GPL-compatible. The XFree86 president, David Dawes, decided to change the XFree86 license to one that wasn’t GPL-compatible and had many practical problems. This proposed license change caused a serious uproar, but the project leader refused to listen to those complaints. For example, Jim Gettys, a well-respected developer and co-founder of X, strongly opposed this change to the XFree86 license, even though he’s not a strong advocate of the GPL. Richard Stallman politely asked that something be worked out. But the project leader wouldn’t budge, so the users and some of the developers forked the project, creating a new project at X.org based on the previous version. An article at Linux Today and a discussion at Freedesktop.org show that the leading distributors, including Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Gentoo, Mandrake, and OpenBSD, are switching or plan to switch from XFree86 to X.org. Since the XFree86 folks wouldn’t switch to a GPL-compatible license, the X.Org Foundation (formed January 2004) announced its own version of X on April 6, 2004. The X.Org foundation version was immediately endorsed by Novell’s SUSE, Red Hat, HP, TrollTech, and FSF Europe among others. Very soon, nearly all developers and users had abandoned XFree86. You can see more information in my cautionary tale about XFree86. This is a case where a project leader attempted to make an extremely unpopular licensing change, causing a mass exodus of its uses and developers. Note how similar this process was to a vote of no confidence; the leader was unwilling to listen to his customers and developers, so his customers and developers established a project where their needs would be met.
4. Mambo/Joomla As explained in Nathan Willis' "In Memoriam: the free software projects we lost in 2010", "The PHP-based content management system (CMS) Mambo suffered an acrimonious leadership battle in 2005 that led to the departure of the bulk of the developers, who started the Joomla CMS. As is often the case is such a fork, the remaining owners of the Mambo trademark and source code copyrights asserted that nothing was wrong and that development would continue unabated. Although that may have been true for a while, here at the end of 2010 it has been a full calendar year since there were any signs of life from Mambo (longer still since there was a release), apart from the occasional Twitter alert that the project's servers had been attacked. Joomla, on the other hand, seems fine."
5. GNU emacs / xemacs, OpenBSD. Sometimes, though this is rare, a fork produces two projects which both live on; typically each fork ends up catering to a different community. GNU emacs was forked into xemacs, resulting in two successful projects. OpenBSD was originally the result of a fork, but it then specialized into being an operating system in which “security was more important than almost anything else”, resulting in a very successful project that has not eliminated the other BSDs. Some people, such as Norm Petry, describe this kind of forking in evolutionary terms: “this type of fork is analogous to speciation, where each resulting species succeeds by filling its own, distinct ecological niche.”

Too many forks can be a serious problem for all of the related projects. In fact, one of the main reasons that Unix systems lost significant market share compared to Windows was because of the excessive number of Unix forks. Bob Young states this quite clearly in this essay “Giving it Away”, and also suggests why this is unlikely to be a problem in copylefted FLOSS software:

The primary difference between [GNU/Linux and Unix] is that Unix is just another proprietary binary-only ... OS [operating system]. The problem with a proprietary binary-only OS that is available from multiple suppliers is that those suppliers have short-term marketing pressures to keep whatever innovations they make to the OS to themselves for the benefit of their customers exclusively. Over time these “proprietary innovations” to each version of the Unix OS cause the various Unixes to differ substantially from each other. This occurs when the other vendors do not have access to the source code of the innovation and the license the Unix vendors use prohibit the use of that innovation even if everyone else involved in Unix wanted to use the same innovation. In Linux the pressures are the reverse. If one Linux supplier adopts an innovation that becomes popular in the market, the other Linux vendors will immediately adopt that innovation. This is because they have access to the source code of that innovation and it comes under a license that allows them to use it.

Note that the copylefting licenses (such as the GPL and LGPL) permit forks, but greatly reduce any monetary incentive to create a fork. Thus, the project’s software licensing approach impacts the likelihood of its forking.

The ability to create a fork is important in FLOSS development, for the same reason that the ability to call for a vote of no confidence or a labor strike is important. Fundamentally, the ability to create a fork forces project leaders to pay attention to their constituencies. Even if an FLOSS project completely dominates its market niche, there is always a potential competitor to that project: a fork of the project. Often, the threat of a fork is enough to cause project leaders to pay attention to some issues they had ignored before, should those issues actually be important. In the end, forking is an escape valve that allows those who are dissatisfied with the project’s current leadership to show whether or not their alternative is better.

About the Author David A. Wheeler is an expert in computer security and has a long history of working with large and high-risk software systems. His books include Software Inspection: An Industry Best Practice (published by IEEE CS Press), Ada 95: The Lovelace Tutorial (published by Springer-Verlag), and the Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO (on how to create secure software). Articles he’s written related to FLOSS include More than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux’s Size, How to Evaluate Open Source Software / Free Software (FLOSS) Programs, Comments on Open Source Software / Free Software (FLOSS) Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems, Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else, and FLOSS References. Other security-related articles he’s written include Securing Microsoft Windows (for Home and Small Business Users), Software Configuration Management (SCM) Security, and Countering Spam Using Email Passwords. Other articles he’s written include The Most Important Software Innovations, Stop Spam!, and an article on Fischer Random Chess (Chess960). He has released software as well, including flawfinder (a source code scanner for developing secure software by detecting vulnerabilities) and SLOCCount (a program to measure source lines of code, aka SLOC). Mr. Wheeler’s web site is at http://dwheeler.com. You may contact him using the information at http://dwheeler.com/contactme.html but you may not send him spam (he reserves the right to charge fees to those who send him spam).

Please link to this article at http://dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html. You may reprint this article (unchanged) an unlimited number of times and distribute local electronic copies (e.g., inside an organization or at a conference/presentation), as long as the article is provided free of charge to the recipient(s). You may also quote this article, as long as the quote is clearly identified as a quote and you attribute your quote with the article title, URL, and my name (be sure to use my middle initial, “A.”). You may not “mirror” a copy of this document to the public Internet or other public electronic distribution systems; mirrors interfere with ensuring that readers can immediately find and get the current version of this document. Copies clearly identified as old versions, not included in normal searches as current Internet data, and for which there is no charge (direct or indirect) for those allowed access are generally fine; examples of acceptable copies are Google caches and the Internet archive’s copies. Please contact me if you know of missing information, see something that needs fixing (such as a misspelling or grammatical error), or would like to translate this article to another human language. Translators: I would love to see more freely-available translations of this document, and I will help you coordinate with others who may be translating the document into that language. Trademarks are registered by various organizations, for example, Linux(r) is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. This is a personal essay and not endorsed by my employer; many people have found it useful, though. This article is a research article, not software nor a software manual.