I was fortunate to catch up Thursday with Stuart Cohen, CEO and founder of the Collaborative Software Initiative. Stuart used to run OSDL where he got to talk with people at large enterprises that have adopted open source, and learned quite a bit about enterprise interest in not only consuming open source, but also creating open source.
Stuart Cohen
(Credit: Collaborative Software Initiative)To help foster both interests Stuart founded CSI in 2007. I asked him how things have progressed since CSI's founding:
Asay: Collaborative Software Initiative is going on 18 months now. How has the company evolved since you founded it in April 2007?
Cohen: I'm really proud to say that our original concept has been validated in multiple verticals with very different projects. Based on my early conversations with customers during my time as CEO of Open Source Development Labs, I saw an untapped opportunity to build communities in vertical markets to develop software at a fraction of the cost of traditional software models.
We believe, and again this has been validated over the last year, that communities lower cost, provide a "network effect" for companies adopting these applications and build sustainability for future growth of an application.
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The GNU General Public License (GPL), unlike Apache-style licensing, offers perhaps the best way to prevent a community from forking. It's therefore not surprising to see the Collaborative Software Initiative turning to the Affero GPL Version 3 to help foster and protect its budding TriSano community.
Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center and co-author of the AGPLv3, agrees:
By offering the code under the widely used AGPLv3 license, Collaborative Software Initiative gives the user community the assurance of knowing that the code can be modified, customized, and shared in a low-friction way to suit their very specific project requirements. AGPLv3 was written as a roadmap to foster the most open, transparent and collaborative open source and free software communities possible.
"Open" is in the eyes of the beholder--there is a longstanding debate between the GPL and BSD/Apache communities as to which is more open--but there's little debate that GPL offers a more robust way to provide incentives against forking a project. TriSano will be better for having all participants rowing in the same direction. AGPLv3 gives them this.
One question, though: why AGPLv3 instead of simply GPLv3? Is there an element of Web-based distribution here against which CSI is hoping to guard?
I reported earlier on the Collaborative Software Initiative's important work with the State of Utah on an infectious disease surveillance system. This week CSI and the State of Utah announced that the system has been open sourced as the Trisano Project:
TriSano is an open source, citizen-focused infectious disease surveillance system that allows local, state and federal entities to collaborate for the good of public health. With TriSano, the Collaborative Software Initiative provides a forum in which subject matter experts (i.e., doctors, nurses and epidemiologists) and software developers work together to facilitate the cre-ation of citizen-centric public health applications. This innovation ensures application features meet the specific requirements of each jurisdiction, allowing public health employees to achieve the goal of protecting lives.
The system itself is useful, but open source makes it broadly applicable and outside the control of any particular government or vendor. It's awesome to see CSI turn open source into something much bigger than just code and licensing. Great work!
Stuart Cohen at Grand Central Station in New York.
(Credit: Matt Asay)Most of the software in the world is written by enterprises that never intend to sell it. They write it for internal use.
Think of all the good that would come by sharing that code between enterprises with similar needs. Think long enough and you'll come up with Stuart Cohen's Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI).
CSI hit the news this week for some intriguing work with the state of Utah, which promises to deliver the world's first open-source infectious disease management system and break down the walls between enterprises to introduce a new era of sharing code.
At least, that's the promise. It starts with one state. Where it goes next is what CSI (and open source) is all about. According to CSI's statement:
... Read moreHaving had a day to ruminate about the Open Source Business Conference 2008, a few key takeaways suggest themselves. It was by far the best OSBC yet, with a far more diverse audience and speaking faculty that we've had before. This naturally leads to a diverse set of "conclusions" arising from the event:
- Enterprises love open source but the business models necessary to fuel both their happiness and that of the vendors still need a lot of work.
Jon Williams of Kaplan Test suggested in his keynote, as Dirk Hohndel captures, that the more happy he is with his commercial open-source software, the less likely he will be to pay for it. Why? Because his developers will acquire the expertise over time to support themselves and because the product will mature to the point that support will be less necessary.
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I spent some time on the phone Wednesday with Mike Herrick of the Collaborative Software Initiative. I knew Mike back when he was at Liberty Mutual, building out its open-source team. When Mike left to join CSI, I wondered what would cause someone with a great job in a Fortune 100 enterprise to join a start-up.
Today, things became a bit clearer.
Remember Avalanche? It was an open-source co-op formed by several major enterprises (Best Buy, Wells Fargo, etc.) to share code in areas of common need (call centers, for example) but little to no competitive overlap. The idea was to share code and thereby improve innovation while lowering costs.
CSI is similar in its aims, but I think it's a better approach to the problem because it should do a better job of coordinating collaboration. CSI's mission is to:
build communities of like-minded IT leaders to reduce software development costs, accelerate compliance and consolidate project timelines.
CSI does this by helping to bring different companies to collaborate on IT projects that each individually needs, but that can be done more cost effectively as a collective. So, for example, perhaps CSI found that Credit Suisse needed to develop a trading platform. As it turns out, this is a common need for Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and other financial services companies. So, CSI would then approach these other companies to gauge interest and then to coordinate the development.
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