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Open Source & the Web
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David Rice
March 28, 2012
Technology
4
160
Open Source & the Web
Talk about embracing open source. Given at a local enterprise technology conference.
David Rice
March 28, 2012
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Transcript
Open Source & the Web by David Rice ( davidjrice.co.uk
)
How many of you have ever used open source software
How many of you have ever used the internet
How many of you still think you haven’t used open
source software
answer: everyone who uses the internet, uses open source software
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/03/17/march_2010_web_server_survey.html 7% 1% 7% 7% 24% 54% Web Server Market
Share by Server Apache Microsoft Google Nginx lighttpd Other
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/03/17/march_2010_web_server_survey.html 31% 62% 7% Web Server Market Share by License
Other Open Source Proprietary
The Open Source Web Stack
Client Side Web Server App Server Application Database Operating System
(HTML/CSS/JS) Nginx Passenger (Ruby on Rails / Ruby) MySQL Debian
Proprietary Web stacks have similar roles of component but are
closed source
Why is proprietary information bad for us
Throughout human history there are positive examples of standardisation, knowledge
sharing and open source
Modern Language Metric System Modern Medicine
However, for each positive example in history, there is also
a negative where information was withheld to improve competitive advantage
In my opinion ideally all knowledge should be free, but
that’s slightly optimistic for now...
How can we embrace open source today... and not be
evil
If you need to retain some of your competitive advantage
(a lot of companies still do)
Application Business Logic Design (HTML/CSS) Framework Libraries Application
Build Applications using open source plugins and libraries
Contribute improvements back to the community
Receive status, feedback & contributions from the community
Release new interesting libraries to the public
If you’re hiring, you have access to a pool of
smart people already experienced with your technology
An incentive for existing employees/contractors, their work will be made
public
As we tend towards more reusable standardised libraries
We have do deal with less bespoke code... faster time
to market, lower costs
The “glue” becomes secondary, and we end up with a
more maintainable solution...
...that adheres to open source standards and can be maintained
by anyone
we end up with configurations and ordering of lots of
small reusable building blocks
that can be developed in an agile and iterative way,
organic like DNA
Now, what about even more forward thinking... be good
There’s also another breed of company, giving everything away open
source
They’re driving profit through expert services & support around the
open source software
RedHat couch.io
A few examples
Active Merchant (Realex) A payment gateway abstraction library http://github.com/davidjrice/active_merchant
Open Translink A Work in Progress collection of demos using
Translink’s data set http://translink.davidjrice.co.uk http://github.com/davidjrice/translink
ATCO A Ruby library for parsing ATCO-CIF UK public transport
data http://github.com/davidjrice/atco
node-comment Real Time Streaming web chat demo using frontend &
server side Javascript Node.js / CouchDB http://github.com/davidjrice/node-comment
Thanks, any questions me@davidjrice.co.uk @davidjrice github.com/davidjrice