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