Open source software (OSS) is more than software whose code is available to the public to be read and revised. It is also an economic activity that fits into the larger ecosystem of software and technological activities.

Open source software is not the only paradigm for software development, of course. Other models include building proprietary products and developing software for hire in the form of outsourcing contracts.

Role for Government

The government must try to maximize the benefits of the full range of software development approaches for its national economy. The role of the government must be guided both by its premier position as a consumer of software and by its responsibility as a promoter of industry.

Government as a large-scale user and the adoption of Open Standards

As the singlemost important software user in any country, the government must avoid the dangers of a software monoculture and must ensure that its position cannot be exploited. As noted by many national leaders, including India’s, the government’s reliance on a single source of software technology can lead to unacceptable stability and security risks. Furthermore, the vendor, reinforced by government procurement practices that minimize competition, has little motivation to ensure reasonable licensing terms and fees and has every incentive to phase out support for older products. With impunity, the monopoly vendor can force customers into frequent and costly upgrades of both software and hardware. Healthy competition is essential for the security, prosperity and independence of all large-scale software consumers, including the government.

Complementing the government’s promotion of competition must be an insistence on acquiring only ICT products that meet open standards. Open standards defeat vendor lock-in by fostering diversity and robustness of implementations from multiple sources. Encouraging open source can also help achieve open standards. Each successful open source project embodies in itself an “open standard”. This same dynamic, exploiting merit and transparency, has been a key to the successful development of the Internet standards and mirrors, for example, the well-accepted standardization strategy of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Government as the promoter of the Indian software industry

The objective of any government software policy in India must be to promote the health of the Indian software industry by balancing competing interests within the entire software and technology ecosystem.

In this respect, the open source approach is not seen as a panacea but as part of a healthy diversification of risks where a proper balance is achieved among outsourcing practices, reasonable protection of proprietary technology, and open source development. That is, proper balance supports all the viable industry models available to India: outsourcing, proprietary product development, and open source development. Diversity is key to long-range health. Ensuring competition will minimize the limitations and negative aspects of any one revenue generating approach and is essential to formulating a successful and sustainable policy.

Concrete activities, which can promote competitiveness among software approaches and which will expand the open source segment of an Indian software industry, include sponsorship of research and development (R&D), expansion of open source software infrastructure, and, of course, actual procurement of open source solutions.

In the world market, the major profit areas for open source software involve selling integration services and support, indirect hardware and systems sales, and packaging. Because of India’s favorable cost structure in the global market, these “dot-OSS” opportunities, whose annual revenue today is several billion US dollars and growing, are a natural for the Indian government to encourage immediately.

Open source services and support readily map into India’s core strength: its existing low cost, high quality, labor intensive software services industry. But open source adds a dimension to this that simple outsourcing never can: India retains ownership of its own contributions and at the same time has full freedom to use the contributions of others to expand its international competitive position.

Talk: Open Source Software Trends in Silicon Valley

A Seminar on “Linux Readiness – Emergence of a New Era”
PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PHDCCI), New Delhi, India
September 2003

Alolita Sharma of Technetra talked about open source technology trends in Silicon Valley and how the OSS paradigm shift is changing the face of IT in the US. Dr. Dhaka, Secretary General of PHDCCI, inaugurated the seminar by highlighting on how IT had become so important in today’s environment and how Linux has become the latest buzzword in the industry. This event was part of PHDCCI’s initiative to create Linux awareness in the Indian business community with a group of experts presenting on the various facets of OSS and Linux.

Technetra is proud to be a co-organizer of LinuxAsia 2004, India’s premier Open Source Software conference. This is the first time, a major conference in India focusing on Linux and open source software implementation in enterprise, government and academia is being organized. The event features tracks on trends, deployment issues and case studies. In addition, a series of workshops covering software development, system administration and Windows to Linux migration will be held. Technetra brings its strong expertise in open source and software development in enterprise and government to build and grow LinuxAsia.

The National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has a mandate to explore, develop and promote state-of-the-art software technologies to increase effectiveness and reduce costs of mission data and information systems. Linux is part of the suite of OSS technologies NASA is using to accomplish its mandate. Linux and OSS have gradually penetrated deep into NASA’s applications for on-board spacecraft systems, monitoring systems and many other internal projects.

LAMP Technologies

NASA, as an organization of software users and developers, has adopted the powerful and robust combination of Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python (LAMP) technologies to get better software at a lower cost. Over the last five years, many projects faced with budget cuts or escalating costs have switched to using OSS wherever it has made technical or business sense. Linux, in this process, has demonstrated the same or superior levels of robustness and performance.

NAIS: One early example of NASA’s usage of OSS was NASA’s Acquisition Internet Service (NAIS). NAIS is an electronic posting system for business opportunities, which converted from using an Oracle relational database to using the open source counterpart MySQL. MySQL is, of course, the “M” in “LAMP” as described above.

FlightLinux

One of NASA’s projects was to develop FlightLinux the Linux kernel customized for spacecraft applications. FlightLinux enables constellations of earth orbiting satellites to talk to each other. It also provides a common application environment between ground and space-based environments.

The goal of FlightLinux was to build a minimal Linux kernel with specialized device drivers to support a technology readiness level (TRL) of 7, or on-orbit readiness, for the spacecraft environment. The FlightLinux project targeted PC-like hardware from Surrey Space Technology Ltd (SSTL). The availability of multiple flight computers on-board allowed FlightLinux to be tested on-orbit without interfering or impacting the operations of the spacecraft. Major advantages cited for using OSS were availability of full source of the operating systems and drivers, and tapping into a large pool of development talent, programming languages, networking protocols and file systems.

Other targets for FlightLinux have included space processors such as Honeywell’s Radiation Hardened PowerPC (RHPPC), Lockheed’s RAD750, ESA’s ERC32 (based on Sun Sparc architecture), and Sandia Labs radiation-hardened Pentium. Each software port for the 16-bit and later 32-bit flight computers involves coding-specific device drivers, and reconfiguration and recompilation of the kernel for specific embedded devices. FlightLinux is OSS but the free distribution of its source code has been inhibited by issues of export restrictions on satellite control software.

Other NASA Open Source Projects

Solar spectral flux radiometer: A scientific instrument that uses Real-Time Linux to collect atmospheric data at 21,000 m (70,000 feet). It is based on RTLinux (http:// www.fsmlabs.com/), which guarantees the hard real-time performance needed by the application. At the same time, it provides a normal, rich Linux environment for everything else that does not have to be real-time.

Personal satellite assistant (PSA) is a robotic assistant for astronauts working in space. The PSA is about the size of a softball. It can propel itself, sense gases, temperature, and air pressure, perform video conferencing and can communicate with other devices onboard a shuttle or the space station.

Beowulf: This is probably the most famous and influential of the NASA open technology projects. Beowulf was developed using Linux in 1994 at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland. It enables building massive Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland. It enables building massive clusters of cheap PCs, which can compete with the largest and most expensive supercomputers in the world. Beowulf class clusters and concepts have spread throughout the high-performance computing community, both scientific and commercial.

Linux@ESA

The European Space Agency (ESA) has also been busy supporting Linux and OSS. Two projects, RACSI and GOAS, highlight their activities.

RACSI: Remote Control of ESA’s Pre-development Program Automatic Transfer Vehicle

RACSI is a Linux laptop application used inside the International Space Station (ISS). It allows an astronaut, or OSS-tronaut in this case, to command, control and monitor the rendezvous and docking operations of an Automatic Transfer Vehicle (ATV). The ATV is a small chaser spacecraft designed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to deliver cargo to or perform other functions for the much larger ISS. Using complex monitoring and computations, the ATV docks with the Russian section of the space station.

The target hardware platform for RACSI is an IBM ThinkPad laptop that is resistant to the radiation possible onboard the space station. RACSI needs 64MB RAM and 40MB disk space. The ThinkPad has a 1024×756 pixel XGA display with 64K colors to display trajectories and spacecraft equipment status. The pointing device is the laptop’s trackball, although a regular mouse can also be used.

RACSI uses shared memory and the Linux file system as database storage for telemetry data feeds received from the spacecraft. It provides three types of information to the user: Mission phase and transitions data Trajectory data Messages and warnings While monitoring the ATV rendezvous, the astronaut can issue two simple commands to the ATV in an emergency: Temporarily interrupt the mission, or execute a collision avoidance maneuver.

ESA is upgrading RACSI to provide multimedia capabilities and additional help to the astronaut.

It will now include:

• A live video signal. The live video window and the classic monitoring window will be displayed simultaneously.
• A grid superimposed onto the live video signal to facilitate navigation toward the target.
• Context-sensitive help.

GOAS: Ground Operator Assistant System for Rendezvous and Docking

While RACSI helps control the ATV from the ISS, GOAS provides much greater monitoring and control from the ground. GOAS helps in the guidance, navigation, and control tasks of a rendezvous and docking space mission. It is similar in purpose to the RACSI application but larger and more complex. GOAS monitors and intervenes for complex fault recovery situations.

GOAS runs as a Linux/X-Windows application on a 233 MHz Intel Pentium system with 48MB RAM.

Linux: The Right Choice

Reliability, performance, portability and affordability of Linux convinced ESA to use Linux and OSS for its real-time spacecraft control software.

For NASA, aside from cost-effectiveness, OSS leads to improved software development, enhanced collaboration, and more effective dissemination of software.

For Linux and OSS, at NASA and ESA, the sky is the limit.

I’m sure that for generations into the future, Silicon Valley will be telling stories of how Tux saved the California movie industry from becoming just another outpost of that suburb of Seattle. We aren’t talking about landslide numbers of desktops or servers here, but the symbolism is inescapable. If Linux can produce entire movies and special effects in blockbuster films as varied as Sinbad, Star Wars, Perfect Storm, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings 2, then it must hold some great magic that can enchant even my own small desktop.

What’s the Secret?

Linux magic infuses two quite different aspects of movie making. The early application of Linux was to generate complex, true-to-life image sequences made using cheap but powerful “render farms” : compute clusters pioneered at the national defense and energy labs were discovered to be practical for computer graphics (CG) studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks. More recently, as the animated movie Sinbad demonstrates, Linux is being used in the full film production cycle ranging from the artist’s desktop to the final output onto film. Again the symbolism is unavoidable: Linux must be ready for my desktop if it’s a standard of the likes of Dreamworks or Disney/Pixar.

To the great pride and satisfaction of the Linux community, Tux has become quite the cinematic swashbuckler, leading the charge to a new “wow” in the ever changing, high-energy world of movie special effects. And the studios together with their support industry partners, such as HP and IBM, are discovering a pirate’s treasure in these successes of Tux.

Cap’n Tux is also visiting other ports of call in the movie industry. Tux is applying tricks learned in simulating and studying nuclear explosion data at top secret US research labs. Demanded by both the movie and TV industries, old films are being digitally remastered. Colorizing and remastering require petabytes of fast storage that can be viewed and manipulated simultaneously by collaborating studios spread across the globe.

Studios compete using Proprietary Tools

But as the hero of Dreamworks’ latest animation discovers, it takes more than bravado to be truly successful.

The challenge to Tux, just as it is to this latest celluloid version of Sinbad, is to realize that while fortunes and adventures come and go, real, long-term success requires hard work, perseverance, and more importantly, a spirit of giving and humility.

The inexpensive, high-performance computing (HPC) technology exploited today by Pixar, Dreamworks and others could never have been developed without the prior open source collaboration of the publicly-funded advanced research communities. Unfortunately, while notable exceptions such as “Film Gimp” exist, most animation and special effects technologies are being developed and maintained by the various studios as proprietary tools. In light of how true progress is made using the open source paradigm, this reluctance to share trade secrets seems a little shortsighted. For, it is not mastery of the technology alone that enables a studio to create its next blockbuster. There are many more compelling factors including artistry, story, action, and marketing. In fact, the major studios should realize that they can all benefit by sharing and collaborating on the basic technologies and that they then can differentiate themselves on what really matters in creating a winning film. The alternative is to remain islands of achievement without any one company being able to reach critical mass.

So, Hollywood, practice what you preach…er, animate. Try to balance each studio’s need to be the “coolest” with a vision of what can be achieved together. Then movies and special effects can progress to the next level of technology sparkle. A sparkle that always can be made brighter with even better tools.