Chip Rosenthal
Unicom Systems Development
<chip@unicom.com>

Sixth Annual National Community Networking Conference
Open Source Software: Choices and Considerations
December 7, 2003

• Software provided in source form that may be freely used, modified and redistributed.
• More complete definition at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php.
• Does not mean no license or no copyright. That's what public domain means.
• At its core, defines a licensing model, but embodies an entire development and use mode.
• An alternative to conventional proprietary software licenses.

Some Key Benefits

• cost - beyond acquisition price
• maintenance costs
• license management
• equipment costs
• freedom and flexibility
• may be tailored to your needs
• reduce vendor control on operations
• security and assuredness
• problems in the open and fixed rapidly
• auditable

Some Key Concerns

• support - who can you call?
• responsibility - who can you sue?
• contamination - intellectual property concerns

FUD Factors

• fear, uncertainty, doubt
• fear of unfamiliar licensing models
• mudslinging from proprietary vendors

• Freshmeat - OSS applications
  http://freshmeat.net
• OSDir - Open Source Directory
  http://www.osdir.com/
• Open Source Bibliography
  http://opensource.oreilly.com/news/biblio_0502.html
• Source Forge - OSS Project Hosting and Management
  http://sourceforge.net/

• How to approach the problem of online community building?
• Try a more familiar question: How to build a meeting space in meatspace?
• You would enumerate your needs and then identify solutions to satisfy them.
• Similar considerations apply when constructing an online meeting space.
• Open source tools are particularly well suited for this. (We'll see why in a sec...)

• Sample Needs:
• publication - distribute news and information
• discussion - asynchronous (email) and synchronous (chat) communications
• collaboration - group development of documents and information
• Sample Solutions:
• mailing lists
• instant messaging and chat
• blogs and wikis
• integrated content management systems (CMS)
• There are excellent open source alternatives for all of these solutions.

• Mailman - Mailing List Manager
• homepage: http://www.list.org/
• facilitate email discussion and announcement lists
• demo: http://www.soaustin.net/mailman/listinfo/
• jabber - Messaging Protocol Standard
• homepage: http://www.jabber.org/
• open standard for IM applications
• drupal - Content Management System (CMS)
• homepage: http://drupal.org/
• includes weblog, forums, (wiki) collaboration
• modular architecture: polls, RSS aggregator, etc.

Sample Community Websites

• Austin Bloggers
  http://austinbloggers.org/
• Holidailies 2003 - build in an afternoon
  http://www.celluloideyes.com/holidailies/

Open Source Tools Used

• Apache - HTTP server http://httpd.apache.org/
• MySQL - relational database http://www.mysql.com/
• php - scripting language http://www.php.net/
• perl - scripting language http://www.perl.org/
• smarty - template engine http://smarty.php.net/

There are many excellent open source software products that are particulary well suited to building open source communities.