Once upon a time, books were handwritten, one at a time, through endless months of manual labor by trained artisans. With the invention of block printing, these artisans were able to print one page at a time. Then came the invention of movable type and the printing press. The resulting explosion of information changed the world forever. And so it was for hundreds of years. Then came the Internet.

Quite a bit happened to technology and the global economy between 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was commissioned by the Department of Defense, and 1990, when the first commercial dial-up Internet provider was established. Twenty-one years had transpired after the creation of the ARPANET before there was any commercial use of this technology. During this transition from ARPANET to Internet, the practice of open source software development began. Open source software development was crucial to creating the Internet, and it is just now being put to use in the AS/400 applications arena. (More information on the history of the Internet can be found at Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v5.0, www.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html.)

Open Source

So what is open source? Open source is a program that is provided by an individual or a software provider to the world without a fee and, more important, that includes the source code. Although the original author of the program retains the copyright, the product and its source code are made available to the global community. With its source code made available, a given program or suite of programs becomes a global development effort. The Internet, as we know it, could not have been created without the open source model of software development. The open source model has proven successful with projects such as the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server. Until now, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite of applications has never been the scope of an open source project. Although, I must say, writing a payroll application is child’s play compared to writing an operating system.

Within days of my offering the core ERP application source code, over 50 AS/400 professionals joined the development effort and agreed to name the project WyattERP. The

companion project to document the technical software relationships and create industry- specific guides was dubbed docHolliday. The WyattERP and docHolliday projects are the logical progression of open source projects—from operating systems to utilities to applications.

The New Frontier

For at least the past two years, companies and individuals have been preoccupied with Y2K. This is pretty much behind us now, and we are faced with a business transition to the 21st century.

A shift to a new business model was required with the advent of movable type in the creation of printed materials. Now a shift is occurring in the development of programming solutions with the advent of the Internet. For quite some time, momentum has been building for the implementation of new business and development models. The computer industry is in a rebuilding phase. With newer technologies and methods available, C is being reinvented as Java; the service bureau is being reinvented as the application service provider (ASP); and the closed-shop method of software development is giving way to the open source model.

The Internet has provided the mechanics for these new opportunities and is rich with resources for the exchange of ideas. One such resource is the MIDRANGE dot COM Web site (www.midrange.com/midrange-l.htm). On this Web site, David Gibbs hosts several of the AS/400 Related Lists, and it was on one of these lists that Leslie Russell of Springfield, Tennessee, spearheaded a discussion about the open source phenomenon. Russell’s well-stated arguments about the benefits of open source projects included a reference to Eric S. Raymond’s experience with the Fetchmail project.

In his paper “The Magic Cauldron,” Raymond analyzes the economics of open source software and states, “An entirely sufficient case for open source development rests on its engineering and economic outcomes—better quality, higher reliability, lower costs, and increased choice.” This paper, along with Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and “Homesteading the Noosphere,” should be fundamental reading for anyone interested in an open source endeavor. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” outlines the logistics of community-based development. “Homesteading the Noosphere” covers the property and ownership customs of the open source culture. These papers can be found at Eric’s Random Writings Web site (www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings).

Upon reading these papers, I started searching for additional information about open source and how the concept has been put into practice. After all, my company has been in the business of developing and marketing application suites since 1977, and making a move to provide open source for our product was not a decision to be made lightly. On his Web site, Setting Up Shop: The Business of Open-Source Software (www.hecker.org/writings/setting-up-shop.html), Frank Hecker, a key contributor to Netscape’s decision to make its Communicator product open source, gets down to the nuts and bolts of the business reasons and opportunities for such a project by saying, “This strategy may seem counterintuitive or even self-destructive; it goes against years of tried and true commercial software practices. However, these are unusual times in the commercial software industry and may call for unusual measures.” Hecker goes on to say, “...a move to more of an open source business model is not simply a tactical move to solve a particular business problem but rather can be part of an overall strategy to change the rules of competition in your market space and perhaps in the software industry as a whole.”

On February 9, 2000, I made such a counterintuitive decision. I responded to Russell’s postings with an offer to place my company’s application suite into the open source “community” and asked if anyone would be willing to participate. The response has been phenomenal. On the very same day, “Can I join?” emails started to arrive, and Gibbs created a new list for the exchange of ideas. Within the first week, it became apparent that this was a project that had global interest. To date, there are participants from not only the

United States and Canada but also Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Paraguay, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. By now, there are over 50 participants, and we have exchanged more than 1,000 emails discussing the finer details of such issues as security, database models, and user interface.

Building an ERP suite of applications is a monumental undertaking, and, in keeping with the tradition of the open source community, my company offered the base code this project will build upon, which amounts to over 5,000 source modules. Linus Torvalds did not write Linux from scratch but started with existing code. By now, there is not much left of the original Linux code, but it provided a conceptual framework that allowed all contributors to have a shared point of reference.

The application suite consists of the fundamental accounting services required for any company and has been put to good use by a variety of industries. These industries include make-to-order and make-to-stock manufacturing, highway construction, distribution, refuse removal, timber sales, nonprofits, hospitals, restaurants, etc. The list goes on. The scheduled applications include general ledger; payroll; accounts payable; accounts receivable; purchasing; inventory control, including lot number and location management; inventory forecasting; bill of materials processing; order entry and billing; sales analysis; and job and equipment costing. There will also be a recurring billing application used by refuse companies, water utilities, portable storage rentals, and janitorial services. There are already 500 program modules available, and complete general ledger and sales analysis applications are now available for download. The remaining applications should be available before the year’s end.

Open Source/400

With open source projects of any real scope, there is typically an organization formed to coordinate the effort. Seeing such intense interest so early in the project, I had to create a formal organization to manage it. With assistance from the National Center for Nonprofit Boards (www.ncnb.org), Open Source/400, a nonprofit educational and research organization, was formed. On February 28, 2000, it became officially recognized as a corporation in the state of Washington. Open Source/400, through its board of directors, will determine which features are included in the general release of the WyattERP and docHolliday products. Leslie Russell was ahead of the game and registered the opensource400.org domain name, and he is hosting the Web site as well as taking a leadership role in spreading the word of the organization’s existence. Within days of my offer, John Ross of Netshare400.com offered his company’s services and equipment to provide us with a demo site and has hopes of using the WyattERP product to expand his company by becoming an ASP.

Before I could place my company’s product into the public domain, I needed to establish a licensing agreement. For assistance with this, I looked to OpenSource.Org, which contains several open source license agreements that are in general use, and found encouragement in OpenSource.Org’s statement that “even a small open source project can muster more brains to improve a piece of software than most development shops can possibly afford.” I decided to create a derivative of the Mozilla license because of its clear distinction between works that must remain open source while permitting software developers the opportunity to provide add-ons for a fee. My company was required to change the name of the derivative license and remove reference to the Netscape Communications Corporation, so it submitted the General Open Source Public License (GOSPL) to OpenSource.Org for Open Source Initiative (OSI) certification.

Under the terms of the GOSPL, any individual or company may obtain the WyattERP program and its source code and can do with it pretty much whatever they wish. Anyone providing programming or consulting services is prohibited from charging a fee for program products. He must provide source code for any modifications he makes. Those modifications must be open source and made available without fee.

The Next Century’s Model

These conditions are, in essence, the new software development model for the 21st century. With this model, computer software is relegated to a commodity status, and the focus is turned to support and services. Any software provider that offers a payroll application is not providing a result that is unique. There are so many rules and regulations concerning the computation of a paycheck that a vendor’s product can not be inherently intellectual property. There are only so many ways to look up a tax table. Also, there are sufficient standard accounting practices to cover every facet of a company’s record-keeping requirements to warrant homogenization of basic processes. The traditional business model of withholding the source code places the user in a stranglehold where the provider dictates features and functions.

The primary objective of the WyattERP project is to permit as many companies as possible to have control over their own destinies by allowing their staff and providers access to the source code. Through this opportunity, a software application can be freely understood and tailored to any particular environment.

Take a look at an example of programming for products that have an expiration date. Once an inventory control module incorporates such a feature, it’s extendable to a multitude of industries. In 1977, my company first dealt with stock rotation and expiration by writing an inventory control application for an explosives manufacturing company. The same rules of inventory rotation were put to use for a hospital pharmacy, a restaurant, and a dry-goods distributor. The same holds true for any provider of gaskets that dry out over time. What my company learned through the experience was that the more companies it provided solutions for, the more generic the fundamental process became. The only change was to the column heading on the reports to satisfy the particular industry’s terminology.

The open source concept expands the exposure for these solutions beyond my company’s customer base to the customer base or employers of all the participants. Today, the participants and users have the ability to pose questions about the solution’s use, limitations, and possibilities, all without fee or restriction. This same support culture will provide fixes and enhancements, also without a fee.

The mere existence of the Internet attests to the fact that open source products can be as reliable, if not more so, as their closed counterparts. According to OpenSource.Org, “The foundation of the business case for open source is high reliability. Open source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets.”

REFERENCES AND RELATED MATERIALS

• Eric’s Steven Raymond’s Random Writings Web site: www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings
• Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v5.0: www.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
• MIDRANGE dot COM Web site: www.midrange.com/midrange-l.htm
• Open Source/400 Web site: www.opensource400.org
• Open Source.Org Web site: www.opensource.org
• Setting Up Shop: The Business of Open-Source Software Web site: www.hecker.org/writings/setting-up-shop.html

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