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Possibilities and Limits of Open Source SoftwareA ThesisPresented to the Faculty of SBS Swiss Business Schoolin Partial Fulfillmentof the Requirement for the DegreeMaster of Business AdministrationbyRoberto SacconAugust 2003Promoter: Dr. Helmut Steigele
 
AbstractSwiss Business School SBSPossibilities and Limits of Open Source SoftwareA Thesis by Roberto SacconPromoter: Dr. Helmut SteigeleKeywords: Open source software, IT costs, software licensesThis thesis studies the possibilities and limits of open source software at the enterprise. The thesisanalyzes the history of the open source movement, describes the open source community andcollaboration model, analyzes the open source development process, describes business models based on open source software, analyzes possible cost savings and presents case studies of popular open source projects.Recommendations are presented, how companies and organizations might benefit from open sourcesoftware and in which cases it should be avoided, because the hidden costs will not pay off thelicense costs savings.Along the process of writing the thesis, more than 20 IT managers from companies andorganizations all over Switzerland had been interviewed. The evaluation of their experiencescontributed significantly to the conclusions of the thesis.
 
Table of Contents
1 Introduction....................................................................................................................................112 What is Open Source Software.......................................................................................................132.1 Myths and realities..................................................................................................................142.2 Free and Open Source Software FOSS...................................................................................152.3 Open Source Definition..........................................................................................................152.4 OSS Licenses..........................................................................................................................182.4.1 General Public License (GPL)........................................................................................182.4.2 Lesser General Public License LGPL.............................................................................182.4.3 Mozilla Public License MPL..........................................................................................192.4.4 BSD License....................................................................................................................192.4.5 Apache Software License................................................................................................192.4.6 Public Domain.................................................................................................................192.4.7 OSS License Summary....................................................................................................202.4.8 Non-Open Source licenses..............................................................................................202.5 OSS and intellectual property.................................................................................................212.6 The Open Source Community................................................................................................232.6.1 Development Model........................................................................................................252.6.2 The Source Code Repository...........................................................................................262.6.3 Software Quality.............................................................................................................262.7 OSS and the Internet...............................................................................................................272.7.1 The Internet as driving force behind OSS.......................................................................272.8 OSS and Digital Media...........................................................................................................273 History of OSS...............................................................................................................................293.1 Linux Operating System.........................................................................................................293.2 Apache Webserver..................................................................................................................303.3 Netscape and the Mozilla Web Browser.................................................................................303.4 The Halloween documents......................................................................................................313.5 OpenOffice..............................................................................................................................323.6 JBoss Enterprise Application Server......................................................................................323.7 Eclipse Development Platform...............................................................................................333.8 City of Munich decides for Linux...........................................................................................333.9 Microsoft's call-to-arms..........................................................................................................343.10 The SCO / IBM lawsuit........................................................................................................344 Engaging with the Open Source Community.................................................................................364.1 Commercial OSS and Services...............................................................................................364.2 Deploying OSS directly from online repositories..................................................................36i
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