Time for an Open Source Web Solution?

As a term, open source gets tossed around as a ready-made mantra of the code hip. It’s under­stand­able. Why sup­port The Man when cool code hack­ers have been the ones behind the move to apps and prod­ucts includ­ing OSs like Linux and the upcom­ing Google Chrome OS, Wikipedia, Mozilla’s Fire­fox (now in its fifth year and still grow­ing), and Google’s Android (smart­phones and now net­books). Even the odd sound­ing Dru­pal is gain­ing trac­tion: this open source CMS enables one per­son or a whole group to pub­lish, man­age and orga­nize a wide vari­ety of con­tent on a website.

That last free soft­ware pack­age came to the fore recently when it was announced that the U.S.‘s first CTO, open source cham­pion Anesh Chopra, uses the app to run the Whitehouse.gov website.

I know. Yawn. Most of us involved in con­tent cre­ation treat all of this as just some­thing code­heads would care about. We’re more inter­ested in the apps that sit on top of our Mac or PC OSs, whether it’s Final Cut or After Effects. A Linux-based pro­gram like Gimp, for exam­ple, doesn’t come close to pro­vid­ing the slick, bul­let­proof expe­ri­ence of Pho­to­shop.

But with the Web play­ing an ever-greater part of our careers, there’s a lot more to know about than just a hand­ful of apps or the Mac vs. PC fan­boy wars. You need to know about the increas­ingly impor­tant role open source soft­ware plays.

That’s what made it use­ful to attend a recent Producer’s Guild of Amer­ica (PGA) Salon Series panel. It’s the PGA’s New Media Coun­cil East that actu­ally puts these pro­grams together, headed up and hosted by always capa­ble, ever-affable Chris Pfaff, chair­man of the group.

As Pfaff noted in a press release before the event held at The New School, pro­duc­ing con­tent using open source soft­ware “is no longer a rar­i­fied option, but a long-term strat­egy for pro­duc­tion companies.”

Nor­man Basch, Linda Dra­bik, Tatum Lade

Three pan­elists addressed the assem­bled group of about 50 pro­duc­ers and other cre­ative types in the New School audi­to­rium: Nor­man Basch, recently of app devel­oper Reser­voir Labs; Linda Dra­bik, Kaltura (open source video plat­form); and Tatum Lade, Diver­sion Media (open source web app developer).

Chris joked dur­ing his intro­duc­tory remarks that the fourth pan­elist, Brian Mur­phy of AdMob, fol­lowed what must be found some­where as part of every startup’s busi­ness plan: get bought by Google, which is exactly what hap­pened with AdMob, a devel­oper of open source apps for mobile adver­tis­ing. The elec­tronic ink, it seems, had barely dried from Pfaff’s invite when com­pany execs had to recuse them­selves from talk­ing before the $750 mil­lion pur­chase went through.

Why is open source soft­ware gain­ing mar­ket share and in some cases becom­ing a hot invest­ment prop­erty? Some point to the prospect of con­tin­u­ously improv­ing soft­ware: open source devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ties work for free, so why not tap into that?

Red Hat Linux, for exam­ple, offers a free non­com­mer­cial ver­sion that ben­e­fits from thou­sands of free work­ers pour­ing over code to improve it. The com­pany sells a com­mer­cial ver­sion to large cor­po­ra­tions, which it sup­ports, writ­ing cus­tom mod­i­fi­ca­tions and other tweaks.

In his open­ing remarks, Pfaff recalled Metcalfe’s law; the com­puter net­work pio­neer had noted that the value of a telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work is pro­por­tional to the square of the num­ber of users con­nected to it. Fax machines for exam­ple only became use­ful when prac­ti­cally every­one in busi­ness had one.

Open source soft­ware took off when the Inter­net con­nected hack­ers and coders work­ing world­wide into a grow­ing resource.

Open source means many dif­fer­ent things. Take lower costs upfront, and lower main­te­nance for exam­ple. There is also the abil­ity to see all of the app’s code (key for mak­ing spe­cific changes you may need) as well as free­dom from the future whims of com­pa­nies that you can’t con­trol, or may go out of business.

That last point is more impor­tant than many might real­ize at first, said the panel’s Nor­man Basch. Com­pa­nies may decide to drop devel­op­ment of an app you’ve based your busi­ness around, which could shut you down.

While open source advo­cates like to tout the word ‘free’, Basch noted that “There are two mean­ings to the word free” that you might do well to keep sep­a­rate, that you can be free to do what­ever you want and free in terms of eco­nom­ics, that some­thing is free of cost.

Some­times the two con­cepts dove­tail and some­times they’re com­pletely dif­fer­ent. Basch says that the open source move­ment is gen­er­ally talk­ing about the first kind of free–free to do what you choose with the software–and not the sec­ond kind of free, as in free lunch, which is what some­one new to the open source trend might think is most important.

That leads to fur­ther com­pli­ca­tions he pointed out when you look at free­ware, which is not the same as open source nec­es­sar­ily. All open-source soft­ware is gen­er­ally free and that means royalty-free, but all free­ware doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily allow you access to the code, so it’s not really free in the larger sense. For exam­ple Microsoft comic a num­ber of its devel­oper pro­grams avail­able for free, but will never allow full access to the code under­neath nor allow any­one to change it, exactly the oppo­site of open source software.

While it’s only a lit­tle over two years since its pub­lic launch, Kaltura has caught the fancy of the open source media com­mu­nity. The New York-based com­pany touts itself as offer­ing “the world’s first Open Source Online Video Plat­form” with some 38,000 active users claimed.

The video-centric app runs on servers, and enables web­sites to include upload­ing, import­ing, edit­ing, anno­tat­ing, remix­ing, pub­lish­ing, syn­di­cat­ing, search­ing, mon­e­tiz­ing, and mon­i­tor­ing both video and photos.

Linda Dra­bik

Any­one who wants to try out the app can down­load the SDK for free, but to use it you have to know how to put it on a server, work with ISPs, con­fig­ure and com­pile the app, and run it on a data cen­ter. If you can’t han­dle that sort of code wran­gling, pro­duc­ers can turn to the active online com­mu­nity for help, or hire the com­pany itself, says Linda Dra­bik, Kaltura direc­tor of busi­ness development.

How can you use the soft­ware? Accord­ing to a post­ing on the Kaltura user forum, one approach would be to install Kaltura CE on a server and use that to man­age your video con­tent on the “back-end”. You could then install Dru­pal, Word­press or a cus­tom piece of soft­ware to act as your “front-end” (i.e. the inter­face that users of the sys­tem will inter­act with). You would then import videos into your Kaltura database.

Besides on your own site, Kaltura can also cre­ate embed­d­a­ble video so that you can embed them in blogs, Face­book, and else­where. You can also cre­ate appli­ca­tions that will accept uploads of user gen­er­ated con­tent such as Web­Cam videos.

But for those pro­duc­ers who blanch at the thought of work­ing with such a server-side app, Dra­bik rec­om­mends the soft­ware as a ser­vice route.

It’s a busi­ness con­sid­er­a­tion of what your time and effort is worth, says Dra­bik. You need to decide if your time is bet­ter spent build­ing these apps your­self or is it bet­ter to spend your time actu­ally mak­ing con­tent and so decid­ing to buy it as a turnkey ser­vice app.

In the lat­ter case, users can expect to pay a yearly license fee based on their usage. For this, “We would have to have a good under­stand­ing of (the filmmaker’s) require­ments, which then would enable us to pick the right com­po­nents,” says Dra­bik. Arriv­ing at the final pric­ing would come after the user picked the desired fea­tures and functionality.

What would it cost? “His­tor­i­cally we serve both the long tail (i.e. small yet con­stant sales) and larger com­pa­nies, so it’s dif­fi­cult to say with­out meet­ing and dis­cussing with the film­maker,” says Dra­bik. “We will see what their bud­get is and will try our best to work with them.”

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