Free Software: Challenges and opportunities for the next decades, Roberto di cosmo

Free/Open Source Software: some challenges andopportunities for the next 10 years

Roberto Di CosmoIRILL Director

www.dicosmo.org - www.irill.org

Universite Paris Diderot - IRILL - INRIAFrance

November 14th, 2013OW2Con

Roberto Di Cosmo (Paris Diderot / Irill / INRIA) Free Software Challenges November 2013 / OW2 1 / 28

http://www.dicosmo.org

http://www.irill.org

Short Bio

15 years of Free and Open Source Software

1998 Piege dans le Cyberespace

1999 DemoLinux

2004 EDOS

2007 Free Software Thematic Grouphttp://www.

systematic-paris-region.

org/fr/logiciel-libre

100 members (SMEs, Labs)30 projects ( 150Me)

2008 Mancoosi projectwww.mancoosi.org

2010 IRILL www.irill.org


http://www.systematic-paris-region.org/fr/logiciel-libre



www.mancoosi.org

www.irill.org

Outline

1 Free Software basic facts

2 Free Software challenges and opportunities

3 Free Software Licensing Complexity

4 Free Software Technical Complexity

5 Coccinelle

6 IRILL


Outline





5 Coccinelle

6 IRILL


Reminder: FOSS

free (as in free beer, or gratuit) software which has not to be payed(today)

free (as in free speech, or libre) software granting 4 freedoms to its users:1

0 freedom to use the software1 freedom to study the source code of the software and to

adapt it to user needs2 freedom to distribute software copies3 freedom to distribute modified software copies

two points of view: the freedom one as outlined above (“free software”),the technical one pivoting around source code availability (“open source”)

1there are of course also obligations, which vary according to the license: GPL, BSD,Mozilla, MIT/X, AGPL, . . .


Free software is everywhere


Some numbers that say it all

IT Market

FOSS in France: 2.5 billions euros in 2012 (PAC)RedHat: 1 billion dollars in 2012

OS Market

There Are Now 1.3 Million Android Device Activations Per DayEric Schmidt, September 2012

Number of FOSS projects

2,091,753 FOSS projects Antepedia, May 2013

Across all layers

Linux, Apache, OpenStack, Hadoop, Postrgres, Alfresco, Zimbra,LibreOffice, Talend, ...

FOSS is or will be part of your software project: get ready!



IT Market


OS Market




Across all layers





IT Market


OS Market




Across all layers





IT Market


OS Market




Across all layers





IT Market


OS Market




Across all layers


FOSS is or will be part of your software project: get ready!Roberto Di Cosmo (Paris Diderot / Irill / INRIA) Free Software Challenges November 2013 / OW2 7 / 28

Outline





5 Coccinelle

6 IRILL


Challenges and opportunities

FOSS is radically changing the way software is conceived, developed,maintained, deployed, tested, proven, marketed and sold.

This is a tidal change with disruptive power:

challenges build transparent software (re)using a multitude ofcomponents available with their source code

opportunities huge new market opening up for new tools and expertise

Let’s see a few aspects of this revolution.























Outline





5 Coccinelle

6 IRILL


FOSS as Lawyer’s nightmare

Proprietary software

There are as many licences as products, but the lawyer’s life is easy: thebasic answer to the question

May I copy/modify/adapt/distribute/etc. software X?

is almost always a very simple NO.

Free software

Lawyer’s life is more complex: there are only a few dozens licenses formillions of FOSS components, but the basic answer to the question

May I do X with software Y?

is almost always It depends....


FOSS as Lawyer’s nightmare

Proprietary software

There are as many licences as products, but the lawyer’s life is easy: thebasic answer to the question

May I copy/modify/adapt/distribute/etc. software X?

is almost always a very simple NO.

Free software

Lawyer’s life is more complex: there are only a few dozens licenses formillions of FOSS components, but the basic answer to the question

May I do X with software Y?

is almost always It depends....


Licence compatibility issues


Bringing Tools InYou can do much more with FOSS than proprietary software, but noteverything: famous lawsuits concerning Busybox have shown that FOSSlicence obligations are real.The gpl-violations.org project actively pursues violators.

This created a business opportunity for companies that sell tools to spotlegal bugs (sic!) in your software:

Blackduck (30% annual growth recently!)

Palamida

There are also FOSS players:

FOSSology (HP, free software)

Ninka (Daniel German, free software)

But...

This is just the tip of the iceberg...and the least useful and/or interesting one!


gpl-violations.org

Bringing Tools InYou can do much more with FOSS than proprietary software, but noteverything: famous lawsuits concerning Busybox have shown that FOSSlicence obligations are real.The gpl-violations.org project actively pursues violators.This created a business opportunity for companies that sell tools to spotlegal bugs (sic!) in your software:


Palamida




But...



gpl-violations.org



Palamida




But...



gpl-violations.org



Palamida




But...



gpl-violations.org



Palamida




But...



gpl-violations.org



Palamida




But...



gpl-violations.org



Palamida




But...



gpl-violations.org

Outline





5 Coccinelle

6 IRILL


Bringing Tools In, reloaded

Tools are needed to trace software origin, evolution, copies and forks; thisallows to

have a complete view of a full bill of materials (Antelink, Blackduck)

identify code flows, and vulnerability duplications (Antelink, ...)

profile community contributions (Bitergia)

... you name it

This is starting to show the way of the future...







... you name it








... you name it








... you name it








... you name it



Who contributes? how much? to what? ...

Answer

Bitergia’s dashboards www.bitergia.org


www.bitergia.org

Who contributes? how much? to what? ...

Answer

Bitergia’s dashboards www.bitergia.org


www.bitergia.org

Where does this code come from?

Answer

Antepedia Reporter’s dashboards www.antelink.com


www.antelink.com

Where does this code come from?

Answer

Antepedia Reporter’s dashboards www.antelink.com


www.antelink.com

Complex software in industry, ten years from now

Free Software is making software artefacts transparent:

no artificial barriers among architectural layers. . .

theoretical possibility to follow the flow of computation from the moreabstract layers down to the moving bits in the hardware

umprecedented levels of quality assurance and certification can beexpected

this is not easy: we need new theory and new tools

it will take time, effort and good cooperation between industrialpartners, higher education and research actors

Industry need to invest in Free Software fundamental research: the sooner,the better.

This is the kind of research we promote at IRILL: let’s see a concreteexample of what can be done.






























































Outline





5 Coccinelle

6 IRILL


Coccinelle: flexible abstractions to master collateralevolutions

Thanks to Gilles Muller and Julia Lawall for the following slides. Seehttp://coccinelle.lip6.fr/ for more information.

The collateral evolution problem:

Library functions change.

Client code must be adapted.

– Change a function name, add an argument, etc.

Linux context:

– Many libraries: usb, net, etc.– Very many clients, including outside the Linux source tree.


http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/

Coccinelle: flexible abstractions to master collateralevolutions

Thanks to Gilles Muller and Julia Lawall for the following slides. Seehttp://coccinelle.lip6.fr/ for more information.

The collateral evolution problem:

Library functions change.

Client code must be adapted.

– Change a function name, add an argument, etc.

Linux context:

– Many libraries: usb, net, etc.– Very many clients, including outside the Linux source tree.


http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/

An example

Evolution: A new function: kzalloc=⇒ Collateral evolution: Merge kmalloc and memset into kzalloc

fh = kmalloc(sizeof(struct zoran fh), GFP_KERNEL);

if (!fh) {

dprintk(1,

KERN_ERR

"%s: zoran open(): allocation of zoran fh failed\n",

ZR_DEVNAME(zr));

return -ENOMEM;

}

memset(fh, 0, sizeof(struct zoran fh));


An example

Evolution: A new function: kzalloc=⇒ Collateral evolution: Merge kmalloc and memset into kzalloc

fh = kzalloc(sizeof(struct zoran fh), GFP_KERNEL);

if (!fh) {

dprintk(1,

KERN_ERR

"%s: zoran open(): allocation of zoran fh failed\n",

ZR_DEVNAME(zr));

return -ENOMEM;

}

memset(fh, 0, sizeof(struct zoran fh));


A simple semantic patch

Abstract away the details of a patch

@@

expression x;expression E1,E2;@@

- x = kmalloc(E1,E2);+ x = kzalloc(E1,E2);...

- memset(x, 0, E1);

A single snippet ... updates 355/564 files!


Practical results

Collateral evolutions

Semantic patches for over 60 collateral evolutions.

Applied to over 5800 Linux files from various versions, with a successrate of 100% on 93% of the files.

Bug finding

Generic bug types:

– Null dereference, initialization of unused variables, etc.

Bugs in the use of Linux APIs:

– Incoherent error checking, memory leaks, etc.

Over 450 patches created using Coccinelle accepted into Linux

Starting to be used by other Linux developers

Probable bugs found in gcc, postgresql, vim, amsn, pidgin, mplayer


Outline





5 Coccinelle

6 IRILL


IRILL in the big picture

IRILL (Innovation et Recherche en Informatique sur le LogicielLibre):a center to host researchers, teachers, engineers, and freesoftware developers to work together on the new scientific,technological and educational challenges of Free Software

See more info on http://www.irill.org.

IRILL has an industry partnership program: join today!



IRILL in the big picture

IRILL (Innovation et Recherche en Informatique sur le LogicielLibre):a center to host researchers, teachers, engineers, and freesoftware developers to work together on the new scientific,technological and educational challenges of Free Software

See more info on http://www.irill.org.

IRILL has an industry partnership program: join today!



Conclusions

Free Software is here to stay, and is disrupting the traditional organizationof the software industry.

Developing, maintaining, marketing, integrating, and qualifying softwarebuilt with or in the FOSS world is the source of new challenges that arenew opportunities for disruptive innovation.

The time has come to stop asking whether FOSS is relevant... and startgetting ready to use it properly.


Conclusions





Conclusions





Questions?


Free Software: Challenges and opportunities for the next decades, Roberto di cosmo

Technology

software freedom

way software

transparent software

libre software

software project

gratuit software

freeopen source software

software copies freedom