Mr Phipps, what makes Open Source unique?

I don’t think Open Source is very unique, it is in the human nature to collaborate on different tasks. People have come together to build barns, plant fields, pick fruits and open source is the same activity but in technology. That’s what open source is: when many people come together on a shared work that they all need to exist. It’s extremely typical of human nature and that's why open source succeeded.

What can traditional companies learn from Open Source organizations?

Interesting question, there is not a single kind of traditional company, but there is only one business model. That business model is to take what is abundant and give it to somebody for whom it is scarce. And they in return give you something that’s abundant to them, typically money. That's the only business model, and what we in open source have learned is that software is not necessarily scarce. Software is something that can be treated as an abundant resource. Also the open source community, by recognizing that software is an abundant resource, something that everybody can have without taking it away to someone else, they choose to monetize what is actually of value for their customers. And so open source communities are full of people who make their money from selling service, selling skill, from selling a unique addon or plugin, from selling DevOps time, rather than making their software artificially scarce and trying to monetize this scarcity. So I think the lesson you can draw from a traditional business is to look at your business and see whether you are monetizing value or whether you are monetizing artificial scarcity. Because if you are monetizing artificial scarcity, in today’s society somebody is coming along and will outcompete your business. Artificial scarcity can’t be maintained in today's technological society. If you don’t believe that go out and ask the hotel companies that are losing business to AirBnB, go ask the Taxi companies in all of Europe cities who are being put out of business by Uber. You might think that your artificial scarcity ends up to protect you forever, but go to look at your business and ask what is the real value that we are offering to our customers, and how do we ensure that we can still monetize this in the future. Looking at open source communities helps you to understand how you should collaborate around the things that are abundant and you should differentiate about what is scarce. I think that a lot of business have forgotten that.

South Tyrol is positioning itself as green region, how can open technologies help to build a sustainable economy?

Once again you have to have “broad thinking” about that. The most obvious answer to that is that if you are involved in an activity around ecology, you are probably not an IT specialist and from open source, you can find the software that you can use to build your software stack. You don’t have to build it from scratch. Open source has two very important properties, first, it comes with the freedom to do what you need to do. And the second is that because it comes with this freedoms it costs you nothing to procure the software. All the money that you have to spend is to configure and deploy it. As a sustainable business, you can build rapidly on open source, rather than going to a commercial supplier.

That’s the obvious lesson. The less obvious lesson is that open technologies show you how to engage communities. And for me, the key to sustainable technology is human community engagement. And that's what open source communities do, they engage the power of the people to build software that if done in secret, as proprietary software, would need a huge amount of money to be spent on it. And sustainable businesses could do the same thing, working with communities rather than attempting to exploit communities. Sustainable businesses can rapidly grow by putting skills together.

What is the state of open source adoption in public administrations and what are the major forces against it?

There is actually quite a lot of open source software in public administrations, but it tends to be infrastructure rather than front office and the reason for that is in the front office you have to take into account more than just technology when deploying software. You have to understand how people cope with change. And you also have to learn how people cope with advertising. What differentiates proprietary software more than anything else, is that proprietary software companies advertise. So when you are deploying opensource software into a public administration you have to realize that all your employees are being marketed to by proprietory companies. They have been told how the proprietary product is great. They’ve been told how the proprietary product is easy. They’ve been told how the proprietary product integrates well with other proprietary products. And nobody is doing the same for open source software. So when you are deploying open source software you have to educate who uses it to understand the benefits.

I see very little open source in the frontend office and where I see it companies are marketing against it. For example, I am familiar with the situation of a public administration in Europe - I won’t name who they are - but that public administration has got a service provider that created what looks like a research report, that claims to prove that the open source software the administration is using is bad. There is no equivalent organization who can create the other report that explains how the open source software helps in maintaining flexibility for the PA, how it is saving money, how it is preventing corporate control. So we see only marketing from one side, and that creates a lot of political difficulties for bringing open source software into public administration. So my advice is to never tread the deployment of open source in PAs as a technical project. It is something that always requires a political will. It always requires executive support, It always requires education of the users.

When I've seen open source failing here then it was because official’s fear of being voted out of office or executives that feared they won’t get their bonus.

You are involved in many open source initiatives world wide, according to you what are the most "open" regions in Europe and the world? What are their main characteristics?

I’ve seen a lot of open source software in southern Europe. I think they are characterized by smaller administrations, by more active environments. But there is not any one region though that’s prominent. What is more an indicator is a city or a region that got an understand what opensource does. Far too many people believe that opensource just is cheaper, and that’s the result of Free Software using the word ‘free’ freely. It's very easy if you have English as the first language to think that’s “Free” its about the price. The regions that succeeded with open source are the ones that have understood that “Free Software” is about freedom, the liberty to solve your own problems and what liberty really means is autonomy. If you got autonomy then yes you get a cheaper price, but you also get control over the architecture, you get control over the migration schedule. You control all the moving parts. That means, well you can fail, but if you fail then it’s because you failed rather than your systems integrator failed. Now that can be good and bad. Because it’s really good for some to be able to blame their systems integrators for the failure of your ICT projects. If you are using open source software you can’t really blame your systems integrator. So open source is a powerful tool, that gives you freedom, and power comes with responsibility. I still like the example of Munich. They keep on keeping out Windows, and they keep on demonstrating they know what they are doing. Also, some regions in Spain are doing a good job. I still find it regretful how few national governments understand open source.

Mr. Phipps, you are a frequent guest at SFSCon, what has changed over the years?

Honestly, not very much has changed. It remains a conference full of enthusiastic people. I remain a conference with a good spread of age range. I think the conference did not change so much but the people have. I turned to watch the young people in the back rows and I realized that in the front rows there are the people that were their age 8 years ago. The same people now are successful businessmen or have key positions in the public administration.