A packed room at KTH’s main campus welcomed Richard M. Stallman to talk about “The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System”. Stallman (also known as rms) is the founding figure of GNU, a project started in the ’80’s as an attempt to protect the freedoms of software users by building a free operating system.

Figure 1. rms about to sign something

A free operating system is an example of free software. Free does not, in this case, refer to gratis, it rather means free as in “free speech” [www.gnu.org].

“Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

0. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

1. The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

3. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.” [www.gnu.org].

Those four freedoms are encoded in the GNU General Public License (GPL) and thus software distributed for use according to this license is free software (it must be said though that there are other so called open source licenses and some of those are even less restrictive for the end user than the GPL). But why is all this important? What motivates thousands of developers (themselves software users) around the world to produce software of sometimes amazing sophistication and then release it as free software?

According to Stallman the main motivation is to ensure the freedom for users [Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. http://www.gnu.org/doc/book13.html]. According to me, trust has something to do with it as well (but this can perhaps be derived from the concept of freedom as defined above. I don’t know). As so much of our daily life now is dependent on software a few obvious questions are: how can we be sure that this software does what it is supposed to (from a user’s perspective)? On what grounds can it be trusted?

The short answer is that it shouldn’t be trusted. It may contain bugs, strange logic, or other even worse problems. Furthermore, those problems may have been put there deliberately or not. In a closed non-free software world, or “proprietary” as Stallman calls it, a user has no way of knowing. He is completely in the hands of the software producer. This situation alone, this asymmetry of power, is, according to Stallman, so serious that non-free software should be avoided whenever possible. Free alternatives should always be considered.

I understand that the talk was a real eye-opener for several people in the audience who had not heard of this aspect of software before or just never thought of the implications of proprietary software. Philosophy aside, a security consultant that I spoke to found the talk interesting since a mundane property of free software is that it is always open for inspection.

[Addendum]

Maybe I should say something about what is written on the black-board behind Stallman. That’s a few URLs that he recommended.

The first one, www.defectivebydesign.org, concerns a thing called Digital Restrictions Managent (DRM). DRM is a way for software producers to limit what your computer can do for you. Microsoft and Apple are two well-known businesses that are really interested in this. Do you want to copy that CD that you bought so you can listen to music on your mp3-player? Forget it. In the future your Microsoft or Apple powered computer won’t let you.

The second one, www.badvista.org, is related to the first one. It details how Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system Vista can and does restrict its users. Among other things there’s an interesting analysis on the reasons why you need to buy all that new hardware to run Vista.

The remaining three URLs, fsf.org, fsfeurope.org, and gnu.org are gives arguments against non-free software, software patents, and other related stuff.

It is increasingly recognized that when modeling enterprises and the ways they do business, a starting point could be to identify the main actors and the values transferred between them. This can be expressed in terms of business models. A business model is created in order to make clear who the actors are in a business case and explain their relations, which are formulated in terms of values exchanged between the actors. At its core all business models capture the relations between the economic concepts resource, agents, and the events that result in resource creation and distribution among agents.

Business modeling can be used as a starting point for an enterprise when setting out to model its processes. A natural way of working for a business analyst is to first establish in a business model what kinds of business elements, like actors, resources and resource exchanges that exist and later determine how they are to interact with each other in activities and processes.

There are examples in literature where it is argued that the design of a process model is motivated by business decisions made explicit in the business model. But if the design of a process model is motivated by a business model, what motivates the design of the business model?

One can argue that the motivation of a business model can be found in the goals of a business, which are made explicit in a goal model. Goal models and business models are parts of a chain of models, together with process models, that have distinct purposes and describe different aspects of a business. A common view is that:

– Goal models are used in the earliest phases of business and information systems design, where they help in clarifying interests, intentions, and strategies of different stakeholders answering to the “why” of the business.

– Business models give a high level view of the activities taking place in and between organizations by identifying agents, resources and the exchange of resources between the agents. So, a business model focuses on the “what” of a business.

– Process models focus on the “how” of a business, as they deal with operational and procedural aspects of business communication, including control flow, data flow and message passing.

Current SYSLAB research is focussed on the properties of those models and their alignment.

Aligning Business and Process Models
Business process models explain how agents co-ordinate their respective activities to achieve a common goal. But how can we be sure that an operational business process does support these common goals? How can we be sure that the goals are well understood by the agents and that all agents have converging goals? If we focus on the process activities, we can note that some of them may be considered as truly value-creating activities in that they contribute to the achievement of the formulated goals; others may be seen as being more of a coordinative or supporting nature, in that they facilitate the communication among the agents.

Aligning process models and business models raises two major questions. First, what are the basic concepts in a business model? Secondly, how should the gap between business models and process models be filled? These are questions that have recently started to attract attention in a wider research community.

Aligning Business and Goal Models
In goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), one usually proceeds from a goal analysis to a requirements specification, usually of IT systems. However, GORE can also be used for the design of IT-enabled value constellations, which are collections of enterprises that jointly satisfy a consumer need using information technology. The requirements analysis needed to do such a cross organizational design not only consists of a goal analysis, in which the relevant strategic goals of the participating companies are aligned, but also of a value analysis, in which the commercial sustainability of the constellation is explored. Research questions are: what exacly is the relation between goal models and business models? How can this relation be exploited in order to improve the models? What would a method for this exploitation look like?

The main rationale behind such a method would be to facilitate the construction of business models that not only describe what entities exist in a business setting but also include motivations for why those entities are there. Some benefits are that business models becomes more closely connected to the strategic concerns of an enterprise and that it creates a possibility to validate the business models against the enterprise’s goals.

I’d like to complement the incredibly dull recent post about the Collaborative writing. That post was written in the old, uninteresting style that you generally want to avoid in a blog. It is the style of someone _telling_ you about things. Could have been written on any conventional corporate web site.

The following text is from the original project proposal (in Swedish only, sorry). It’s contains also the motivation about the project, why it exist, what are the main problems, and so on. A more intrestng read if you ask me.

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Skrivande av vetenskapliga rapporter (“papper”) är en viktig del av universitetet/högskolans verksamhet. Genom dessa sprids den kunskap som skapas genom forskning samtidigt som resultaten granskas och kvatitetssäkras. De senaste åren har jag och kollegor varit inblandade i skapandet av en hel del sådana rapporter (se http://is.dsv.su.se/Publications.aspx?Lang=en för ett relativt aktuellt index över de rapporter som producerats av personal knuten till Syslab). Som kan avläsas ur detta index är rapporter skapade av enskilda forskare undantag. En typisk rapport har flera författare.

Att flera forskare arbetar tillsammas och författar en rapport medför ofta problem vid skrivandet. Dessa problem sträcker sig över ett vitt spektrum, allt från inkompatibla editorer till oenighet om skrivrutiner. Situationen kompliceras dessutom av att det blir det allt vanligare att enskilda forskare är skilda åt fysiskt och att alltså all kommunikation sker elektroniskt via mail, messenger och telefon istället för personliga möten.

I denna situation ägnas en alltför stor arbetsinsats åt att administrera rapportskrivandet och man konstaterar lätt att det vanliga, traditionella sättet att skriva har brister. Man kan hävda att dessa brister kan åtgärdas mer genom till exempel utbildning i de verktyg man använder eller genom att skapa bättre diciplin i samarbetsformerna. Problemen är kända och olika lösningar har skapats genom åren. Det går till exempel att införa versionshanteringssystem, katalogstrukturer och namngivningsstandarder i skrivprocessen för att komma tillrätta med en del av problemen. Genom sådana åtgärder kommer man utan tvivel långt.

Å andra sidan utvecklas idag nya skrivverktyg och nya sätt att arbeta baserat på Webb-teknik. Dessa nyheter ger möjlighet att arbeta på fundamentalt annorlunda sätt än de som hittills använts och medför att att man i en högre grad kan gå ifrån de verktyg och arbetssätt som skapar de problem som ovan nämnts. Dessa verktyg spänner från Wikis till on-line ordbehandlare som ofta är del av större innehållshanteringssystem (“Content Management System”, CMS). Exempel på produkter för kollaborativt skrivande är MediaWiki som är det program som driver uppslagsverket Wikipedia och de webb-läsarbaserade ordbehandlarna Writely, Zoho Writer och JotSpot. Gobby är ett exempel på en ordbehandlare där samarbete inte sker genom en webb-läsare utan på annat sätt.

Det finns i dessa nya verktyg och arbetsätt möjligheter att avsevärt förenkla arbetet runt rapportskrivandet utan att förlora något i kvalitet hos slutprodukten. Ytterligare fördelar är förbättrad åkomst till dokumentet för medförfattare samt att möjligheterna för universitetetet att inventera vad som producerats över året underlättas. I en sidoanmärkning kan nämnas att mottagare av rapporterna (alltså publicerande förlag, vetenskaplig samfund och allmänheten) bara har krav på slutprodukten (kvalitet, format, etc.).

Processen att ta fram den står det var och en fritt att utforma.

Syftet med detta förslag till internprojekt är alltså att undersöka de nya verktyg och arbetssätt för rapportskrivning som vuxit fram baserat på Webb-teknik. Förhoppningen är att eventuella fördelarna med dessa nyheter överskuggar nackdelarna och att man på sikt åtmistone kan komplettera dagens verktyg och arbetssätt med dessa nyheter. Konsekvenser är att bättre och effektivare sätt att producera rapporter kan införas på DSV. I förlängningen har naturligtvis även studenter vid DSV nytta av detta då rapportskrivande i högsta grad ingår i deras uppgifter/utbildning.

First of all, thank you for the invitation to join this space.

There is a project as Syslab that is coming to a conclusion shortly, called Collaborative writing. It’s all about using new (or new-ish) technology to collaborate when writing for instance a research report. Examples of these technologies are Google.docs (aka Writely) and different Wiki platforms.

The focus of the project is not so much on the technologies per se but to understand how to organise and set them up so as to support the collaborative writing in the best possible way.

I’ll drop a notice in this space when the results of the project is published and becomes widely available.