I'm very glad to be here on the opening of Norway's national center for Open Source software. I'm fortunate to be able to work in Norway part of each year as a researcher at Agder University.

Norwegian companies, organizations, and government can profit from increased use of Open Source. Business managers can increase the revenue of their companies by using Open Source software in their operations. There are a few key facts that business managers will need to know to do that.

The first is that there are two kinds of software in any business. Some companies have software that makes them look better to the customer. For example, Amazon has a recommendation system that helps them sell more books. This is what we call a "business differentiator", because it is visibe to the customer and makes the business look better than a competitor. But Amazon also uses Linux, and programs like PHP, and Apache, which are Open Source, to operate their business. And those programs are what we call "infrastructure", they are essential to the business and its operations, but they are what we call non-differentiating because they don't make the business look better to the customer - the customer generally doesn't even know they are there. 95% of the software in any business is "non-differentiating". It's infrastructure or "enabling technology", and lives in a cost-center rather than a profit center. Neither Microsoft nor the Open Source community provide differentiating software, because everyone can get their products. And thus their software can't make a customer-visible difference for one business for very long, because that business' competitors can get it.

So, this tells us how to improve the bottom line in any business that develops its own software. Move as much money as you can to developing software that provides customer-visible business differentiation - that makes the business look better to the customer. But you still need that infrastructure, and Open Source provides a way to distribute the cost and risk of developing infrastructure software among multiple companies. It doesn't hurt those companies to share that development, because it's non-differentiating for their business.

Another interesting fact is that most of the software in the world is never sold. Only 30% of programmers work for companies that sell any software at all [US Department of Commerce labor statistics], and probably about 5% of the software that is written is meant to be sold. Most of the software in the world is written for use inside of one business exclusively. Managers, be sure that if you are paying for all of the writing of any large program, that it will be differentiating for your business. If not, you are wasting your company's money and should be participating in an Open Source community rather than going it alone.

This center will face challenges. Its founders have done a good job at setting it up to maintain its independence. But centers like this are sometimes pressured to do what's in interest of a particular company rather than what's best for the common good and Open Source. The owners and operators of this center are vulnerable to pressure from large companies who would profit if Open Source did not succeed. Resisting that pressure will sometimes be a difficult fight.

Open Source is itself threatened by political agendas a few large companies. Europeans are currently fighting a battle against proposed software patenting laws that could kill Open Source and harm the vast majority of small and medium-sized proprietary software manufacturers, in the interest of a few very large international companies. It's important for this center to help Norway and Europe resist the pressure to enact enforcible software patenting laws.

Today we see the Norwegian universities creating a new restrictive intellectual property policy that will be applied to taxpayer-funded research, and can potentially harm Open Source and Norway's own citizens.

Open Source is also subject to a torrent of fear spread by a few companies that would rather not have it as a competitor. It will be the duty of this center to combat that fear.

Open Standards are like treaties, they allow all programs to speak the same language to each other, whether they are proprietary or Open Source, so that we don't have an incompatible Tower of Babel. It's especially important for government to use Open Standards, because government should not be in the position of requiring that its citizens use a particular vendor's product to communicate with the government.

And there is business pressure against Open Standards as well, first from lazyness and ignorance - there are many government web sites today that only work with Internet Explorer, because that's the only browser that the developers tested. Imagine how much worse those sites will work for handicapped people who must use special tools to view the web and absolutely depend on open standards. There are also a few companies that would rather lock their customers into one product through the creative use of incompatibility. It's this center's duty to educate government and business customers about these problems and how to avoid them.

With a center like this, Norway has the chance to progress tremendously through the use of Open Source and Open Standards. I look forward to participating in the programs of this center, and my best wishes are with them. Thank you.