The developing strategy of Taiwan software and information industry–analysed from the international trend of moving from open source to mixed source

• Main Authors: Shih, Vincent L.C., 施立成
• Other Authors: Liu, Paul C.B.
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/32354268036410741580

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 經營管理碩士學程(EMBA) === 98 === Open Source Software (OSS) or Free Software has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. Comparing with traditional proprietary software, many governments, enterprises and institutions seems to believe that OSS is more cost effective and more secure, and thus support OSS. Similarly, a number of global companies have also started to invest in the development of related products that support OSS. However, after some in-depth analysis of the advantages and shorcomings in pricing, stability and functionality between OSS and proprietary software, it could be found that OSS may not have such high advantages in cost and technical level as its supporters asserted. Regarding the market shares in the last ten years, OSS has gained significant growth in the markets of Web Browser and Mobile Devise OS, but its market shares in Desktop Computer, Notebook, Netbook and Server markets are still far hehind proprietary software. 　　 The increasing popularity of OSS has inevitably triggered relevant issues and risk. From business model perspectives, previously IBM has been a long term OSS supporter and also publicly announced that it will never attack Linux companies and communities with its own patents. However, IBM recently began leveraging its patent portfolio and sending patent infringement warning to an OSS company who may compete with IBM in the server market. This recent case is a good example to highlight the inherent conflict and contradictions between the pursuit of freedom and open sharing spirit in OSS and the pursuit of profit and market shares in enterprise business environment. In order to reduce or manage the potential risk that could be triggered by OSS, more and more companies who use OSS begin to adjust their software strategy by adopting Mixed Source strategy. It has also become a trend in the global ICT industry to adopt or combine both OSS and Commercial Software into one product. Nowadays, more than 50% of OSS vendors start to combine OSS with their internal proprietary source code, more than 60% of OSS vendors have adopted certain types of commercial software licensing model, and some of the original non-OSS companies are also starting to leverage OSS to improve their market competitiveness. 　　With respect to intellectual property rights (IPR), even though some OSS communities still strongly oppose to the concept of IPR protection, some recent cases clearly prove that this kind of ideology is contrary to the trend of further improving IPR protection in the era of knowledge-based economy. Consequently, OSS still inevitably needs to face IPR management, infringement risk and licensing terms enforcement issues. However, due to the lack of professional legal or IPR management personnels in traditional OSS community and OSS projects usually involve numerous technical or code contributors, adopting OSS in current business environment will face many difficulties and challenges in IPR management, IPR enforcement and litigation risk. Another issue lies in the enforcement of OSS licensing terms, recently some OSS communities began to increasingly emphasize that users must strictly comply with all the licensing terms or requirements of the OSS model, and subsequently began to actively pursue legal enforcement actions against those violators. Therefore, it is imperative for any enterprise organization to establish comprehensive risk management and internal control/audit mechanism if it wishes to adopt OSS model. 　　In the past there were lots of media reports that actively promote government sponsored OSS policies in Europe, Asia and other major countries. However, there were less and less OSS only policy in recent years, governments around the world began to take Technical Neutral position or focus on interoperability by adopting a variety of different software licensing models. This development also confirms the international trend of adopting Mixed Source model. As for the software industry development policy in Taiwan, previously it has been focus on OSS related development and subsidy programs only. However, from the execution results, not only there is a huge gap between current market status and the expected results, the return of investment (ROI) from all those government funding programs is also extremely low. Furthermore, from the OSS development policy announced by the government, it is quite clear that there are confusions and myths among related government agencies that our current OSS development or subsidy programs equal to our national information software industry development policy. All of the above issues have seriously hindered the development of information software industry in Taiwan. 　　Based on the above analysis, this study leverages the National Diamond model proposed by the famous compete strategy expert, Michael E. Porter, to analyse the competitive advantages of Taiwan's information software industry. The study further proposes specific recommendations focusing on the organizational leadership, legal environment, innovation of business models, policy index, and the accurate role of think tanks in our government's information software industry development policy. Hopefully there will be some value-added and contributions to the development of information software industy in Taiwan.