First look at the SWOT table from 'IST Advisory Group: Software technologies, 
embedded systems and distributed systems: A European strategy towards an 
Ambient Intelligent environment'


This table describes the situation nicely.  However, it falls short of
having a strategy for addressing the problem presented.  We have one.

Our intent is to use the strength in the Open Source Software development
community (7) and some strong SMEs (8)  to combat the Threat of US players
dominating in development platforms(1).  In doing so our principal goal
will be to overcome Weakness (1) -- Inadequate Structure and Weak Culture
for transferring and exploiting university research results, fragmentation
of academic efforts.  That's the weakness we are most familiar with, and
the one we believe we know how to fix.

To put it another way, 'Why is that so much of our research effort
comes to nothing?  Why do the Americans, and not us, take our research
to market?  What exactly is it that goes wrong somewhere between making the
prototype and making the successful company?'

The answer, we believe, is an inadequate understanding of what it takes
to become successful.  In Europe there is a crucial blindness as to
what it takes to be successful in the marketplace.  Technological
superiority we have oodles of.  It's in the marketplace where we fail.
And this is in large part because people in Europe still believe that
good technology sells itself.  This is almost never the case.

The Americans know that.  This is their big secret.  And nobody knows this
better than the Open Source movement.  We routinely create programs that
are much better than those that are commercially available.  And then
what?  Nothing, mostly.  This problem in European competitiveness is
our problem as well.

Over time we have learned, the hard way, that being technologically
excellent is the easy part of the job.  Getting to market is the hard
part of the job.  We believe tthat the European Commission understands
this problem very well.  We do not, however, believe that the EC knows
how to solve it.  Searching over proposals, we found very few Open
Source ones.  This is unsurprising.  Perhaps without intending it,
the EC has made participation by Open Source companies more difficult
that it needs to.

From our outsider's perspective, we see that the EC thinks that it should
plough money into some hopeful line of research, and group some large
industries with some academics, in the hope that the large industries
will use the research in some of their current projects.  There is
some sincere effort to get SMEs involved, but almost exclusively as
consumers of research.  Small manufacturers, in particular, seem to
be the 'ideal SME' that the EC envisioned when crafting its plan.  

We would like the opportunity to show you an alternative way to attack
the problem, one that comes from the Open Source and Agile Programming
world.

First of all, you must start with some SME entrepreneurs and some
professional educators or communicators.  They are essential to your
eventual success, and they need to be on board even before you begin
your first technical expedition.  This is because the first thing to
do is to start with a marketing/educating effort.  You need to do this
in order to attract the best people to your project.  This is a common
problem in the Open Source world.  Some businesses have embraced 
Open Source, primarily out of greed.  They hope to have other people
develop their software, for free, thus saving them the cost of hiring
developers.  They 'hang up a shingle' -- in other words make a
web page, and make a few announcements, and then sit back astonished
when nobody comes.  In the Open Source world, it is not the case that
'if you build it, they will come'.  There are companies who do
succeed at this.

The PyPy development team did things differently.  We first decided to
make a prototype.  This has taken us most of the year 2003, because we
have only been able to do this on our vacations -- about 5 weeks
total. We did this for 2 reasons.  The first is that we were quite
aware that we were going to ask you for money to enable us to work
full time creating something useful that had never been done before.
It would be embarassing and shameful to then fail, because we asked to
do something that could not be done.  A prototype would allow us to
test our novel concept of Object Spaces.  If they did not work, then
our whole idea was unsound.

Moreover, this would give us the time to greatly publicise our project,
and attract the best people to it.  We happen to be some of the biggest
fish in the Python-World Pond, but we made sure that we invited others,
including Guido van Rossum, the biggest fish of all to our development
Sprints.  We worked on our process ensuring that we could work together,
and that no unexpected personality clashes or conflicts would derail
the project.  We went to conference, after conference, after conference
and gave papers and informal talks about what we intended to do.  We
made our own website, set up some mailing lists, and discussed things
not only there, but in the 'python in education' mailing list, the
'marketing python' (this one is about increasing the market share of
Python) mailing list, in the Python developer's list, and in the
newsgroup comp.lang.python.  We hung out on our own internet relay
chat line on irc.freenode.net and answered questions of whoever
dropped by.  We held open Sprints, and let anybody who was interested
participate.

We made an enormous splash.  We are now an extremely high profile 
open source project.  We are being watched.  If we fail, we will do
it quite publically.

Why, you might ask, would we go to all that trouble?  Because, unlike
some projects you know, where 'getting the EU funding' is all that
really matters, and what you do to get it, is secondary -- we find the
EU funding only a means to our goal.  This is because our goal is
multi-facetted.

First of all there is the straight-forward technical goal.  We want to
make an extremely novel specialising compiler for the Python programming
language.  This goal is technically quite formidable, and requires
sophisticated expertise.  

Second of all, those of us who write software using Python hope that
our software will itself be improved.  This is a commercial interest
for the PBF, a large stakeholder.

Third  of all, there is the marketing goal.  We want to make Python
the most used language on the planet.  And that is a much harder goal.
We had to successfully attract the best people to the project, without
causing a crisis that would 'fork the project' -- producing 2 hostile
camps who each point at each other saying 'Mine's the real Python'.
When we are done making PyPy we want to immediately capture the
existing user baser of 175,000. <-- should we make an appendix of how
we calculate that?  And then we want to go after those Visual Basic,
Java, and C++ programmers out there.  Python is currently ranked only
the sixth most popular language on the planet.  We would like to become
number one.

And fourth of all, we want to be the reference project for future
collaboration between the Open Source and the Agile programming
communities, and the EU.  We think that both groups need each other.
The EU, in its statement clearly recognises the fact.  But it seems,
to us, unsure how to do this.  And there are significant risks which
the EU seems to want to take with one hand, while want to prevent
with its other.

For instance, it is not enough to merely have some SMEs involved, in
some small token way.  That will only marginalise them.  You will lose
the very ones you want to attract, those with true entrepreeurial
spirit, and keep those who are only after a safe and satisfactory life
at the government trough.  If you would like your project adequately
disseminated, you must involve the SMEs all through the project.

But this is hard to achieve.  The smallest SMEs cannot afford to
dedicate a full person to the project, and will find the paperwork
crushing.  The project cannot afford to rely on a key player who could
be bought or go bankrupt or become too overworked to contribute at any
moment of time.  What then?  There is, of course, a solution.  If SMEs
banded together, and shared resources, they could function like a
large company.  This has worked successfully for Swedish farmers, and
we believed it could work well for software companies as well.  With
large enough numbers, you can spread the risk around.  While at any
time any PBF member could be in a state of transition, they won't all
be, and somebody equivalent could be found to take the place of
somebody who was temporarily unavailable.

This, however, is only possible if great effort is taken at all times to
keep the process open and transparent.  There must be no secrets.  You
cannot get a replacement on a dime unless you are constantly educating
your larger community.  Otherwise, getting up to speed would take too
long and the project would fail.  Aside from the usual web pages, 
conferences, irc channels, and mailing lists, you must make targetted
FIXME BEA what do you call them?  And host open Sprints, keep your
source open and availabel for download at all times, and use a
process based FIXME BEA is this correct? Agile development model that
is robust in the possibility of change.

This is hard.  This is very hard.  It requires trust, and courage, and
the sort of Egoless programming which is trained, not read about. It is
what the EC has claimed it wants, but which it has not fostered.

Thus, from our point of view, we see our relevance to the IST program
as 2-fold.  First of all we are going to give you the AmbiIntelligent
FIXME_LAURA correct jargon?development platform for networked and
mobile devices that you believe is essential to European competitivness.

But what we also intend to do is to deliver a model of how you can
actually get the Open Source community to work with you -- and, of
course while we deliver the OS community to you, we are also going to
deliver you to them -- we are going to take special effort to document
and publicise _you_ to _them_.  We are going to teach 'how to crack
the system and get the EU to pay for you to develop marvels without
demanding that you lose your soul'.  Because, when it comes down to it,
that is what the OS community wants most.  A chance to make a difference,
change the world, and make it a better place.

If you accept this proposal, and our way of software development, we
will only be the first in a long line of successful Open Source projects
that produce the marvels you ask for.  And we will stick around and 
teach anybody who comes by exactly how we did it.