Aidan Delaney’s weblog

Darragh, Murf, Niall and Vish all work for a small Irish company called propylon who’ve just got their second mention on LugRadio. Well done lads. You must be doing a lot right if you’re the number 3 contributer to OpenOffice.org.

If you use LaTeX and ever want to do something with images and figures. Read this ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/epslatex.pdf it’s great.

Continuing my brief comments on Free and Open Source software (FOSS)….as customers we buy software because of the competitive advantage it will bring our business. That could be as simple as improving document distribution (an intranet portal) or easing communication (email) to analysing and streamlining customer experience (CRM tools). The problem is that, in general, if I can afford a software product from a vendor my compeditor can also afford the same product. Hence it can’t provide any reasonable competitive advantage, or the competitive advantage is provided by the local customisation rules (the “value add” component).

With FOSS you can install applications and build local cusomisation rules on top of it. Macros in OpenOffice.org are an example of this. However with FOSS you also have the opportunity to build in competitive advantage from the ground up. You can take the original source and modify it for your needs. So to a small to medium size business FOSS provides a way to customise the software, but for larger companies and government FOSS provides an opportunity to build competitive advantage from the ground up.

As a large company you could take control of a Linux distribution and ensure that you only have a major platform change every three years. Or you could choose a continuous update policy. The competitive advantage is that you control the whole platform and use it in a manner that benifits your bottom line.

I needed to split a PDF file into multiple files with one page per file.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use PDF::API2;

$pdf = PDF::API2->new;
$pdf = PDF::API2->open($ARGV[0]);
$pagecount = $pdf->pages;
for(my $i=0; $i< $pagecount; $i++) {
my $newpdf = PDF::API2->new;
$newpdf->importpage($pdf, $i, 1);
print “Saving $ARGV[0].$i\n”;
$newpdf->saveas($ARGV[0] . “.$i”);
}

Several of my students have asked me what Open Source is. As of yet I don’t have a sufficiently clear elevator pitch to explain what it is and why it is a good thing^(tm). So I had a think about it over the weekend and here’s the first version of my explaination.

In order to consider Open Source we must first consider Free Software. Free Software is important as it lays out some core terms that customers should demand from their software provider, those of

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

As you can see, the freedoms are written from a philisophical point of view and don’t mention source code at all. The need for source code is driven by the need to protect these freedoms for users.

It has been said that the GNU GPL (a Free Software licence) was the first licence written from the point of view of a software user. Other licences are written from the point of view of the provider, or more generally, the providers legal department. And given that most of us consume more software than we produce, we should be demanding user-friendly software licences.

So where does that leave Open Source? Open Source regards the availability of souce code as important. Thus the licences do not concern themselves with protecting users freedoms, but promoting source code availability.

But Open Source is more than that. It’s also a collection of differing development methodologies. It allows developers to collaborate, generally over the Internet, to develop good software. So under my interpretation the Linux kernel is a Free Software product developed using an Open Source methodology.

If that’s what Open Source is, why is it any good? This answer has to come from the point of view of the customer rather than the producer. As a customer using Open Source I can switch providers. That’s it! There’s no magic. It’s simply the most efficient use of the free market. As an Open Source user I can switch providers without an interruption to service, which is even better. The software that I run on RedHat Enterprise Linux will run on Ubuntu Linux, and vice-versa. Thus as a customer I’m removing a risk factor of my supplier failing or going bust, or charging too much.

There are also some strange benifical side-effects of Open Source. If I use an Open Source product the data I generate with it will always be available to me. And again…as a customer, the data is the only thing that is important to me. I spend time collecting and collating my data (lecture notes in my case) and I’d like it available to me no matter what software platform I use.

Other side-effects include the ability to grow a local economy. When providers can compete to provide a service local knowledge can become a competitive advantage. They found this in Extremadura in Spain where they deploy Open Source software in government institutions. Several small local companies sprung up to compete for services. This kick-started the economy of the region.

Not exactly an elevator pitch But hopefully I’ll be able to extract the main points and turn it into one.

Someone nominated me for the Irish blog awards wich is kinda cool. It’s also nice to see Dave and Planet MiNDS> there, but I’m not surprised as I nominated them.