Ken Guest’s online diary

These are my notes from the Les Timms talk at the FOSS Means Business Conference on Thursday 16th March 2006 in Belfast.

Les Timms
Open Source Academy

Les Timms is IT Manager for the Development Directorate of Birmingham City Council. He has extensive experience in managing major IT projects, programmes, and services in both commercial and public sectors. Les also has a lead role for technical strategy within the City Council, and has most recently steered the ODPM-funded Open Source Academy project.
Les will be delivering a presentation on the Open Source Academy implementation project in Birmingham libraries. The presentation will focus on the business case for open source, the challenges that have been overcome, and the cultural, technical, and financial issues to be considered when planning an open source implementation in the government sector. [taken from the FOSS Means Business website]

The Open Source Academy is an e-innovations project of the Nothern Ireland eGovernment Unit, focused on the public sector and producing a viable case for OSS as an alternative to proprietary software.
To guarantee impartiality they commisioned an independent report.
A lot of people play it safe in recommending/choosing software, after-all “nobody gets sacked for going with IBM or Microsoft”.

As a “field experiment”, they deployed OSS in a library, tested on ageing infrastructure.
They put OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Gimp on Windows XP to expose library staff to OSS. They also deployed Linux on various PCs, with Gnome and KDE as the desktop environments. They also deployed some Windows PCs.

There were very positive perceptions:
* Many library members found the Linux desktop userfriendly amd easy to navigate.
* They found there was better support for foreign languages such as Chinese and Arabic – important in a multi-ethnic society.
* Users preferred Gnome and KDE over Windows.

There were some negative perceptions:
* Microsoft specific plugins required for Firefox (I guess nobody told them about EasyUbuntu which amongst other things installs the most needed FireFox plugins for Flash, Java and Realvideos).
* Need to sort out issues regarding portable media such as CDs, DVDs, USB sticks and floppy disks.
* There are some accessiblity issues with OpenOffice.org

Framework for evaluating FOSS:
Think through all legality, usability and training requirements.

Technical Conclusions
* Need to work on management regarding portable media.
* OpenOffice.org is suitable for most users, not all as there may be some very specifc requirements that OpenOffice.org doesn’t cater for at present.
* Check interoperability.
* A Linux Desktop is likely to need more configuration than proprietary Operating Systems, if only because the option to over configure the install is there.
* FOSS implepmentations – you get a choice, and can uncover opportunities to improve your business process.
* Accessibility is key in a public facing role.

Management Conclusions
Full set of criteria is required.
Significant investment is required in the decision making proccess.
FOSS affords you no lock-in to proprietary software.
Audit existing apps and support contracts.
Renegotiate support contracts to include support for FOSS.
Look within your organisation for FOSS expertise.

Cultural Conclusions
Check user requirements
You are unlikely to find issues with rolling out OpenOffice.org
Expect resistance/opposition – it’s a natural reflex.

Financial Conclusions
You will make savings in the long term by avoiding forced upgrades.
You will have greater control over the upgrade cycle.
There are real returns available.

These are my notes from the Bruce Perens talk at the FOSS Means Business Conference on Thursday 16th March 2006 in Belfast.

Bruce Perens
Sourcelabs

Bruce Perens is a leader in the Free Software and Open Source (FOSS) community. He is creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of the Open Source movement in Software. He’s founder or co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, The Linux Standard Base, Software in the Public Interest, and No-Code International. Perens released his first Free Software program, Electric Fence, in 1987. He is creator of Busybox, which has spawned its own development community and is part of most commercial devices using embedded Linux. [taken from the FOSS Means Business website]

Q: Why how does FOSS work?
A: People will volunteer to fix code and/or write documentation for the community because it benefits those individuals too. They don’t have to keep re-applying their private patches of code or keep updating their private documentation if that work is made public so others can collaborate.

[There is such a thing called a LAMP stack - this is the combination of Linux, Apache, Mysql and PHP. This is the stack of technologies most commonly used for webservers / website development. There are subtle variations of this that also use the LAMP acronym.]

Amazon uses LAMP. Amazon are happy to work on improving LAMP technologies and are contributing those improvements back to the core projects – they simply will not do this with their own differentiating technologies such as “Recommentation software”. This is a good example of how FOSS can benefit a company’s strategies.

Merrill Lynch, Citibank and similar banking institutions are members of Sourcelabs (and are using Linux). They develop software that their competitors also need and so share the cost of this development.

IBM dropped their AIX version of the unix operating system in favour of Linux because it makes economic sense – enabling people tomake more money and lowering the cost to do so.

In the retail software development paradigm companies have to locate their customers. this is costly: 84% goes to advertising, packaging, locating customers and producing throw-away documentation. Also retailers such as CompUSA charge for shelfspace to manufacturers.
Such margins and costs obviously do not exist in the world of FOSS.
In the FOSS development paradigm you [can] pay developers to customise software to your company’s needs (usually 50% cost for development, 50% overheads).

Software has to do something useful – poeple will use it and write new features for it – submitting their changes to the code back to the project.

Patents
Business Method Patents/Software Patents
There are no disclosure benefits for society regarding software patents. It takes a 21 year wait for the Public Domain clause in patents to come into effect. After this length of time the software innovation is irrelevant.
Software patents are supposed to help the advancement of software development, but doesn’t – there are no proven exampled of it doing so.

Software patents can kill FOSS projects as Courts are too expensive, except for large multinational companies.

How to be more active regarding the software patents issue:

• If you can write well do so. Get your ideas published.
• Get in touch with technical and opinion editors at local magazines and papers etc (just don’t ask to be paid).
• Just communicate [coherently] – contact your MEPs and other representatives to ensure they are aware of the ramifications of software patents
• Grass-roots action is required.

FOSS – how to convince:

1. It’s important that developers should stretch themselves by writing code for normal people.
2. Get people using FireFox, OpenOffice.org (as opposed to paying license fees and having forced upgrades).
3. Business people tent to be good public representatives – to try to influence them.

I’ll be going to the FOSS Means Business conference on Thursday in Belfast. It’s for IT decision makers in medium-sized businesses and in public administration, though any one who’s interested should go to it. The registration is free, so there’s no reason why not.

It will focus on the adoption and use of Free Software/Open Source Software (FOSS), with particular emphasis on the economic and competitive benefits for both the public and private sector.

Given the list of speakers it looks like it will be a very interesting and informative day.