Because:
- Christmas is around the corner
- Games are the subject of degree courses within UK HE these days
I thought I’d point to the latest release of one of the best free or open source games out there Freeciv. Try not to waste too much time, though.
Archive for November, 2008
I recently asserted that we should be educating people about how open source is managed, developed and supported. Without this kind of education we limit our ability to capitalise on the opportunities presented by a maturing open source industry. However, this is not the only reason why we should be providing this kind of education.
Jon Hall, Executive Director of Linux International, a man with plenty of experience as a computer science lecturer, recently wrote an article for Linux Pro Magazine with the title “Seeking the next Einstein: Show me the code“.
In this article Jon observes that access to source code is one of the most valuable educational tools there is for programmers (new or old). He reminds us of the efforts of John Lions who annotated a copy of the complete source of Unix. A work which became one of the most sought after books for computer science students, despite licence changes in Unix preventing its legal use for quite some time. Jon says that “looking at a good programmer’s code is still a great way to learn the craft.” Personally I would go much further than that.
I discovered open source during my undergraduate computer science degree as a mature student in 1995. Being able to examine and use open source libraries throughout my studies led me to the creation of a final year project that won me a first class honors. However, it was not just reading peoples code that allowed this, it was the hands on support given to me, in return for my own minor contributions, by the people who wrote that code. These people were real programmers, building full scale applications for use in the real world.
I attended less than 20% of the lectures and tutorials on my course, yet I still managed to get that First Class degree. I do not consider myself to be a gifted computer scientist, my educational success was a direct result of the combination of a well structured theoretical degree and solid practical experience outside of the normal teaching process.
My engagement with open source continued through my early research career, it formed an important part of my materials as a computer science lecturer and it put food on my table when “between jobs”. Today I spend my time trying to help others understand the benefits of open source and open development.
In his article, Jon acknowledges the educational value of free and open source software, but he goes on to turn this on its head. He goes on to observe that the openness of source code “will help us find the next generation of experts”. In other words, as well as helping us round out skills in our workforce, it also ensures that our staff can identify other experts and thought leaders in any given area of expertise.
It is my opinion that open source and open development as a vital part of skills development, if you are interested in such activities please contact us.
Open source has emerged as one of the most important IT movements in recent times. IDC said “Open Source is the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980’s.” Evidence of this can be seen in all sectors, for example the UK government has defined a policy that aims to deliver value for money by ensuring that procurement in the public sector considers open source alongside closed source as well as ensuring that software resulting from publicly funded research is sustained through commercialisation and/or open source licensing.
The for-profit sector is adopting open source even more readily. Gartner predict that “By 2012, 80 per cent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology.” This figure was revised, within two months to 90%, whilst IDC believes that open source will eventually play a role in the life-cycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers.
A survey of nearly 1000 IT staff in the UK, Germany, France and North America, commissioned by Actuate, showed that fifty four percent of businesses in the UK felt that the benefits of open source outweighed any negative aspects, a significant increase over forty five percent last year. This upward trend appears to be based on experience rather than expectations with forty three percent of responding businesses in the UK already using open source, whilst six in ten French and German firms do so. Similarly, the above mentioned IDC study finds that of the 5,000 survey respondents, open source software is in production at fifty four percent of their organisations.
Even Microsoft, historically one of the most vocal opposers of the open source movement, has been using open source components since Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition using open source components since Windows 2000. Today open source related announcements come from Microsoft on a regular basis. For example, Microsoft has recently been engaging directly with a variety of open source development projects. In addition they have had two open source licences approved by the Open Source Initiative. Microsoft now hosts and releases software under those licences.
Another of Gartners top predictions for 2008 is that “by 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as a service subscription instead of as a product licence”. The service subscription model is one of the most commonly found open source business models. For example, it is the main revenue generator in Sun Microsystems business model (Sun recently acquired MySQL, another open source business, for $1B).
However, all is not well in this increasingly open future. Research conducted for Actuate found that six in every ten respondents said there “were serious problems finding the right IT skills to implement and manage open source solutions”. As more open source is adopted across all sectors this skills shortage will become more acute since there are currently very few educational or training organisations offering courses that focus on open source, open standards and open development.
The reason for this lack of skills development is simple. The people who understand “open” are able to command higher than average salaries due to the scarcity of skills which makes training necessary. Consequently, there is a shortage of teachers and trainers ensuring new graduates and existing staff have the open source related skills required by employers. The majority of those who genuinely understand open source licencing, development and deployment are too busy earning high incomes by helping companies realise the benefits of an open source strategy.
OSS Watch are currently building a network of organisations and individuals interested in tackling the open source skills problem. It is our intention to create a comprehensive set of freely available training materials. We also hope to provide a supportive infrastructure to maintain and deliver these materials in a variety of situations such as workbased learning and formal education.
If your organisation is interested in such activities please contact us.
The second keynote at ApacheCon US 2008 was from Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Ph.D. who said she had “witnessed the birth of a new global community rising above the depths of despair “. This keynote described what she had witnessed.
Shahani started with the often quoted “if I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants” (Isaac Newton). In the scenario to be described the giants were identified as those people in the global open source communities. The people who work together responsibly in transparent collaboration to achieve common goals in efficient and effective ways.
The common goal that drove the people described in this keynote was to alleviate suffering. The outputs of the comunity efforts Shahani witnessd was Sahana, a free and open source disaster management system. Sahana is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems found during a disaster. These include finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers and tracking camps. Sahana is a tool to aid communication and coordination between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.
Margaret Mead once said “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed people can change the world”. Sahana is a project that proves just how the open source way of doing things allows those thoughtful and committed people to truly change the world. However, there is a caveat here. We are not talking about the kind of open source that just slaps a licence on some code. We are talking about community led development of open source code, or as many call it, open development.
The Horrific Start of the Sahana Story
The Indian Ocean Tsunami struck on December 26, 2004. The first wave thundered into Sri Lanka at 8.30, a second wave hit 20 mins later. Two thirds of of the Sri Lankan coastline was affected. In Sri Lanka alone 35,000 people died, 100,000 houses were destroyed, a further 50,000 houses were considerably damaged. In total 5% of the Sri Lankan population were instantly homeless, whilst 500+ million kilos of rubble and waste was dumped on the island.
The result was destruction of unimaginable proportions spread across the whole country. Scenes of horror everywhere. For example, a train on a coastal track was stopped due to flooding in the next village. Villagers, who were running from the first wave, found the train and climbed onto the roof in the hope of escaping the flood. The second wave hit the train. The train was smashed by the wave. Thousands died instantly.
The response from the rest of the world was amazing. We rose up to help within hours, cash started flooding into aid agencies. In the affected regions local people set up refugee camps, aid collection points and medical camps in frenzied, chaotic attempts to alleviate the suffering. Within days foreign aid workers and aid was arriving.
In Sri Lanka a small group of IT gurus stayed behind their computer screens. They suspected they could do more with their keyboards than they could with their shovels. Initial communications with organisations claiming to have disaster management systems turned up blank in terms of suitability for a disaster of this scale. The IT guru’s immediately started communicating the scale of the problem to the open source communities they were a part of. I distinctly remember the despair in those early blog reactions from people who’d seen the affects of the Tsunami first hand and the chaos that followed.
This growing band of IT specialists knew that they could build software to help coordinate the relief efforts. They set to it in the only way they knew how - they created an open development community. It is true that the majority of early work came from Sri Lanka itself, but critical support was forthcoming from other significant players around the world.
At this very early stage, only hours after the Tsunami hit, nobody knew what they needed to build, they just knew they could build something.
The Birth of Sahana
On Dec 29th Sahana (a Sri Lankan word for relief) was born. A call to the Sri Lankan prime minister, with a single question, gave the IT folk the direction they needed. The question was “what is the greatest need right now?”, an answer came immediately - “a missing persons registry,” something to help unite people separated in the evacuation efforts and to help rescue workers identify the dead.
The IT gurus got to work.
Development efforts were frantic. Contributions came in from around the world, there were more than 80 people active on the project. Work continued around the clock and the first useful release was made in about seven days. After that major releases were being made almost daily.
It was quickly realised that Sahana had mobilised enough effort to go beyond the missing person registry. People out in the field had reported that there were refugee camps that had more equipment, food and medical supplies than they needed, whilst other camps needed more supplies. As only true open development allows, individual effort was immediately directed (by the individuals themselves) to areas in which they could make the most impact. Development teams listened to the needs of the users, which were relayed by people on the ground, and simply got on with providing solutions.
Sahana Phase II
Sahana today has been completely rebuilt to provide a more maintainable architecture. Today it has an impressive list of features and continues to receive contributions from across the world. It has been deployed in China, Peru, New York, Indonesia, Philippines, Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Ohloh estimates $4.3M of effort has gone into writing the Sahana application, what Ohloh cannot do is estimate the impact it has had in disaster situations across the world.
The efforts of the Sahana team also spawned a concept and community founded by a humanitarian consultant, Paul Currion, and the Sahana project lead, Chamindra de Silva, based on the more generic ideals of Humanitarian-FOSS.
All this happened because people just wanted to help. The success of Sahana is a result of the fact that the open development model, when applied correctly, just works. I personally believe that Sahana would not have been possible in the time frames and budgetary restrictions of the real world, if a closed model with tight management structures had been employed. Certainly, the lack of any pre-existing disaster management software would seem to support this.
What was needed was the arrival of just the right leadership and just the right motivation for those willing to help realise the vision (yes, open development is all about strong leadership).
It would appear that the Sri Lankan government also agrees that open source is the way forward. They have seen, first hand, the power of open development. Shahani reported in her keynote that the Sri Lankan government is now working hard to further benefit from the lessons learnt in the Sahana project. In particular the government is examining its procurement policies.
The people of Sri Lanka get it too. The University of Moratuwa had the highest number of successful students in the Google Summer of Code this year, pretty impressive for a country with about a third of the population of the UK. I had the honour of meeting some of these students as a GSoC administrator for The Apache Software Foundation. Let me tell you, these are impressive people.
Does it Take a Disaster?
Does it really take a disaster of the scale of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami to communicate the power of open development to the rest of the world. Certainly, hard facts don’t seem to count a great deal.
A video of the keynote will be available from Linux Pro Magazines archives (at the time of writing the archives were not yet available).
In 2007 Brian Kelly convinced me I should try Twitter, I’d been avoiding it for some time as I simply did not “get it”. I agreed, started following Brian and a bunch of other people and almost immediately got totally wound up by someone tweeting about what was happening in a baseball game they were watching in the states.
I’m a big sports fan, but having about 20 tweets in the space of a couple of hours telling me someone I’d never heard of had hit a home run or caught a ball was not what I wanted. I wanted the “watercooler talk” that Brian had promised me. No problem thought I, I’ll stop following them (which was a shame as this was someone whose opinions and thoughts I value).
Despite having stopped following them Twitter kept sending me their tweets. This, coupled with a number of other bugs made me reject twitter very quickly as the unnecessary distraction I had expected it to be.
However, Brian has continued to blog about how useful twitter can be - often providing examples of how it has helped him with his work. At the same time many other people I respect have started to tell me how good it is. So, when I attended ApacheCon US recently and an attendee requested to follow me I thought I’d give it another try. After all, conferences is where most people seem to get the most value out of Twitter.
Immediate impressions were poor - the link in the email to accept this new follower told me “I couldn’t use the service in the way requested” (eh? I was following the link they supplied!) I tried to use the search functionality to look them up, but that was “temporarily disabled”.
It felt good to rant for 140 characters or less about how rubbish Twitter was. It felt even better when Josie Fraser instantly took the proverbial out of me for my intolerance (we eventually figured that because I was born in Scotland and and raised in England I have inherited the no-nonsense Scottish attitude rather than a stiff upper lip English one).
Was this some of the water cooler talk I’d been promised or had we just wasted a few minutes of too many peoples time with unimportant waffle?
Then useful things started to emerge from all the noise:
- I discovered TweetDeck which provides a more sensible way of working with twitter
- A conference attendee posted about a great place to get breakfast, I joined them the following morning rather than suffering with the standard hotel fare.
- The conference committee tweeted about the need for a spare laptop for the keynote speaker since theirs had died. One was provided minutes later.
- I tweeted about an interesting talk in the Humanities domain and Matthew Dovey responded expressing an interest in more details at a later date.
- On the trip home I tweeted about being in New Orleans airport and discovered that another conference attendee was in the airport. We met for a drink before boarding our separate planes.
- I learnt that someone I occasionally bump into at events is moving house soon (something to break the ice next time we meet)
Today I saw more benefit. Andy Powell tweeted about his live blogging at an event. I took a look at the programme and realised a session related to a recent blog post of mine about the Open Web Foundation. A quick tweet to indicate this and a couple of hours later Andy asked a question about the topic and followed up via Twitter (was that twitter noise necessary? I’m not sure, I could have asked via comments on Andy’s live blog where they would have been between the two of us).
At the same time Brian Kelly was asking for info that related to the event he was attending - not sure if he got anything useful, but I know he has reported this technique has worked in the past.
So, am I a Twitter convert?
Not yet, but I’m starting to “get it”. My problem is still how do I avoid being distracted by yet another stream of information. Especially since I suspect that the way to get maximum value is to follow a large group of people.
I’m looking for interesting people to follow, but Twitters search is still broken! Feel free to follow me and I’ll then know you are there. I promise to avoid telling you when I’m about to wash my hair 
