open source software innovation support centre
Because:
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.
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:
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 
Brian Kelly suggests:
rather than seeking a formal definition of open standards, we needed a more flexible approach based on an understanding of the characteristics of open standards.
People interested in the idea that standards can be defined in ways other than through formal standards bodies will be interested in the keynote address at ApacheCon US08 by David Recordon of the Open Web Foundation and Six Apart. This keynote (see videocast), titled “Learning from Apache to Create Open Specifications”, examined how many of the important specifications today were developed in an ad-hoc way outside of the usual standards body, often with a new foundation being created to manage the specification.
David then went on to explore how this process could be formalised in the way that the Apache Software Foundation has formalised the process for creating and managing open source software. David argued that by focusing on licensing, copyright management, community development and incubation we can better manage the creation of clear and flexible open specifications.
The Open Web Foundation is a new initiative, modeled on the Apache Software Foundation, which focuses on the community definition of open specifications. It’s early days for the foundation at present. They are currently working on the licensing issues with lawyers and the general structure of the foundation. If you are at all interested in the future of open specifications join the community and help forge the future.
Replay is an open solution developed in java to integrate, index, archive, and distribute audiovisual lecture recordings on a large scale. It’s being considered as the initial code to support the OpenCast community. The Opencast community is a collaboration of higher education institutions working together to explore, define, and document podcasting best practices and technologies.
As I’m currently at ApacheCon I am in geek mode, so I figured I’d have a play with the 0.4.1 release of Replay. I tried to install it before I left for the airport but the installer failed. I had time to check out the Replay issue tracker and found that this was a known issue and there was a hint in there as to how to solve the problem. However, this required me to download a 1Gb file from Apple. Since my taxi was due to arrive I had to give up on the idea of getting it installed. So I updated the issue with my findings and started my journey.
Over the last few days I’ve been working on this in the odd five minute here and there – how many conferences do you have sufficient bandwidth to download a 1Gb file in a reasonable amount of time?
I discovered that there were two other issues that would prevent things working – both appeared in the FAQ, but I can be pretty sure that both of these issues will apply to the majority of Mac users (as opposed to Mac developers), so I hope these make it into the install documentation. Furthermore one of the issues, relating to proxies, was not correct (if you care I had to remove both entries in the proxy settings, not just the one identified in the FAQ).
I was now able to upload new content to the system – cool.
The idea of Replay is that the system does speech and text recognition to make the video searchable. However, it didn’t look like this was working, searches didn’t produce any results. So I decided to go for lunch, a shrimp and oyster Po Boy from the excellent Acme Oyster House (I’ve eaten so much shrimp whilst here in New Orleans – this town knows how to cook shrimp!)
When I returned from lunch I sat down to have another go and discovered that the search page was now showing a tag cloud. It seems the indexing had worked, it’s just that the UI didn’t tell me it was in progress earlier on.
Very early impressions of the system are that it is very promising – I love the fact that my podcasts can now bew indexed automatically. But I haven’t actually played with Replay enough to see if it works that way.
Although I had some problems getting it running I was, with a little work, able to find the information I needed. It’s perfectly acceptable for a 0.4 release to have teething issues like these, hopefully this feedback will help the team iron them out. It’s always hard for developers to know which issues users will hit and feedback like this is vital (note without the feedback of previous users I would not have been able to get this install working).
I’m going to be playing with adding content over the next few days and will report further in the future.
ApacheCon starts on Wednesday, but Monday and Tuesday are filled with the Hackathon, Apache Barcamp and training sessions. Today I attended the Media and Analyst Training run by Sally Khudairi of Halo Worldwide. Sally has a very impressive list of clients and is a member of the ASF, so when the opportunity arose to attend one of her training sessions I jumped at it.
I was lucky enough to meet Sally at the ApacheCon EU planning meetings so I already had a feel for what to expect from her. I was excited when I arrived for the training at 10am.
It wasn’t long before I decided that the decision to miss out on the Hackathon in order to attend this training session was the right one. Not only would this training benefit my work within the ASF, but it was clearly going to help my work with OSS Watch. In fact I quickly decided to use OSS Watch as my test case during the training, rather than the two top level and two incubating ASF projects which get attention from me.
The highlight of the training, for me, was the chance to have a short briefing with Michael Coté of RedMonk, the open source analyst firm. Having the opportunity to bring all the mornings hints and tips to bear on delivering a real (if slightly artificial) briefing for a highly respected analyst like Coté was extremely useful. Now that I’ve met him I know I will be ensuring that he receives all relevant information from UK HE and FE open source as well as the ASF projects I work with.
The afternoon was taken up with writing some press materials and then having these critiqued by Sally and the group. This was a really useful exercise, I’ve written press releases before, indeed I’ve had many taken up by the press. However, this was the first time that I’ve had immediate, clear and concise feedback – invaluable!
Thanks to the ASF and to Sally for giving me this opportunity to learn further develop my skills.
I guess the vast majority of the readers of this blog will not be attending ApacheCon US, so you may be interested to hear that the opening plenary and the keynotes are being streamed live and from the archives after the event. These, along with lots of other paid for streams, are being provided by Linux Magazine.
The free sessions are:
pen, :microsoft), Sam RamjiIf you are here in New Orleans please be sure to look me up, if your not here maybe you’ll enjoy the streams.
Like most major software foundations The Apache Software Foundation runs its own conference each year. In the case of Apache it actually runs two a year, one in the US and one in Europe. I’ve been a member of the ASF for 5 years now (and a committer for many years more) but in that time I only ever managed to make it to one ApacheCon, in Europe 2005. This is a real shame because it is always good to put a face to the names on mailing lists (not to mention enjoying good food and other leisurely pursuits). For this reason, I’m thrilled to be in New Orleans to attend ApacheCon US 2008.
I’ve actually been here since Friday as I’ve volunteered to help organise ApacheCon EU 2009 and we’ve had a two day long planning meeting over the weekend. I’m hoping that my presence on the ApacheCon team will not only help ApacheCon in some small way, but also that the experience I gain assisting in the organisation of a major international open source conference will significantly help OSS Watch put on a great show in 2010 (we’re planning an open source conference in the UK – if you are interested in helping with the organisation get in touch).
However, it’s not all been hard work. Halloween in New Orleans is something very special.
