Archive for July, 2009

Wookie Accepted into Apache Incubator

Published by Ross Gardler on July 17, 2009 in Community, Development, Software and Standards. 3 Comments

Wookie is a Java server application that allows you to upload and deploy widgets for your applications. Wookie is based on the W3C Widgets specification, but widgets can also be included that use extended APIs such as Google Wave Gadgets and Open Social. It was originally created at the University of Bolton as part of the European Commission funded Ten Competence project.

In January Scott Wilson attended an OSS Watch workshop on software sustainability at which I and my colleague Rowan Wilson presented a number of models for managing open source software in a sustainable way. After my presentation Scott approached me to ask what was involved with entering the Apache Incubator.

I’m pleased to announce that the Wookie proposal has now been accepted into the incubator. There is still some work to do before the code actually appears there, but it won’t be long

This is great news for all involved. OSS Watch hope that Wookie will go on to provide our first significant use case demonstrating that software developed in the UK academic sector can, and should, become useful beyond our sector. I congratulate the Wookie team on clearly separating the domain specific features of their work from the generic code that will be useful beyond their core team. It is this, and the teams awareness that restricting their code to a niche market would restrict the pool of contributors, that has enabled OSS Watch to assist Wookie as it worked towards entry into the Apache Incubator.

I truly believe that the University of Bolton, and any other project or institution that adopts the Wookie code, will benefit significantly from this move. Already we are seeing interest from many third parties, indeed, it is a long time since a proposal passed with such a large number of positive votes.

[DISCLAIMER: I am a Member of The Apache Software Foundation, but this has no bearing on the choice of the ASF as a home for Wookie. The justification for the ASF is that it has a track record of producing reference implementations for open standards]

International Free and Open Source Software Law Review

Published by Rowan Wilson on July 17, 2009 in Legal. 2 Comments

Rejoice, licence geeks! A new international  journal has been launched covering developments in law relating to free and open source software. To quote the journal’s web site:

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

In the first issue there are discussions of the Jacobsen vs Katzer case in the US and its repercussions for both in the US and the UK, the peer-to-patent programme and a proposal to help organisations procuring  free and open source software understand and manage their risks. It’s good if slightly technical stuff, and I highly recommend it.

Project:Possibility accessibility project code in Google Code

Published by stevelee on July 12, 2009 in Community, Software and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Project:Possibility have recently published the code from 17  open source accessibility projects on Google Code. Teams of computer science students from USC and UCLA  developed these projects when participating in the lively extra curricula accessibility coding events organised by Project:Possibility. Now the students  have moved on, leaving the open source code available for others to exploit, whilst taking with them the memory of the experience and hopefully an appreciation of open accessibility.

Those of you familiar with OSS Watch will know our position is that projects are successful when practising open development with a diverse community. When introduced at the project’s inception this leads to optimal chance of sustainability by minimising barriers to entry and contribution. So you may wonder why I was involved in such a ‘code dumping’ activity?

The answer is largely one of resource as the Project:Possibility team are all volunteers, and the limited time  students have in the events which are designed to get them excited about accessibility concepts and technologies. That’s not meant to be an excuse as we would dearly like the students’ work to seed innovative open accessibility and assistive technology projects with active user communities. However we have to prioritise until further resources are found and while the teams work with basic open development tools like version control, more attention could be given to then practice of open development, even if only through introducing template project tools and governance models.

Working for OSS Watch has already refined my understanding of open development and  I hope Project:Possibility will be able to introduce best community practices in the Semester programme where experienced mentors join the teams. That is unlikely to be practical for the fast paced and high energy weekend ‘code-a-thon’. The results of these 2 events have been impressive with highly motivated students producing  interesting and useful projects. Anything done to make projects sustainable and develop into mature projects with active users communities will be a huge plus. The code produced is often raw, as you would expect from the style of events and the fact that it is effectively prototyped, even if the style has been more ‘big design up front’ than agile. However this shouldn’t be an issue as open development is very comfortable with early and frequently code releases.

Project:Possibility has already attracted some external interest in the projects such as the mobile currency reader, but how much better it would be for  interested parties join the students while they are active or for the students continue after the closing ceremonies. I’d personally be happy if we managed that with just one project. This may be possible as Project:Possibility are addressing the resource issue and the first step will be recruiting a CEO who will concentrate on strategy and raising more resources, including funds. We are naturally interested in hearing from anyone who would like to contribute in anyway.

My choice of Google Code as the new public home for projects was based on considerations such as :-

  • light weight tools cover the basic requirements and are easy to learn;
  • easy to setup each project and can have a shared account to manage all projects;
  • popular space with many other student projects;
  • related student friendly activities such as Summer of Code and GC university;
  • relatively easy to move code and resources in and out (e.g svnsync for code);

OSS Watch has an introductory guide to setting up a Google Code project if you’d like to investigate.

So now the code is more easily available we can hope that someone will find it and make use of it. However what is really needed is for interested users and developers to take the Google Code projects and grow active communities around them. Such wishes rarely come true, but perhaps someone reading this will take a first step?

Feast or famine

Published by Elena Blanco on July 7, 2009 in Community and Development. 0 Comments

Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that OSS Watch publication production line has stalled. It can seem like we haven’t published any of our own material on the website  for a while even though we have been blogging.  And then a few articles pop out in quick succession. Take the last four weeks for example.  We have published a case study on EduApps, a case study on TexGen, a substantial article on the open development method, and a report from an OSSWatch workshop looking at business and sustainability models around free and open source software. Why has there been a recent flurry of publications?

Very early on in OSS Watch’s history we decided that we would take the quality of our written outputs very seriously, perhaps more seriously than anyone expected us to.  All documents that we write adhere to a stringent authoring and publication workflow that has been designed to offer the best quality assurance that we can muster.  Some of our documents are drafted by one individual, others are written collaboratively from the start.  Some others are commissioned from external authors.  However all documents move to final draft status collaboratively, all members of the team comment on the first draft and the document is refined iteratively until consensus is achieved.  And this is where the process takes as long as it takes and, as a result, you may observe a famine if several documents are moving through this iterative process.  We believe that this process really does need to take as long as it takes as we use it to iron out not only factual issues but also to come to team consensus on matters like bias and advocacy.  Settling these big issues using argument and counter argument can take time, changing a view or position through discussion often requires a period of reflection.  However, we feel (and hope) that this process makes our documents better.  And because this process is not artificially bounded several documents may appear at the other end in quick succession.  A publication feast.

Once a document is published our workflow doesn’t stop there.  The Web is littered with “write once, review never” information.  You know the sort of thing, a topical article written three years ago that still turns up in a Google search and gives outdated information because no-one has ever updated the information within it.  Since OSS Watch strives to be an authoritative source of information on matters relating to open source, we don’t think that outdated information is acceptable, particularly if other organizations and services rely on it.  So all our documents are reviewed every six months.  We check not only facts and links but we also check for relevancy and for missing content, ie has something happened since the last review that should be mentioned.  Sometimes we retire a document that is no longer relevant and this is then preserved in an archived state.  Sometimes we completely rewrite a document. However most times we tweak and refine each document at each review and we often add new information.  This review process is time consuming and all OSS Watch staff are involved in reviewing documents each and every month.  Is it worth all the effort? We think it is.

And finally, we don’t want our documents to be the result of a collaborative process involving just the members of OSS Watch.  We welcome comment and feedback from you.  We often develop documents in the OSS Watch wiki, a public resource where all collaboration is welcome to get the document to its first draft and and where you can see the status of all wiki documents being developed for publication on the website.  Even, and perhaps especially, when a document has entered the formal QA process and has subsequently been published on the website we welcome comments, just drop us a line at info@oss-watch.ac.uk.

Open source education – ensuring students develop the skills they need

Published by stevelee on July 3, 2009 in Discussion, Strategy and Policy and Uncategorized. 1 Comment

When I first became involved with Mozilla through working on a Mozilla Foundation accessibility grant, I quickly discovered the impressive open source educational work at Seneca College in Toronto, lead by David Humphry and Chris Tyler. Students on the computer science course get the enviable opportunity to work on projects that immerse them directly in some of the most successful open source development communities, contributing to programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office and Fedora (Linux).  These projects are not just academic exercises, rather they are strategic for the open source projects, and students contributions are accepted into the projects. As a result students get incomparable experience working on large code bases and in the process acquire the open source software and community development skills that are highly sought by companies all over the world.This work started with Seneca introducing Mozilla technology in their courses and soon Mozilla joined in, with key people giving lectures and making themselves available to the students. If you visit Seneca’s Mozilla IRC channel you will find a vibrant community where students, faculty staff, Mozilla staff and volunteers are busy discussing issues, working on projects and having fun.This morning I spotted a tweet from Mark Surman, Mozilla Foundation’s executive director,  that linked to this excellent paper by Chris Tyler explaining how Seneca approach open source education.OSS Watch, like Seneca and Mozilla are serious about open source education as the way to address the skills shortage. Along with the others members of the Teaching Open Source collaboration we are working to ensure students, educational institutions and industry alike acquire the open development skills that are so critical for much modern software development.

Innovation through Open Development

Published by Ross Gardler on July 2, 2009 in Community and Development. 0 Comments

In my last post I argue that open development can both reduce costs and improve quality. Today, Steve Lee pointed me to an article in Business Week that illustrates the point very well.

The article identifies Ken Saunders, a 41-year-old, legally blind volunteer for Mozilla as a prime example of the kind of third party contributions that are key to the success of open development projects:

Saunders is among hundreds of people who donate time and skills to Mozilla, the Mountain View (Calif.) company that releases Firefox and other open-source software. Even as Mozilla’s internal staff has grown to 250, from 15 in 2005, an army of volunteers still contributes about 40% of the company’s work, which ranges from tweaks to the programming code to designing the Firefox logo.

Innovation in open development can happen within the core project team, but it can also happen at the edges, where people with different objectives and interests see value in the projects outputs. According to the Business Week article Mike Beltzner, who runs the Firefox project, says that open development projects need to “allow people to innovate and to explore and [give them] the freedom to do what they want along those edges—that’s where innovation tends to happen in startling and unexpected ways.”

The article also discusses some less successful attempts at open development, highlighting some of the good and bad approaches to rewarding and recognising volunteer contributions. A recent case study on TexGen, published by OSS Watch, illustrates how the open development model can be used to apply to even the smallest niche area project.