Archive for the 'Strategy and Policy' Category

Strong leadership and openness = software sustainability

Published by Ross Gardler on October 2, 2009 in Community, Development, Software and Strategy and Policy. 1 Comment

Time and time again we read and hear about how successful open source is maintained by an army of volunteers, yet those who are at the core of successful open source know this is not what makes the project survive in the long term.

For example, Greg Kroah-Hartman reported, in a Google Talk, that of 2399 unique contributors active on the Linux Kernel project during a year and a half, roughly 75% of the work was done by people who are paid to do so. All of those people are considered volunteers within the project, but they are not there for the good of their health (although open source work is often fun). Furthermore, half of those contributors only contributed a single patch, whilst thirty people (1.25%) do nearly a third of the work.

My own anecdotal evidence, collected from over 8 years of working in projects at The Apache Software Foundation, leads me to assert that the popular “army of volunteers” myth is a result of the chatter of the masses (the other 98.75%). In surveys, interviews and snapshot observations the one patch contributors far outnumber the visionary leaders in a project and as a result it is their voices and opinions that are heard. At the same time, the leaders know that they need to play down their own importance in order to credit the community, since the contributions of the community are vital to the survival of the project, I’ll look at why later in this post.

Dan Woods, in “The Myth of Crowdsourcing” appears to agree that leadership and vision is what is needed in a successful project:

There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field…What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise…There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs. Often this individual was joined by other programmers who shared the founder’s vision and, under his direction, created great software.

However, I believe Dan, at least partially, misunderstands the importance of the crowd in crowdsourcing.

The real importance of community

The community is vital to the sustainability of an open project, and, increasingly as I’ll discuss later, closed projects too.Note that Dan talks about the “broadcasting of ideas”, this is where the “army of volunteers” comes into its own. They validate what is happening in the project, they fix bugs, make suggestions for improvements and provide sounding boards for new ideas. Without these contributions a project is completely reliant on a handful of individuals in leadership roles. This dependency presents two main problems.

The first is that the project relies on the limited knowledge of the leadership. Even the best of the best don’t know everything, or as Mark Twain puts it “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” An effective and successful leader has the ability to step back and listen to those with different experiences, make the right (or best) call and ensure it is actioned. That is, the best leaders encourage, support and reward an army of contributors so that their project continues to excel.

The second problem of this dependence on a small group of leaders is that things change. Over time, one or more of those leaders will move on. Where will their replacement come from? If the leaders have already cultivated an “army of volunteers” in an open and transparent way there should be no shortage of people willing and able to step up and take on the role.

What about closed development?

To ignore your community is a mistake in almost every case. Community and the power of crowdsourcing is not, as Dan explains, the sole domain of open source software. Open innovation is becoming increasing popular in most industrial sectors, including closed source software. Microsoft, for example, has its Most Valuable Professional programme which is specifically designed to:

recognize the best and brightest from technology communities around the world…These exceptional community leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds. They are teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, as well as technologists, who actively share their high-quality, real-world technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft.

Is openness for me?

Most people starting new projects assume that either their project is too specialised to be of interest to third parties or that opening up to the community will result in them being swamped by well meaning contributors. As a result, they don’t engage, support and reward their community.

Popular communities do not grow from one member to hundreds overnight, there is little chance of you being swamped. They grow organically and, assuming the community is empowered to self-govern under strong leadership, they grow in self-sufficient way. As for niche projects, an “army” of just one person can still be extremely valuable, who knows what just one person can do – after all, you are just one person, right?

If you care about software sustainability you should never ignore your community.

Pragmatic ‘virtuosos’

Published by Gabriel Hanganu on October 2, 2009 in Business, Community, Development and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

Message posted today on our social mailing list at work:

Do you lendaround ? Let me know if you sign up and I’ll email you an invite which’ll make it easier for you to connect into the network.

According to their website, Lendaround is a free web tool that aims to help people borrow things from one another. It’s good to bring friends, neighbours, families and colleagues together by swapping things, such as DVDs, isn’t it?

Why do such tools exist? Apparently, because somebody had an idea that made them sleepless in the first instance, and this person persuaded others to help make it happen:

Looking around his home, Tim noticed how much stuff we all seem to have that doesn’t get used very much — at a time when there are a billion people in the world who have not very much at all, and when it would be good to use a bit less of the earth’s resources.

The email message reminded me of a good read about The Myth of Crowdsourcing my colleague Amir pointed to me recently:

In the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous.

The crowds by themselves, the author suggests, are unable to produce innovation. It is the highly skilled, highly motivated ‘virtuosos’ who are the real engines behind the often misused term crowdsourcing.

Open-source developers are often mentioned as a crowd of motivated programmers ready to meet the world’s software needs. A lot of wishful thinkers love to put forth the notion that all large software companies should be quaking in their boots because a crowd of open-source developers is ready to eat their lunch and create software for any purpose. There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs. Often this individual was joined by other programmers who shared the founder’s vision and, under his direction, created great software. Yes, there are large teams of developers on open-source projects, but without the virtuoso contribution at the outset, they would achieve nothing.

In OSS Watch consultations with HE projects we often need to correct the general view that open source is mainly the affair of a bunch of bearded geeks animated by common idealistic views. In fact, as mentioned in one of our workshop reports, the open development model that lays at the foundation of most open source commercial businesses is based on what Harvard Internet lawyer Yochai Benkler termed “commons-based peer-production”, a process by which everyone who contributes also gets something back that furthers their interests.

A certain level of pragmatism associated with the business of open source is perhaps not unrelated with the idea of the highly skilled ‘virtuosos’ that make crowds vibrate. Something worth exploring further, maybe in a break between watching two lendaround DVDs.

Software innovation in academic software outputs

Published by Ross Gardler on September 3, 2009 in Community, Development, Event and Strategy and Policy. 2 Comments

At OSS Watch we spend a great deal of time talking about project governance. We argue that a lack of clear governance results in potential contributors being discouraged, either because there are no visible rewards for the extra effort involved or because they are worried that contributions will not be well managed. New projects often delay specifying a governance model and opening up because they don’t want to lose control of the project. However, this misses the whole point, a governance model does the exact opposite, it ensures you maintain control for as long as you want it. Furthermore, opening up is what drives innovation. This is likely to be the topic of my lightning talk at the JISC Rapid Innovation in Development event.

The goal of the #JISCRI projects is not  to have perfect software solutions, but to develop expertise in a range of potential solutions. By sharing this expertise across the whole community we not only increase the skills base of all, but we also bring ideas together – it is this converging of ideas that results in innovation, or, as Marten Mikos puts it:

innovation happens … when you encounter other people and also when you step over some boundary and you combine ideas that haven’t been combined before.

By adopting an open source licencing model and an open development governance model we allow anyone with an idea to bring that idea to the table, the governance model defines the mechanism for evaluation and subsequent acceptance or rejection of the idea.

However, at this point we hit another problem. People are often adverse to contributing their ideas because they also desire to control the latest and greatest innovations. A good governance model will reward the best ideas with a stake in the overall project. That is, it recognises that if we want to benefit from other peoples ideas we need to ensure they can benefit from our own. At this point please allow me to misquote Kahlil Gibran:

 If you love somebody a project, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were.

If you create and manage a truly innovative project then the rewards will always come back to you. By allowing people to experiment with your project you encourage those people to dream up new innovations and to invest new resources into implementing those innovations. These resources and the expertise they bring is something that your project would never have if you failed to let it go in the first place. The trick is to make it more beneficial for the third party to work with you rather than to work independently, for this you need a good governance model.

This kind of collaboration happens a great deal in the commercial sector, but it is much rarer in the academic sector (although it does happen). The reason for this lack of openness is a cultural mismatch with two distinct causes. The first is that scientists are encouraged by the peer review system of publication to keep things close to their chests until the point of publication. The second is that universities are geared up to exploit innovations through patent licencing, which is not compatible with the idea of openness during the act of software innovation (this post is getting to be quite long, so I’ll save the exploitation issue for another post).

The fact that the peer review system prevents the kind of peer recognition demanded in open source projects is ironic since that system was devised to encourage openness. Micheal Nielson explains it well:

The value of cultural openness was understood centuries ago by many of the founders of modern science; indeed, the journal system is perhaps the most open system for the transmission of knowledge that could be built with 17th-century media. The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals and not in more modern media.

My hope is that initiatives such as the JISC Rapid Innovation projects will help increase openness in the academic software development sector, but my concern is that very few of these projects understand the importance of being open from day one. I’ll be challenging people to prove me wrong in my lightning talk at the #JISCRI event and OSS Watch will be exploring the need for openness in our Engaging Developers workshop in October.

JISC Funding Call: Access & Identity Management

Published by Ross Gardler on August 11, 2009 in Software and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

The Joint information Systems Comittee (JISC) in the UK have issued a new call for funding proposals titled “Access and Identity Management“. As with most JISC calls, proposals must come from UK educational institutions although other organisations can partner with appropriate institutions. Finding partners is one of the services OSS Watch offers as part of our bid writing consultation service (free to UK academic institutions).

As with all JISC calls, bidders are expected to consult with OSS Watch in order to understand how the JISC open source policy and the open development approach to project sustainability apply to their project (see paragraph 57 of the call details).

We look forward to helping you write your bids.

Open development and the art of community

Published by Gabriel Hanganu on August 6, 2009 in Community, Development and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

The first chapter of Jono Bacon’s long awaited ‘The Art of Community’, to be published by O’Reilly later this year, is available for preview. So far the reviewers’ comments have been enthusiastic. I’m not surprised. I have followed Jono’s blog posts for some time and enjoyed most of them. His vast experience as a Community Manager at Ubuntu, combined with an alert and imaginative writing style, makes him one of the most insightful authors writing about the social aspects of open source collaboration.

The first chapter introduces the main themes of the book – collaboration, belonging, trust, social capital, communication – and this is done in an engaging combination of theoretical vignettes and personal accounts drawing on the author’s early experiments with open source. There are a couple of extremely well made points in this chapter, but in particular the importance of fostering a sense of belonging in the process of building an online community grabbed my attention.

Writes Jono:

In the same way that we judge a strong financial economy by prosperity, wealth, and a quality standard of living, belonging is the reward of a strong social economy. An economy is a set of shared concepts and processes that grow and change in an effort to generate a form of capital. In a financial economy, participants put goods and services on the market to generate financial capital. The processes and techniques they use include measuring sales, strategic marketing, enabling ease of access, and so forth. A social economy is the same thing—but we are the product, and the capital is respect and trust. The processes and techniques here are different—open communications mediums, easy access to tools, etc. — but the basic principles are the same.

Building social capital by welcoming new members and helping them develop a sense of being part of the community is a crucial aspect of making it sustainable. This was the subject of an OSS Watch Community and Open Source Development Workshop last year, and Ross alluded to it in an earlier post on software sustainability:

Now that OSS Watch have started to show that closed communities are not required, the next step is to encourage people to develop their software in such a way as to ensure non-community members are empowered to participate. It is these third party contributions that spread the cost of development across multiple financial pots and thus reduces centralized risk. We recognize that policy is all very well but it is practice that matters. The adoption of open development practice requires a significant cultural change, but this is a change that our research shows is desired by enough practitioners to make it viable.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Jono’s book. I’m particularly keen to see if he has anything to say about matching personal and institutional drivers in making the cultural change associated with adopting open source effective.

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.

The ÆGIS 1st Pan European open accessibility Workshop

Published by stevelee on June 12, 2009 in Community, Development, Software, Standards and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

To be honest I’m enthusiastic about the potential of the European ÆGIS project which launched last week. I see the blend of open source and accessibility, open accessibility, as having the potential to provide the most appropriate solutions for users of accessibility and assistive technology. So I’ve spent the last few years developing and promoting the concepts of fair access to all and user engagement whenever I get the opportunity. This has brought be into contact with enthusiastically dedicated  people and projects. The scale and scope of ÆGIS gives the impression open accessibility is now coming of age. The strap line of ‘Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards’ indicates the wide scope of the project which aims to use open source, open development and open standards to ‘enable people with disabilities, the elderly and anyone else who is disadvantaged when using Internet services, Desktop PC or Mobile phones’. It will do this by providing developers with a framework, architecture and toolkits, whilst also creating end user applications. 4 pilot studies will inform the subsequent development phases.

The Pan-European Workshop completed the launch week activities at Research In Motion’s Slough Offices and shared the proceedings with Raising The Floor an initiative by Gregg Vanderheiden and Jim Fruchterman to bring together all parties working on web accessibility, again using open practices. Greg has been involved in accessibility for many years and in his Introduction, Peter Korn, technical lead on ÆGIS sited Greg as his primary mentor. Peter in turn has been very active in open accessibility, especially the GNOME desktop which is used in Linux (e.g Ubuntu) and Sun’s Solaris. Peter along with Will Walker has taken a key role in orchestrating the  resources of their employer Sun to bear on making GNOME a focus of much open accessibility work, including infrastructure, the Orca screen reader, GOK on screen keyboard and collaboration with the Firefox web browser accessibility team.

In addition to hearing more about ÆGIS, the workshop offered the opportunity to catch up with some of the collaborators from the Ace Centre, OATSoft.org, aIDEAS & Mozilla as well as being something of a ‘tweatup’ for those who follow each other on Twitter, including Henni of Opera, Steve Faulkener and Gez Lemon of TPG and Davis Sloan of the University of Dundee. There was woefully little time to chat and I completely missed David Banes of AbilityNet and David McKay of Inference Labs, Cambridge (Dasher is an alternative text input program). I did finally meet Jutta Treviranus, director of ATRC at University of Toronto. Jutta is the boss of long term open accessibility developer David Bolter (e.g. GOK, dojo, ARIA), and we also heard the news that David is taking a years break from ATRC to work on Mozilla core accessibility with Maroc and Surkov.

Due to my failure to understand the scale of the map I arrived after the start having wondered up and down the batch road. The first few talks by M Gonzalez-Sancho (EU Commision ICT for inclusion, information and media Directorate General) and E Bekiarias (CERTH-HIT) provided high level views of the EU’s inclusion policies and AEGIS (£12.6M funding) as well as feedback from the previous days user forum.

Peter Korn then gave a technical overview with demos of existing applications including old friends such as the accessibility APIs, GOK, Orca+eSpeak, Dasher and Accerciser. In addition Peter showed an as yet unreleased simulator of visual impairments such as macular degeneration.

Dr Bekiarias then presented the AEGIS use cases which appear to present a reasonably representative and useful range. I was pleased to see symbol support in OpenOffice.org along with synthetic voices. As Simon Judge pointed out the desktop had little for AAC and switch users but  there is more on the mobile platform.

After an all too brief lunch, Dr C Galinski (InfoTerm) gave a presentation on structured content standards. This was followed by a very effective talk by Greg on accessibility overall and Raising the Floor. He made the point that what we do determines if ICT is a blessing or a curse to many users. He provided a clear analysis of the ways of providing accessibility (adjust interface, provide alternative interface, select alternative or download new interface on demand) and asserted that the accessibility API’s are the only real chance for an affordable and lasting strategies for flexible interface options (and I agree). He also considered reducing cost to users and the part OSS plays, seeing this as enabling more direct paths for the transfer of research and allowing the public coverage of costs other than licences. he also suggested we might like to consider free public access (cf public/private schools) and the need to fund more than research – e.g hardening, awareness, support.

Before the panel discussion Peter announced the Open Accessibility Everywhere Group. The desire to bring together all interested parties including developers, researchers and users and so facilitate exchange of ideas it echos the original motivations that underly Oatsoft.org and later Project:Possibility. While Oatsoft’s funding was only for an initial evaluation phase we can hope that OAEG will succesfully fill this important community role and so help us push the open accessibility envelope. There is an overlap here with Raising the floor that will need to be worked out, though AEGIS adds desktop and mobile accessibility to RtF’s focus on web accessibility.

I was pleased to see a place for the open accessibility projects I have been personally active in. In addition to key projects such as Mozilla, GNOME and NVDA I saw some potential for those I have been closely involved in as a developer; Simon Judge thought Maavis has something to offer in many use cases, and the straight-street.com open symbol set has much to offer. Jambu may also be useful as a starting point for some work. I’m not sure about PowerTalk as it relies on MS technologies but at least that is now included in the EduApps USB stick collection. Greg again mentioned his interest in OATSoft.org as providing the master list of projects, though the announcement of the OAEG seem to indicate it would be providing similar functionality after all.

So all-in-all a useful workshop but perhaps too many presentations with too wide a scope; I would have liked more networking time. ÆGIS is an exciting project and a serious opportunity for the benefits of open accessibility to be realised by users and developers alike. There is a lot to be done and good management will be need to ensure it delivers, but building on open development gives it a very good foundation for success. I’m looking forward to being involved as well as watching what happens.

I’m greatful to Ross Gardler (OSS Watch manager) for being so supportive of open accessibility and providing me opportunities to make it part of OSS Watch’s portfolio of experience. My first project was AccessApps and we spent Tuesday in a highly constructive consultation with the Maavis project, working out ways forward by embracing open development.

That reminds me I have an article on open accessibility to take though OSS Watch’s thorough quality control process.

Open Development embraced by OMII-UK projects

Published by stevelee on June 2, 2009 in Community, Development, Software and Strategy and Policy. 1 Comment

Towards the end of April I found myself spending  2 enjoyable days in the company of OMII-UK members at the OMII-UK collaboration Workshop along with others involved in e-Research in various capacities.  Steve Brewer,  project manager of the Engage project, invited me to provide OSS Watch input at the event which included Open Source and Open Development as a key theme. This provided an opportunity for me to learn more about e-Research and meet those working in it, whilst also passing on some of our experience in open development to those project team members wanting to better embrace the techniques. Dr Mario Antonioletti, principle consultant at EPCC and long time OGSA-DAI project team member subsequently requested that I facilitate a session which became the following:

How to invigorate your project with open development: Using an OSI approved open source licence on your project artefacts and putting them on a public server is one thing but how do you nurture a lively community that ensures your project continues to develop and becomes self sustaining?  Open development is the lifeblood of successful open source projects but how does it work, what tools and process make is successful? How does it mesh with the project life cycle and at what stage should it be introduced?  This breakout will explore open development and how it can be applied to individual projects. Come along and share questions, suggestions and experiences from your own projects.

This was a deliberate ploy to concentrate everyone’s energy on understanding open development as opposed to open source, as I explained in both this session and another lead by Steve Brewer on ‘Accelerating the deployment and uptake of open source tools in e-Research’. Working for OSS Watch has help me clarify my understanding of a fundamental principle of open source projects. This is something that, having been active  in several open source projects, I rather take for granted, but that is often not immediately apparent to newcomers to the scene.  The Apache Software Foundation say it well in their policy statement of  ‘community over code’, and back in 1992 the IETF’s phrase ‘We believe in: rough consensus and running code’ puts community decision making first. Having worked with active open source projects such as Mozilla and GNOME it’s clear to me that nurturing a vibrant and diverse community is the vital ingredient for success and sustainability. In contrast there is often a focus of attention on licence issues by those new to open source, and while this is a key part of the picture, OSS Watch now also emphasise  ‘open development’ in order to restore balance. This also helps projects more clearly see why fundamentals such as encouraging participation through the use of well tested collaboration tools and having a clear governance model are critical for their long term health.

Accordingly I was keen to steer discussion towards the issues surrounding open development and how to achieve it, as well as providing recommendations and clearly indicating OSS Watch’s desire to work with projects, providing support from our collective experience.

During the 2 days I chatted with members of at least 4 mature e-Research projects, each at an intermediate stage of practising open development; OGSA-DAI, DIASER, ALADDIN and Portal Access Grid. I encouraged all to go a stage further towards fully embracing open development, so it is exciting to hear announcements from 2 of them that clearly indicate that they heeded some of our recommendations.

Damian Brasher’s DIASER was already practising many of the principles and has now followed our recommendation to make early decisions and design notes available as project memory as these were not originally discussed on the public discussion lists. This involved considerable work but the outcome is that anyone can now find this information archived on public list and can more easily evaluate the project.

OGSA-DAI started as a closed community project though it is now released under an open source licence. During the workshop Mario stated his desire for the project to practice open development as I described it.  Thus it was a pleasure to see an article by Mike Jackson in the June 09 edition of National e-Science Centre news stating they are commited to achieving it.

OGSA-DAI: from open source product to open source project

The OGSA-DAI project has been funded by EPSRC for an additional year, until April 2010. This funding will enable us to evolve OGSA-DAI from an open source product into an open source project.

An international community of users and developers has formed around OGSA-DAI, our unique open source product for access to and integration of distributed heterogeneous data resources. This includes projects and institutions in a myriad of fields including medical research, environmental science, geo-sciences, the arts and humanities and business.

Moving to an open source project will provide the community with a focal point for the evolution, development, use and support of OGSA-DAI and its related components, providing a means by which
members can develop and release their components alongside the core product. It will also provide an avenue to ensure the sustainability of their components. Over the next few months we will set in place the
governance and infrastructure of the OGSA-DAI open source project. This will be done in conjunction with key community members, and will draw upon the expertise of our OMII-UK partners in Manchester and
Southampton and in the Globus Alliance. We aim to roll out our open source project site in October.

Our move to an open source project contributes to OMII-UK’s vision to promote software sustainability, and will guarantee that the lifetime of the OGSA-DAI product will exist out with any single institution or
funding stream. In addition, we will continue to develop the product and engage with international standardisation activities:

[snip]

The OGSA-DAI project -which involves both EPCC and the National e-Science Centre- is funded by EPSRC through OMII-UK.

I’d like to congratulate both projects for taking these important steps toward open development and wish them every success. I’m sure the OSS Watch team will be most interested to hear how they progress, I know I am.

OSS Watch provide many articles about open source development including a guide to participating in an open source community and a review of one of the best books on the subject – Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel.

Guest Post: FOSS and the European Parliament

Published by Rowan Wilson on June 1, 2009 in Community, Guest, Procurement and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

From time to time OSS Watch will be publishing guest blog posts here to highlight interesting opinions from around the FOSS community. This post is by Gerry Gavigan, chairman of the Open Source Consortium.

Elections for the European Parliament are scheduled for 2 June 2009, and this seems like an ideal opportunity to broach the subject of ICT policies and draw the attention of candidates to the issues surrounding choices by government and its administration concerning software and systems. Hopefully, this will at least raise the profile and gain better consideration of the underpinning issues and lead to wider adoption of Free and Open Source Software.

One initiative attempting to do this is the Free Software Pact (FSP) providing candidates with a method to inform the voting public that “they favour the development and use of Free Software, and will protect it from possible threatening EU legislation.”

As Chairman of the Open Source Consortium I was asked to help promote the FSP. Fundamentally I agree with the underlying objectives of the FSP but I am not sure that the approach to implementation is well thought through.

I am convinced that level playing fields coupled with open and transparent processes topped off with effective governance (easier said than done, of course) are all that Free Software needs for new installations and also to trickle through the arteries and capillaries of existing ICT deployments, eventually eliminating the externalities of proprietary software (largely summarisable as the deadweight costs arising from distortions in the market). I should add that this opinion is vendor neutral. I don’t care who it is or how Free Software is supplied.

If we are to achieve this nirvana we need to approach those we are seeking to influence in terms that are meaningful to them. This is not always easy but that is not an excuse not to try. And it may require several goes. Additionally if one is seeking to influence politicians or administrations is is easier to go with the grain of things than start again somewhere else.

With that in mind and prompted by the FSP, it seems right to put my drafting where my opinions were. Accordingly the OSC has created a draft form letter that hope as many people as possible will send it to the candidates in their constituency.

Dear…

Support Implementation of draft European Interoperability Framework V2 “EIF V2″

As you are a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the European Parliament I am writing to seek your support for a simple measure that will help citizens, businesses and European society.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has become a critical part of European infrastructure; a modern economy cannot function without it.

Optimal choices in ICT need a European policy on interoperability in ICT.

Interoperability means it does not matter how you mix and match the constituent parts of ICT, they will just work with each other without problems or issues. Such choice also means that users of your ICT systems (e.g., users of European or national government on-line services) do not have to make ICT choices based on your decisions, e.g., having to use a specific web browser (that itself may require a specific operating system).

Many European and national ICT systems have been implemented using software which does not enable easy interoperability, and instead creates an effect where it becomes easier, and some cases necessary, to choose more of the same supplier’s products, and harder to choose competing products.

Moreover, once governments or local administrations have decided to use software that does not enable easy interoperability, that choice imposes a requirement for the citizen or customer to choose the same software.

This network effect prevents choice, competition and limits opportunities to promote innovation outside vendor control, in the whole European arena for ICT.

To have agreed as policy the (draft) EIF V2 ( http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728) will halt and eventually reverse this situation.

This draft has been criticised by vendors currently benefiting from the current uneven playing field, but its adoption would not prevent any vendor, current or future, from supplying ICT to European or national governments.

The EIF is not considered to by all to be perfect, but getting it firmly “inside the tent” would enable it to be improved. I urge you to adopt or adapt this letter and write.

You can find your existing MEPs and candidates here.

Gerry Gavigan

Conference: Open Source in the Public Sector

Published by Rowan Wilson on March 27, 2009 in Business, Community and Strategy and Policy. 1 Comment

“The country is in an economic crisis…”

That’s how the description of Kable’s upcoming conference on Open Source in the Public Sector begins, and it’s becoming a regular theme in marketing in every sector. This morning brings news that Microsoft is planning to air a series of TV ads that attacks Apple’s pricing as inappropriate in these cash-starved times. In the light of this, Steve Ballmer’s assertion last week that Apple customers are essentially paying upwards of $500 else for a logo and nothing else looks like a teaser for the ad campaign. Ballmer’s sound-bite was taken up by noted open source blogger Glyn Moody who mischievously suggested that this was Ballmer’s backhanded way of acknowledging Windows had lost the fight against Linux to be the pre-eminent OS on the low-priced, tiny and increasingly popular sub-laptops known as netbooks. After all, writes Moody:

“who’s going to pay extra money just to get the Windows logo on a netbook, when they can get the same features for less with free software…?”

Clearly the IT sector is in the mood to be wooed with promises of low prices. In the public sector too, as this blog has mentioned in the past the February 2009 Cabinet Office action plan Open Source, Open Standards and Reuse strongly promoted the consideration of free and open source software:

“Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations; it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work…”

and adding the following imperative added to public policy on IT procurement:

“Where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products, open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility.”

This document should perhaps be read in the light of the Chancellor Alistair Darling’s demand that public sector IT should find effiency savings of £5bn before 2011…

Clearly this is an appropriate time for an event such as Kable’s (disclosure: OSS Watch supports this event and will be speaking at it) which invites delegates from the public and not-for-profit sectors to come and hear about the pros and cons of free and open source adoption and to discuss the issues with others in the same position. As well as attendees and speakers from OSS Watch, there will be representatives from across the public sector and from the Open Source Schools project, the Open Source Consortium, the British Computer Society’s Open Source Specialist Group and noted think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies. It looks to be an interesting event. Hope to see you there…