Linux Solutions

For the first time in British history, UK firms have been granted official permission to supply software to the public sector.

At least two open source software suppliers have been awarded places on the £80 million Software for Educational Institutions Framework, making them official suppliers to UK schools and gaining ground in what has been a drawn out battle against favouritism toward conventional software companies in UK politics and procurement.

Mark Taylor, Sirius Corporation president, one of the winning Open Source suppliers, said “We were utterly stunned. We are delighted. It’s a significant breakthrough for Open Source software.”

The United Kingdoms procurement frameworks, a fast-track process for public sector purchasers, handled £4.4bn of business in the year to April 2008. They are not supposed to prevent businesses not on the lists from selling to the public sector but, that was what has been happening, said Taylor.

“Schools would say, ‘we want this stuff, it doesn’t cost us anything and its really good’,” said Taylor. “The LA would say, ‘well the software’s not on the list, there isn’t a supplier who can supply it on the list, so you’re on your own with that.”

“So obviously there’s a reasonable amount of pressure on the schools not to,” he said.

The other open source firm is Novell UK, as confirmed by spokeswoman, Jill Henry. Novell has been on frameworks before now, but not in a capacity that would sanction its supply of open source software.

A further ten companies have been awarded places on the framework, but those names will not be released until tomorrow.

Linux IT’s managing director, Peter Dawes-Huish, said his company had pitched for a place on the framework, but withdrew when he realised he was competing for a piece of history rather than a prudent business strategy.

However, he said: “We wish Sirius very well and hope they will be very successful. It’s important not just that we support each other because we come from the same, perhaps, beliefs, in terms of the adoption of software, but it is where Mark and Sirius have their experience and we would like to see them successful.”

The Shuttleworth Foundation’s Mark Surman will move to the Mozilla Foundation after he was appointed executive director, where he will continue his work in open sourcing philanthropy.

The Mozilla Foundation is an international community and open source software project that believes the internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. The organisation runs many projects, and is responsible for the development of the Firefox web browser.

“Mark’s move to Mozilla shows that our fellowship programme is working,” says Helen King, principal advisor to the Shuttleworth Foundation. “The programme aims to let people explore new ideas like open philanthropy, and then to move on to using these ideas in places that matter, such as at the Mozilla Foundation.”

King explains that through fellowships, the Shttleworth Foundation aims to work with people on the front edge of issues like open education, Knowledge and telecommunications in a way that will make a real difference.

At present there are four fellows working with the foundation; Andrew Rens in the area of intellectual property, Steve Song – telecommunications, Steve Vosloo, communications and analytical skills, and Mark Surman, open philanthropy and open education

“The fellowships emerged about 18 months ago as a way for us to make bets not only on projects, but on people too,” says King. “So far it has been successful and we have begun to see traction on key issues in terms of progressing an open knowledge society.”

Sun Microsystems has launched a new website that looks to compete with Google Code and the numerous Forge sites, with its beta site Project Kenai. According to a blog post, the site was given a soft launch on Friday. The goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them.

The Kenai Project is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems and according to the Project Kenai site, it will be “more than a Forge.”

“We built it because we needed it, but it’s open for use by the world for free,” says project engineer Nick Sieger.

“Kenai is a recognition by Sun that, as the largest open source company in the world, we need to take control of our own destiny. We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control; we need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications,” he said

He continued, “By launching, I think we’re well on the way toward showing progress toward those goals. Where we go from here is going to be a blend of what the community asks of us and our own ideas for what we think would be cool new features to build on top of a collaboration portal that no one else has done yet.”

Project Kenai is likely to compete closely with Github. Git, written by Linux Torvalds has become an increasingly popular version-control system.

You can find much more on the servers and infrastructure behind Kenai at tbray.org. Sieger has already responded to the heat he has taken for the use of the word “control,” in explaining Kenai.

It’s kind of like dating your best friend’s sister – it’s just not the done thing. But last week Google did something similar when they jumped into Mozilla’s back garden and started kicking its ball around.

Googles new Chrome browser caused a bit of a stir with its beta release. A rival to Mozilla, and a threat (apparently) to Internet Explorer, will the new browser tear people away from Firefox’s awesomeness? Or will Firefox continue to rule supreme?

Although the release was all about Google, something that was duly noted by people round the world is that now open source has been given another global platform to show us its moves on. But what do Mozilla think about the competition?

Mozilla CEO John Lilly, a man who is extremely proud of Firefox, said that “Google’s trying to give users a good Web experience as well… as for competing, users will make their own choices. If you’re asking whether we’ll see market-share erosion, we’ll see, but remember that 72 percent of the users on the Internet still use IE, so there’s room to grow for everyone.”

But Ray Valdes of Forrester Research believes its not all good: “There will be some negative impact” on Mozilla…the question is how much and in what time frame.”

The early adopters are curious, Valdes said, “and some are going to switch over for sure. That will be a negative impact in terms of influence on the technogeeks,” Valdes said.

Firefox has the advantage of a huge and dedicated community of users, which Google will have to convince to switch over to them. “That won’t go away soon,” Valdes said.

Also, it looks like, with the signing of a three year contract, that Google will be helping finance Mozilla a little longer. Mozilla reported in a financial statement that 85 percent of its 2006 revenue came from a “contract with a search-engine provider for royalties.”

Lilly recently wrote on his blog that the arrangement with Google “means a lot for our ability to continue to invest in Firefox and in new things like mobile and services.”

“We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mozilla for really bringing a lot of innovation back to the browser space,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management.

“They’ve led the way. We have no doubt they will continue to do so moving forward. We wanted to continue extend our relationship so they have resources to do so.”

Pichai said alternatives to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer aren’t well-known. “Most people don’t know there is choice. We wanted to add our voice to the mix.”

A fall out it would seem is inevitable, but for now everything is rosy.

After a ten month campaign by volunteers to encourage open source in schools, the Polish Ministry of National Education has recommended that schools and universities switch to open source software.

In a statement, the Ministry recommended that schools and universities use OpenOffice. They say believe that the application is sufficiently mature and advanced enough for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. “OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses.”

The ministry published the statement on its website just before the end of the ‘WiOO w Szkole’ (’Free and Open Software in Schools’) campaign. The promotional tour was run by 150 volunteers of the Polish Foundation on Open Source (Fwioo).

Over the course of ten months, the volunteers visited 99 schools, mostly junior and high scools, speaking to 4,506 students an 43 villages and cities.

“During these meetings, our volunteers presented Open Source applications, answered questions and cleared up doubts. They often also helped in installing the software on the PCs in school computer labs and on school servers”, says Fwioo member Łukasz Nowicki, who began setting up the campaign at the end of the summer in 2007 in Poznan, where Fwioo was founded.

Where possible, the Wioo w Szkole campaign volunteers used local Open Source enthusiasts to assist in the promotion.

In the city of Bielsko Biała for example, all schools participated in the campaign. “We combined our visit to the city with the Free Software day, which attracted local Open Source developers and we even managed to interest university teachers and several local police officers.”

So far 30 percent of the schools visited by the volunteers have switched - at least partly - to Open Source. Most of these schools have now configured their PCs to run a GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva, alongside Windows.

“Some school staff told us they are still considering a switch, others would use the summer vacation to for instance install OpenOffice and a few schools said they would switch to Open Source when they renew their computer labs,” said Nowicki.

A good example of a school using Open Source is, according to Nowicki, High School No 15 in the city of Wrocław. “At this school teachers show students how to use Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. This broad knowledge base lets students develop their interests without limiting them to a specific platform.”

Alfresco Software has announced Alfresco Labs version 3, an open source alternative to Microsoft’s enterprise content management (ECM) software SharePoint.

Previously called the “Alfresco Community”, Alfresco Labs 3 offers users the first open source fully compatible SharePoint repository. With Alfresco Labs 3, companies can leverage existing investments in Linux, JAVA as wet as .NET to significantly reduce their SharePoint total cost of ownership and maximize their hardware and software investments, according to Alfresco.

“This product upgrade is a good example of how we are using judo against much larger and more established players in the market. We are attacking one of the last Microsoft strangle holds,” John Powell, CEO of Alfresco, said

The Alfresco Labs 3 repository offers three main features. First of all it supports the Microsoft SharePoint protocol. Secondly, it does not require client installation, and thirdly it’s a highly scalable ECM platform. The repository has been independently tested with over 100 million documents, according to the company.

“The Alfresco Labs’ version 3 is designed to be a research community lab for new features, enabling developers to access a nightly build with the latest functionality,” added Powell.

Alfresco sees this new release as a cost-cutting measure that provides all the functionality of SharePoint. The shift in how information and content is shared and created is forcing enterprises to blur the lines between enterprise content management (ECM) and social software.

The aim of the development is to allow “enterprise employees to access content everywhere, not just in large monolithic applications. ECM software is commonly used in Fortune 1,000 companies, but it’s only seen in about 5 to 10 percent of smaller enterprises,” Powell said.

“Workers in these smaller environments prefer to use shared file drives or e-mail. As a result, products that offer basic content services like Alfresco Software and SharePoint position themselves to fill this gap,” he added.

“Alfresco Labs 3 is the first product to implement the SharePoint protocol and provides the same ease-of-use of SharePoint while giving companies the freedom of choice in their hardware, database, operating system, application server and portal products,” said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco Software.

“Alfresco Labs users get a content management and collaboration tool that is integrated with Microsoft SharePoint and Office. It lowers overall IT costs and increases return on existing investments,” he said.

“The added functionality in Alfresco Labs 3 reflects a major engineering effort for the company,” noted Powell. “It provides a new level of social computing functionality. The SharePoint emulation was a small yet critical part of the overall product upgrade,” Powell said.

“Microsoft provided much better documentation due to the demands of the European Union,” he said. “It gives users options for a complete alternative system.”

“Microsoft released the SharePoint protocol as part of its compliance with the EU’s antitrust decision of March 24, 2004. Alfresco also is the first ECM system to implement the Microsoft Office protocols as a compatible server,” said Newton

Intel’s low-cost laptop initiative has had a boost from Portugal’s government, which has pledged to provide school children with 500,000 computers based on the chipmakers Classmate PC design. The announcement brings Intel’s rivalry with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation into the limelight once more.

Back in may, the OLPC group announced that its XO laptop computers would work with Microsoft’s Windows, as well as a homegrown Linux-based OS. The move was seen by many as a way to make the “$100 laptop”, which actually costs $188, more palatable to education ministers who were unsure of an open source system.

Now with this deal, Intel has matched OLPC’s total orders to date – 600,000 units as of May. This has made many people question whether the inclusion of Windows has made any notable difference.

Intel spokesperson, Agnes Kwan, has said that the company will serve as a “technology adviser to Portugal’s Ministry of Public Works, Transportation and Communications, which is coordinating the laptop program.”

Kwan said, “Parents of young school children will be able to choose between computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system and ones with an open source Linux operating system, and that the government will distribute the machines to Portugal’s elementary school students over the course of the 2008-2009 school year.”

As of the middle of this year, “hundreds of thousands” of the Classmate PCs had already shipped to customers in more than 30 countries, according to Kwan.

Kwan declined to disclose how much the laptops will cost parents or other financial terms of the deal. She said Portugal’s Ministry of Education is “working out pricing details”.

Classmate PCs are based on Intel’s design and include its processors, but they are pieced together by other manufacturers and sold under various guises.

OLPC XO and Intel’s Classmate PC are just two of a growing number of small, low-cost computers aimed at the millions of students in developing countries around the world who have not had access to technology or the internet.

The relationship between Intel and OLPC, whose XO machine uses microprocessors made by Intel competitor Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has been a bumpy one.

The two declared a truce last summer, but earlier this year relations turned frosty again when Intel abruptly pulled out from OLPC’s board of directors.

A survey by the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has found that the stagnant economy may be helping to push open source adoption.

The survey of over 100 of its member organisations found that 83 percent said they expect to see a year-over-year increase in revenue in 2008 from open-source related software and services.

78 percent of those surveyed believed that the affordable price of open source software is motivating their customers.

“We see that the market for commercial open source software and services is growing and growing fast. And I see the economy contributing to that because of the cost,” Dominic Sartorio, senior director of product management for SpikeSource and president of the OSA, said.

Sartorio said the survey showed that open source companies are serious about collaborating. Nearly 97 percent said they have active partnerships with other open-source software and service companies. “The average survey participant had 10 such partnerships,” he said. “We knew that collaboration was important to open source companies, but this statistic was surprising,” he added

The survey also showed that nearly 85 percent of the companies polled said they sell open source products or services that run on Microsoft Windows or otherwise interoperate with Microsoft products.

“Microsoft is an important partner to numerous open source companies and will continue to be more so moving forward,” said Anthony Gold, vice president and general manager for the open-source business at Unisys and an OSA board member. “Enterprises need to maximize their IT resources and many realize that a hybrid Microsoft open-source environment can be the best option for their requirements.”

The OSA survey was conducted in late June, and covered a number of topics that are interesting to the open source community.

Other key findings include that most open-source companies surveyed - 85 percent - have operations outside the United States, and of those, 58 percent say they see more widespread open source-adoption outside the United States. 72 percent of respondents said software-as-a-service is an important part of their business strategy.

Meanwhile, 56 percent of survey participants said their customers were concerned about interoperability between open-source applications, and 79 percent said their customers were concerned about interoperability between open-source and proprietary solutions.

The OSA released the findings of its survey at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in July.

In a move that will send mild shockwaves through the Linux community, Microsoft has become a sponsor of the open source Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and has opened up some of its protocols for use by open source software (OSS) developers.

Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab, made the announcement at OSCON.

Neither party has given the specifics of the sponsorship deal, it is reportedly around the US$100,00 per year mark, which will help the ASF pay for its administrators and support staff, allowing developers to “focus on writing great software,” noted Ramji.

Perhaps even more important than the added revenue for the ASF is the new Open Specification Promise (OSP) from Microsoft. The company is putting forward a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under OSP.

“This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols,” Ramji said.

“We have established a clarification to the OSP that guarantees developer rights to build software of any kind and for any purpose using these specifications, including commercial use,” he added.

Ramji was quick to point out that Microsoft is not moving away from Internet Information Services (IIS) as Microsoft’s strategic Web server technology.

“We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP. We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently underway with development of IIS 8,” he noted.

“It is a strong endorsement of the Apache way and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF. We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software,” he explained.

The open source licensing models supported by ASF allow for commercial use of code in closed source solutions.

“It’s a good step for Microsoft, and positive news for Apache - though some members disagree,” Stephen O’Grady, an industry analyst for Redmonk said..

“Some feel that this is the continuation of the ASF as a more corporate organization, rather than an agile open source enabler,” he explained.

“Both organizations stand to gain: Microsoft, because of the potential for good will and a better interoperability story, and Apache because of both the money and the explicit endorsement,” O’Grady said.

Internet search giant Google has released a new knowledge base called “Knol”. A ‘Knol’, according to Google, is a unit of knowledge.

To be a bit more specific, a Knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic, which has been written by people who know about those subjects. Announced last year, Google kept Knol it an invite only beta – until now.

In a similar fashion to Wikipedia, Google’s Knol is an attempt to allow people with knowledge to spreads it around for us simpletons to digest, regurgitate and look intelligent at our next dinner party. Rather than the anonymity awarded by Wikipedia, Google’s Knol gives the authors a name.

“The key principle behind Knol is authorship,” said Google employees Cedric Dupont and Michael McNally.

“Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good,” they said.

Although Google intends to push the author as expert, the company isn’t going to ignore general net users. With “moderated collaboration,” any reader can make suggested edits to a Knol, and the author can choose to accept, reject or modify the suggestions and remain in control of the content.

Knols are also dynamic, which means people can submit comments, rate or write a review of a knol.

“Knol will be a conversation open to everyone, not just the experts,” Paul Saffo, an independent technology forecaster, said.

“It’ll be entertaining, I’m sure - there’ll be UFO (unidentified flying object) nuts writing very authoritatively on their chosen subject,” he added.