---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: 12 December 2003 17:24 +0000
From: Jan Grant <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Brief report: OSS Watch launch conference.
[Note that this is going to ILRT and SPP lists so please trim the
replies if you respond.]
This was a mostly enjoyable trip. Some new faces, some old familiars.
It's not clear exactly who the conference was aimed at, or the
motivations of the attendees. I'd presume many are looking at providing
services to support education and research, often on a shoestring. A
number of times I heard the old HR-inspired chestnut that people were
effectively "free" because they lived under different budget heading
and
they'd be there to support commercial or open software, regardless; and
that they therefore should (or should not, conclusions drawn from this
hypothesis varied) come into figuring out TCWPYP (Total Costs of
Whatever Proves Your Point). Lots of "let's be open-minded and
pragmatic" talk. At least, for most of the day. Seems to me that the
important issue is that if you expect to run a professional service
then
you must be prepared to invest in support, whether that's
locally-provided or a combination of local and external. Spending money
to get your staff expertise level up (whether it's on commercial
software or open-source) is going to be a part of this, and the devil
is
in the detail of exactly how large a part this might be.
The day opened with a quick run-down of the findings of the initial
OSSW
scoping survey, which raised many questions. The prime factor for
institutional managers appeared to be "where do we go for support?"
Jim Farmer gave a lively talk about JA-SIG and uPortal in particular,
which is a bit of a darling in the Academia & OSS world. He highlighted
that support was available through several channels (commercial and
otherwise). The future of the software was "interoperability, stupid" -
ie, the importance of adopting open standards.
"How do you make an open-source project?"
Second session I attended was Jon Maber on "how do you make an open
source project", talking for far longer than he had expected about his
work on the Bodington VLE (the other speaker could not attend due to
illness and Jon manfully managed a rather interesting session).
He talked about reasons why Bodinton had been open-sourced: amongst
other things, there had been internal pressure to "commercialise" the
project which, for a number of reasons, had not come to fruition. There
was a round of applause when he said that since he was a public servant
the taxpayer had already paid for the software once already!
Developer details were sketchy since it's early days of the actual
open-sourcing of the project. They use SourceForge for CVS and mailing
lists, and (theoretically) bug tracking, but currently bug reports tend
to be one-line patches to the mailing list. They've not practice yet at
QAing and merging external contributions (but that's likely to come
soon) so I look forward to a future talk from Jon on that subject.
One other thing that came out of the discussion (that struck me,
anyway,
because I worked for a stint doing support for FE) was that there's
plenty of scope yet for supporting FE colleges, who tend to be somewhat
alone in the wilderness.
Third session: "Practical approaches and support"
Paul Browning on hard-won experience with OS deployment - in this case,
Zope. Much of the message would have applied regardless of the source
of
the software, but his "lessons learned" included the need to actively
engage the community involved with the software you're using, since
it's
often the first source of your support. (Also true wrt commercial
software, eg: sunmanagers, but more so since there may not yet be
commercial support avaiable).
The second speaker was Henrik Omma, talking about TheOpenCD. This is a
grassroots project aimed at (I guess) user reeducation: supplying
best-of-breed open-source alternatives on a Windows platform to common
desktop apps. I guess his was the only real "advocacy" talk I attended.
The final session was "Does open source matter?" - a question
studiously
unanswered by either speaker, into which one might, I suppose, read an
affirmative.
Jeremy Wray from IBM presented himself as a pragmatic man'o'the world,
giving IBM's position as basically, "we'll support pretty much anything
if you pay us to". His repetition of the "well, somebody pays for
everything, eventually" line grated on a few members of the audience,
notably David Casel (?sp) from Apache UK/Cocoon. He presented a fairly
down-to-earth "who cares about [any specific piece of software], what
you need to know is well always be here and always be supporting you"
which is a message aimed at IT managers. It's pragmatic and probably a
fair representation of the truth (although it still felt like a careful
pitch), although his dismissal of professional-level support available
though other channels didn't go down well with David. Didn't seem
well-briefed on prominent OS projects (which form the basis of some of
IBM's offerings(!)) but that may have been part of the "who cares about
the specifics? Trust us with your money and we won't let you down"
line.
The other speaker was Nick McGrath from Microsoft UK. He gave a generic
and ill-received talk (subtext: Linux sucks, watch out or SCO will own
you) but again at least pointed out/acknowledged that interop was
important. There was certainly an undercurrent of "we don't care how
cheap it is, you're Evil with a big E" in the audience :-(
The question time was painful, rude, and unproductive in the extreme. I
found none of my technical opinions challenged by it* and the whole
level of politically-motivated slanging to be a total turn-off. Grabbed
a "free beer" and departed post-haste.
All in all, a (mostly) worthwhile day.
jan
* when it comes to service provision, a clear balance of
future-proofing, lockin avoidance, and cost and liability management
needs to be made. If you're worried about reliance on one vendor
(always poor when it comes to negotiations) then you need to factor
that in to long-term plans. Or at least pretend to the next time you
sit down to negotiate five years' of licenses.
--
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
Unfortunately, I have a very good idea how fast my keys are moving.