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Date: 15 December 2003 14:30 +0000
From: Dave Beckett <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Brief report: OSS Watch launch conference.
On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 17:24:27 +0000 (GMT), Jan Grant
<address@hidden> wrote:
[Note that this is going to ILRT and SPP lists so please trim the
replies if you respond.]
I also went along with Jan, and I'll intersperse with my comments on
the sessions.
The slides should be online at
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2003-12-11/
at some point.
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?"
The OSS watch maanger Sebastian Rahtz gave a good intro and David
Tannenbaum's overview of the scoping study results was OK.
Scoping study: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/studies/scoping/
there should be an executive summary nearby.
The major concerns reported were with migration and third party
support. Rahtz also gave an outline of the upcoming OSS Watch
work which includes:
March 2004 - Workshop on Licensing and IPR
June 2004 - Conference
Sep 2004 - Workshop on Interopability and Migration
He did get a question about FE; there being no specific event for it.
The answer was that they plan to foster regional activities,
coordinating via the RSCs - OSS watch doesn't have the staff to
provide national support or helplines.
A factlet from elsewhere, ~70% of OSS is under the GPL.
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.
Also, the uPortal work he reported was entirely funded by grants;
that it produced open source was just one aspect of it. Reference to
SAKAI proposal for future funding.
"How do you make an open-source project?"
...
<snip/>
I went to the other tracks to Jan.
First session - Deployment Track: Making the Institutional Case
Open Source on the Desktop - Andrew Findlay, Skills 1st Ltd
[looks like a Netskills-related or derived consultancy]
A quite sanguine report on deploying and promoting OSS on the
desktop. Especially with Open Office. Reference to the Secure Open
DEsktop Architecture (SODA) and the Open CD rpoject (theopencd.org)
who were handing out a CD of open source for WIndows. Primarily this
was about linux desktops and the issues with applications that area
vailable, issues with migration.
With reference to the Newham linux desktop rollout, the only
application that was not available was shared calendaring. They also
found that most people when they said email, meant
email+calendaring+some groupware. The only solution they could
advise was using Ximian Evolution on the desktiop with the exchange
2000 plugin to an MS Exchange server. Web based groupware works
adequately but is "not for GUI lovers". (At present only Lotus Notes
really deals with this complete problem best.) In future,
Mitch Kapor's Chandler may be the solution to watch.
In deployment, they found it took 2 days to retrain general users
to use linux GUI and desktop applications - 1 day for the general
use and one day for the applications. (German court of auditors).
Problems
* "toys" - hardware and drivers which are just different; you need to
carefly buy the right hardware (cameras, scanners, ...) to get them
working under linux with no fuss.
* "CV dilution" - MCSE trained staff scared of having their training
becoming useless, fighting any change.
Overall, interesting from somebody who's actually done it. Some gaps
remain but it is possible and practical.
Open Standards - Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/osswatch-2003/
This was a standard open standards ra-ra-ra :)
Brian also made an effort to talk about not-truly open standards
such as defacto standards such as Word 'doc' formats, PDF,
Java etc. He claimed that with MS now publishing XML schemas
for Word output, that is the least proprietary now.
Mentioned RSS, ROADS, matrix for selection on standards from QA Focus
work.
Third session: "Practical approaches and support"
<snip/>
I went to the Development track - Getting the right license
Getting the right license: Evaluating the Context - Susan Foster,
Eversheds LLP
An overview of open source and licensing. Consider of what the
software is for, and its IPR, are you offering warranties (typically
not). Your employment contract might list restrictions on what you
can use or make - take care on the "click to accept" licenses since
you don't want to be accepting things on behalf of your institution.
There are typically different ownership rights for copyright and
patents.
Tip, emphasised a lot - keep records of all your (software)
development for due diligence, especially if you intended to at some
point exploit this commercially. Make copyright assignments on paper
(not email) from contributors to software projects. Last slide:
"OSS is a lawyer's nightmare ... go on, then, give us a challenge!"
Of course, it said: get your own legal advice :)
Summary - an IPR-heavy presentation but useful help in considering
some of the legal aspects of licensing.
Getting the right licence - Andrew Charlesworth, Senior Research
Fellow & Director of Centre for IT and Law, University of Bristol
An overview of the various licenses
Permissive (BSD/MIT/Apache)
Persistent (LGPL)
Persistent and Viral (GPL)
with the main choice being GPL or not. 67% of open source is GPL,
10% LGPL, 12% BSD, others 11%.
Open source typically has a "mesh of rights" - in most cases,
there is no advantage to taking them proprietary (where that is
possible).
Dual licensing is seen such as with Sleepycat Software's Berekely DB.
(Also I know of MySQL, Trolltech and KDE/QT). Usually GPL and
others. There are also possibilities of using different licenses for
different parts of the software.
In considering license choice consider these factors -
Who is the software aimed at? - for developers, OSS works well
Is a revenue stream needed? - if sales are intended, maybe not OSS
Warranties - typically OSS has none (however, non-OSS also!)
Protecting OSS reputation - use a trademark (like Apache does)
Software Patents - GPL/LGPL are incompatible with them
Project leadership - forking
Protecting the IPR (copyright/trademark/patents) - use a third
party organisation, foundation (e.g. like Apache, Debian)
The questions afterwards were directed to chosing a license; the
presentation outlined the pros and cons of the various choices.
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.
A quote from him, in the "we are not evil" vein:
"all the world's ponytailed [developers] support us"
He really didn't believe that software would be made by people for no
$$s or in their spare time, unpaid for. Seems to dismiss the
foundation of Apache, Linux and many other projects that IBM is now
making billions out of. At least this was a reasonable pitch
and was very keen to promote open standards; not defacto ones.
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
:-(
This was a vanilla MS sales pitch, not appropriate for the audience.
I counted all the types of PowerPoint chart junk. He wasn't
interested in working with or competing with open source by using
open standards, but showed an entirely MS solution for everything,
despite cost being mentioned many times for moving away from MS.
Promoted the "Services for Unix" which despite the name is a way
to migrate running services on Unix to the Windows platform. Didn't
address or answer the session title.
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.
Quote from IBM guy:
"Don't believe any of our TCO reports, I wouldn't"
The last session was a waste of time, instead of what could have been
an interesting discussion on open source might matter in different
application areas, interoperating and working with non-OSS as
appropriate.
Overall, mostly worthwhile except for the last session.
Dave
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