Big business appears to be closing ranks in order to force UK schools to use non-interoperable Microsoft-based databases despite determined efforts from the UK Government to introduce the UK Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). The dominant vendors, Capita and Serco have withdrawn from Becta's SIF trials and are lobbying the Government to support their opposition to SIF.

In order to understand why this should have happened it is necessary to appreciate the upcoming developments in school management and database systems.

Databases in Schools

Currently UK schools’ databases are largely confined to Management Information Systems (MIS). This sector is dominated by Capita through their long lived product Sims.net. A distant second place is taken by Serco's own MIS database and together these two companies account for over 90% of this market.

Typically monopoly markets are enjoyed and protected by the vendors that own them. Sadly the inevitable consequence of a monopoly is market abuse as the following recent memo to Surrey LA schools illustrates:

...Windows Server 2000 will not be supported by CAPITA after July 2008 and Windows 2000 workstations will not be supported after February 2008. It will therefore be necessary for all schools with these operating systems to consider upgrading them at the earliest opportunity. Four S will continue to support them for as long as possible, but it is vital that you start planning your budgets for 2008/09 with this in mind.

Microsoft’s withdrawal of support for SQL 2000 (which is the ‘engine’ making SIMS.net work) also means that a newer version of Microsoft SQL will need to be installed later this year. The August 2007 main release of Sims.net will work on both SQL 2000 and SQL Express 2005, the newer version. However, subsequent releases of Sims will only work on the latter. Four S will issue further details on the above and instructions of what schools will need to do in order to install the new version of SQL, once they have received more information from CAPITA'...

Of course extracts like the above are not news to anyone who has experienced the pain of vendor lock-in. In reality SIF will not affect the major player's market share of MIS, schools already have invested too much training and data to contemplate changing. This begs the question as why should they then be so opposed to SIF?

Following the introduction in September 2007 of the huge database that is the Unique Pupil Learner Number (ULN), schools are about to experience a rapid increase in the range of databases that they and others will use. Information from social services and police databases will be integrated with school records stored on the school's MIS and on their Learning Platforms which are also obligatory from 2008.

What is clear is that the monopoly school database vendors see a new lucrative market which they naturally would like to exploit ideally to the exclusion of others. But how will they try to do this and why do they regard SIF as a bad thing?

Learning Platforms (LPs)

Learning platforms (LPs) otherwise know as Course Management Systems (CMSs) and Virtual Learning Environments VLEs), are web-delivered database-driven solutions for independent and remote learning facilities based in schools but designed to extend to a wider 'learning community'. They are key to understanding opposition to SIF.

LPs are 'all the rage' in UK schools; they have to be, because in the near future they will be 'pupil entitlements’. That is to say schools or LAs must have one. Right now Europe's leading Learning Platform is Moodle, an Open Source fully inter-operable and free package. Moodle dominates the UK's further and higher education sector and in a sane world Open Standards and Open Source would make it the platform of choice for Secondary schools too. However it is always a mistake to underestimate the proprietary vendors' ability to close off a new market. How it's done in this case is described below.

How 'Must Have' distorts Schools' thinking Learning platforms are the latest 'must have'. 'Must have-itis' is endemic in education. They are replacing the previous educational ‘must have’, the Interactive Whiteboard(IWB). It is instructive to briefly divert into the IWB story because it will inform the database story to come.

Truly, the most spendthrift and undiscriminating market must be the schools ICT sector. Hitherto loaded with public cash and addicted to shiny new stuff, UK schools have now bought a staggering 250,000 IWBs (by the way using a kilowatt of electricity each)from a standing start ten years ago, a feat comparable with the PC revolution itself.

Ten years on, predictably,we now see a proliferation of IWB products, all of course non-interoperable, and all using incompatible proprietary software. This is a major source of frustration to schools which often have several different makes of IWB on site. It is little wonder, given this mini Tower of Babel, that Becta funded the UK's first major educational Open Source- Open Standards project to produce a universal IWB software package.

Such virgin markets are of course wonderful opportunities for ICT vendors, especially when armed with a little (often flimsy) evidence of 'proven education value to children'. Now with LPs the scene is set identically for the same thing to happen again.

Without SIF, without open standards, we can be sure of the following:

1. lots of proprietary database software will be sold to schools by major vendors
2. most of it will be incompatible with its rivals' products but will work well as suite of one vendor's applications.

It follows that opposition to SIF is an effective strategy to extend the monopoly vendors' hold on the emerging school database market. However as the expression goes ' it gets better' ...

The great LP stitch-up

Learning Platforms are databases with a web front end as described above, they are however empty shells devoid of content. LPs such as the huge Moodle VLE used by the Open University are enormous resources of content created and uploaded by their academic staff who act as course creators.

In a school context however course and content creation is something now quite alien to teachers who as well as being very busy are used to delivering off-the-shelf content provided by publishing houses in coordination with the exam boards.

Consequently there is great advantage to be had if monopolist vendors can 'partner' educational content providers such as Pearson and, rumour has it, that this is exactly what has happened.

Great advantage can be had only if non-inter operability remains the status-quo. Non-SIF compliance excludes competition and locks in clients. As a bonus, if the market share is big enough, the monopolist by ensuring non-interoperability can make its product the standard!

To remind us all of how this kind of thing works, it is useful to consider a 'de-facto' standard, MS Office. Despite initial rejection worldwide of OOXML as the standard format in place of ODF Microsoft are fighting back hard. Even the BSI it is rumoured are preparing to back OOXML as an ISO standard, despite .docx being un-openable by any rival product.

Becta's SIF trials, if you were wondering, were taking place in Birmingham. Capita's withdrawal has caused the whole project to be deferred indefinitely.

Coincidentally guess who is Birmingham City Council's outsource partner for IT? Capita.

Conclusion

Schools once again are looking like becoming victims of non-interoperability and 'de-facto' standardisation. They are being put in a position where they are yet again unable to take full advantage of the products offered by others including the open source sector. Value for money will not be an option and no doubt many more memos such as the one at the beginning of this article will be issued.

Becta, hopefully will have the courage and support of the Government simply to insist on SIF implementation, open standards will benefit schools, increase innovation and provide opportunities for UK companies.

Closed standards will mean a return to the bad old days of monopolist providers and poor value for the taxpayer.

Watch this space.

In the past few weeks I have written several articles for this blog deprecating at length the wasteful power consumption of ICT facilities in schools and suggesting alternative strategies to tackle the problem. I do not intend to do go over the ground again because you can only hector folk for so long on one topic. In any case I don't need to, since wonderfully, the Cardinal Wiseman CTC in Birmingham has recently deployed the UK's first zero carbon ICT facility.

The facility went live in January 2008 according to this month's Education Executive ICT supplement. The details of the project reported in the magazine shows how innovation and open source make natural bedfellows. The school, sponsored by North Birmingham City Learning Centre, has combined a novel thin-client installation designed by yours truly here at Sirius with a 6kw Wind Turbine and 1 KW solar panel supplied by SRE technologies.

The fanless thin-clients use an embedded Linux and draw approximately 4 watts when combined with 7” LCD panels and optional laser keyboards. They are grouped in clusters of five inside a central cylinder and cooled by a natural thermal updraft. The 12v power is supplied to all five from a single DC source thus avoiding the huge power losses contingent on individual transformers. A cluster of five computers uses 25 watts of power, not bad when compared to a single standard 400watt desktop PC.

Up to 20 clients are supported by one 400 watt LTSP server clients bringing the deployment to under I kilo watt. Many congratulations to Cardinal Wiseman Technology College for their bold moves into sustainable computing and hopefully other CTCs will be inspired to do the same.

In addition to thin-client computing low powered devices (6W) such as the new generation of sub-notebooks such as Asus's EeePC and Elonex's One are ideal partners for electricity generated by wind turbines and their like. Maybe now that the island of Eigg has its own wind generated electricity they will soon get computers too.

Aaron Seigo joined the KDE project in 2000 and is sponsored by Trolltech. Based in Calgary, Canada Aaron spends his time thinking about KDE project and its client-side software. Here he describes how porting KDE4 to Windows and MacOS will enable Kontact, the Open Source groupware application, to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Outlook in the enterprise.

How long have you been working on KDE how has the project developed in that time?

I started contributing patches during the 2.0 development time frame and slowly became more involved with each release after that.

In that time, the project has grown along three avenues: technology, community and organization.

The code base has grown in complexity as well as capability. Today we have far more applications than we did when I first got involved and they are capable of so much more. While 2.0 was a capable desktop, it was really the promise of it that drew me to it: it was obvious that one day KDE would be a very complete set of products, and we've mostly arrived there by now.

Community-wise, there are not only more people involved but more kinds of involvement. When I first got involved we had relatively few non-coders involved on a regular basis, and if you weren't a coder you were certainly something of a second class citizen. These days not only do non-coders get treated much more equitably, but we have impressive numbers of artists, translators, writers, communicators/marketeers, coordinators, etc. The user community has also grown substantially, to say the least, and has resulted in many thriving user-centric resources on the web such as kde-look.org, kde-apps.org and dot.kde.org . The growth in diversity and numbers in the community has been nothing short of phenominal.

Organizationally, while the KDE project's global foundation, KDE e.V., existed when I got involved with KDE it was much less visible and far less visibly active. There were conferences every year, but they were smaller and certainly not linked together under a single umbrella as Akademy is. Today, we have official non-profit status, relationships with many of the biggest industry movers and shakers (not to mention literally dozens of smaller but highly entrepeneurial enterprises), an annual conference event in Akademy (with a second one about to be added in the Americas!), sponsored developer sprints on a nearly monthly basis, quarterly reports that get published both to membership and the public, etc. We have working groups (our version of "steering committees") for things such as human-computer interaction issues (usaiblity, accessibility, art direction, etc) and communication and marketing.

In a nutshell: KDE has grown up in just about every way imaginable in the years I've had the pleasure and privelege of being a contributor. The successful maturation of the project is certainly one indicator of its success, and the fact that it has done this while the active leadership has gone through a couple of generations shows that this likely to continue on. If anything defines KDE, it is the deep internalization of the values and goals of the group within every corner and sub-project.

How has the release of KDE4 compare to the early days of KDE3?

KDE4 compares much more readily to the early days of KDE2 rather than KDE3. KDE 3.0 was a very evolutionary release over KDE2 with a few interesting and useful new library features, but it was hardly a massive reworking of things. KDE 2.0, on the other hand, was a couple of years in the making just as 4.0 was, it was certainly not what we would consider "complete" by today's standards though it was usable and it brought a huge number of exciting new framework level advances.

KDE2 was a bit of a rocky time for the project due to the long release cycle and the expectations-to-realities relationship. But it was that 2.0 release that directly led to the much vaunted 3.5 series several years later and not only won award after award but won the hearts and minds of the Free software community.

In that sense, KDE4 is starting out very similarly: an amazing amount of new technology, huge promise, a terrific start to things ... but it's a foundation to build on with much building left to be done just like 2.0 was.

Unlike 2.0, there are far more applications and far more features already in place. In that way it's like 3.0, for its scope and breadth.

It's unlike any release we've done before, though, as we are supporting Windows and MacOS as target platforms now and our community has grown hugely since then. The expectations are higher than ever and the appetite in our user community for experimentation and ambitious efforts is quite a bit lower. Doing such a huge reworking of the frameworks and applications in such a tricky environment is not easy, and it's a situation that simply didn't exist in KDE 2.0 or 3.0 times.

So while we've "been there, done that" in some ways, there's also a lot of new challenges: and new challenges bring opportunity as well as keep things interesting.

Many people think Microsoft hasn't been able to communicate the advantages of Windows Vista to effectively to XP users. Given how good KDE3.5 is, have you managed to avoid this trap with KDE4?

I think we did a much better job than Microsoft did with Vista and people are very aware of the promise of our "pillars of KDE4" such as Phonon, Solid, Decibel, etc. as well as the exciting applications like Marble, Amarok, Plasma, etc.

However, to be honest, I think we could have done even better on this point. There was room for improvement when it came to communicating with words that were broadly understandable what the 4.0 release was and the path leading up to it. Sometimes when what you are doing is not what the audience expects, you end up with a fundamental communications barrier. There are was to address that, and in the flurry of activity and hurry of things we dropped the ball at times there.

Since then we've done a much better job of setting and defining expectations and the quality (let alone amount) of communication around the benefits of KDE4 has improved considerably.

There is a lot of interest and desire for KDE4, with Linux distributions racing to integrate it with their offerings and people not in our traditional audience such as Mac and Windows users or hardware integrators really paying attention to us. That is a good measure of our ongoing success in this area.

What are the five most important technical advancements with KDE4 and how do they benefit end users?

Which five are the most important depends on who you are. So instead of trying to define the five that are "most important" I'll take the liberty of enumerating five that I think will have great impact in diverse ways.

Obviously, there's the addition of more platforms and in particular Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. This not only broadens our potential user base but more importantly it increases the attractiveness of the KDE framework stack to third party developers and lets us start to compete in a meaningful way in terms of data standards.

We are going to see some very interesting developments happening when Kontact is available on all platforms. For instance, finally there will be a groupware solution that looks and behaves exactly the same on all platforms (a support win) that lets you choose your groupware server (a server side win). Kontact represents the client side of the first realistically competitive threat to the Exchange-plus-Outlook hegemony. And that's just one application.

We've also done a tremendous amount of work on making it possible for "mere mortal" developers to build sophisticated and complete applications. Phonon brings multimedia to the Free/Open Source Software appilcation world in a way that is actually approachable for the average developer, for instance. KDE4 provides similarly ground breaking frameworks in terms of platform independance and ease of use for hardware awareness (Solid), threading (Threadweaver and QtConcurrent), messaging (Decibel), spellchecking (Sonnet) and more.

We've also laid the groundwork for important "enterprise" functionality through work such as pluggable configuration backends, allowing us to start to deliver things such as directory based configuration management and definition. While not overly exciting for the average end user, this is big news for those managing large deployments, which is an audience that continues to grow: it's no longer unusual (though still exciting) to hear of five figure seat deployments of KDE anymore.

In the desktop workspace itself, KDE4 pushes all edges of the envelope. From the new window management features of KDE4's window manager that simply blow past what is available on any other production system, including MacOS, to the fresh approach to how the desktop spaces and panels are managed KDE users will find whole new ways of interacting with their devices opening up to them. Easily sharable widgets, groupable into easily switchable activity sets and more humane access to windows and search as an integral part of things (the "Run Command" dialog has been transformed into a search portal!) will have impacts that we have only begun to understand and experience.

Finally, the applications themselves are breaking down barriers. That's really the whole point of this entire excerise, after all: to make killer applications that people end up relying on for work, communication and fun.

So we see things like the Marble desktop globe helping to Free up mapping, Amarok2 extending its support for ever more online (and DRM-free!) music stores, improved usability and utility in our image viewers, file managers and other utilities, more and better amusements, etc.

Where do you see the opportunities for KDE4 in the enterprise market space?

KDE is first and foremost a Free(dom) Software project, and this has huge implications for enterprise customers. It continues to amaze me that even now large companies, educational institutions and government agencies tie themselves into a single vendor strategy, something that can only be characterized as "brittle". Whether you look at the information security aspects, contract negotiation leverage, lifetime realities, long-term business goal appropriateness (impacted by things such as the vendor changing their business goals in a way that are innapropriate to yours) ... single vendor situations are just bad business. Virtually no other industry that business relies on so fundamentally has such a pervasive occurance of single vendor lock-in relationships.

So all other things being equal, the enterprise market should really be looking very seriously at adopting software such as KDE4 purely from a business strategy point of view.

Fortunately for us, all things aren't equal. With native support for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and MacOS, KDE4 offers something very, very few other software vendors do: a single user interface that can be supported across all platforms. Since most enterprises have a heterogenous information landscape, often rather closely reflecting broader market trends, this can very easily translate into a huge win for the support teams. It also means that those looking to add, for instance, Linux base systems to the mix can do so with greater ease by adopting KDE4 applications across the enterprise.

From a management point of view, I expect to see directory integration to appear that exceeds what was in KDE3 rather quickly. The move to technologies such as PolicyKit and PackageKit are also afoot which improve management. This has been an area KDE has always done well with it's Kiosk framework for user and group configuration management and lock down, so these improvements will only strengthen that trend.

KDE is now the first free desktop whose apps compile on every major platform.

Not only is it the first Free Software desktop, it's one of the few desktop application sets that do that anywhere. Very, very few applications anywhere with a user interface work out of the box on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and Solaris. The reason for this is only partly technical: while one needs to design for portability in mind from the start, even if your application is portable adding more platforms can be extremely costly in terms of support and marketing.

With the Open Source model, however, instead of a top-down approach where all costs filter upwards, costs filter outwards. So we have a Windows team that is made up in large part by new participants: opening up a Windows port actually increased our resources rather than taxing them further, even before we had a single released product. This has also increased the opportunities around KDE, which is being met with interest from entrepeneurial companies.

This may seem like a paradoxical situation from a business perspective, but once one realizes that a distributed, participant based model thrives on cost since that implies opportunity it becomes apparent that there are great economic efficiencies to be tapped by extending the KDE landscape.

Can you tell us more about the strategy for encouraging Windows and Mac users to use KDE instead of their default desktops?

First off, Windows and Mac users do not need to leave their default desktops. They can use KDE4 applications alongside other Windows and Mac applications and continue working as they always have. So a Mac user may decide to use Okular, the KDE4 document viewer, because it supports so many formats, is light on resources and leaves the "DRM question" up to the end user; meanwhile they can continue to use the Mac OS X finder and other applications.

Our first foot in the door, so to speak, is filling the niches, some of which are actually very large, that are under-serviced by current applications available on those platforms. This may be because the initial cost or total cost of ownership may be too high for competing proprietary or even open source options, or it may be because the KDE4 application is simply much better at what it does.

While these applications work just great on Windows and Mac OS with their default desktops, it's also true that they work even better in a full KDE environment: they will tend to start faster, user fewer resources and have greater interoperability with the workspace shell.

Moreover, this will give people who absolutely must hold on to their Mac or Windows systems for some specific tasks the option of replacing the rest of the systems in their offices with full KDE (on Linux, BSD or OpenSolaris) systems without increasing their support costs due to differeng desktop applications or changing their desktop application mix.

Additionally, by offering options on the client that allow you to pick your server side choices with greater lattitude (the Kontact + groupware server of your choice versus Outlook + Exchange example is a great one), this will allow those who previously found the transition to a Free Software operating system too difficult or expensive due to server side considerations to make the decisions on the client side that they would like to.

In the end, though, it will come down to communicating these benefits clearly to the market. Clear, consistent and powerful communication is at the core of our strategy. That means executing a coherent and moving marketing campaign, building up our network of partner companies that sell and support KDE products and making sure that all this resonates strongly with the core values of those who make KDE to begin with.

You may notice that virtually all the benefits of KDE that I've described above relate to the concept of freedom: the freedom to do business how and with whom you'd like, the freedom to do what you want how you want to do it, the freedom to choose your tools rather than be forced into those choices, the freedom to be a part of an exciting community of participants that encompasses users, technologists and business ... in a single phrase, it's all about being free.

And being free is what KDE4 brings to the desktop, the laptop, the media center and the mobile devices of this world.