This post comes hard on the heels of an important piece of news... at least one Open Source company has become part of the Becta's official list of suppliers to the education sector. The new procurement frame work under the aegis of the OGC relaunches the supply of ICT to education. The emphasis is clear: deliver value for money to UK schools.

It was not long ago that most commentators believed an Open Source company would join the likes of Capita, Serco and RM shortly after hell froze over. But times do change. In this case the driving force for change seems to be (we presume) the well-known cost-benefit values of Linux and other Open Source software.

It's the Economy Stupid

As usual it's all about money. The Open Source community has always advocated that schools in the UK adopted Free Open Source Software (FOSS) on the grounds that there were considerable cost savings to be had which would directly benefit schools and the taxpayer alike.

As long ago as 2005 a report from Becta strongly supported this assertion. However this was a time when huge amounts of a cash-rich Government's money were being poured into developing school ICT and value for money was not really on the agenda. As a result the incumbent proprietary vendors enjoyed a feeding frenzy and Open Source solutions were ignored. Indeed it was impossible, despite persistent lobbying, to get an Open Source company on the official school suppliers list. As I said, how times change. If we revisit school's ICT finances 2008 we see a different picture.

If you are a school fund-holder you can forget about long-gone ring-fenced ICT funding and generous e-learning credits; forget about BSF grants; forget about the massive refurbishment 'refresh' monies and try not to think about the few super-rich Academies. The UK Gov has run out of money for the continual 'improvements' in school ICT, and an impending recession is hardly likely to restore the coffers, but, and this comes as no surprise, it hasn't run out of ambition.

Given that there are no monies waiting to be showered on school ICT projects from the Treasury, then there are only two ways of funding government plans for ICT in schools now. These are: donations from a generous philanthropic third party multinational software giants or try to wrestle it back from the schools to whom the money has been devolved (and being no longer ring fenced could be spent on crayons if they liked).

The former route, the philanthropic donor, involves, the cynics may say, attempts to sell a slow selling operating system to new generation of children via several well publicised 'access' initiatives this year.

Indeed, the source of the funds for this week's announcement that all poor children will be given £700 to buy themselves a computer with broadband access is not clear. It may well be Treasury (ie taxpayers) money but it is rumoured to be 'philanthropic' in its origination. In any case, the generosity of putative donors is not the thesis of this article. What concerns me is the attempt to claw back devolved money from schools to support a model of ICT which is unsustainable and unsuitable for school's needs.

Yes, schools have all the money now; the budget was devolved to while ago, but unfortunately the Government wants it back to fund their grandiose schemes.

Enter the IT Managed Service Agreements. If you are a school Finance Officer and for some reason you are reading this article the mere mention of the phrase Managed Service Agreement (sorry I said it again) will cause you to reach for the sedative bottle. To cut to the chase, you should find that your IT budget has just gone up by a factor of two or three. If you are a Secondary School put aside a cool £300,000 to have your IT run by the LA in companion with your local friendly outsourcing giant who will decide what kit you use and what software you can have. If you thought Microsoft was good at locking you in you have seen nothing yet.

Forget any freedom to allocate resources as you think would meet the needs of you students, any money you have spare may just fund the electricity needed to run the latest behemoth computers; pay the software licence-fees or the wages of the small army of technicians needed to keep it all going.

How to hold two contradictory positions at once

Becta said it loudly nearly two years ago and they were right - the level of funding required by UK current ICT structures is unsustainable.

They weren't kidding then and as we prepare to hit the walls of a recession they sure are not kidding now. Moreover the cost of bidding for BSF and the squeeze on margins has caused the major UK ICT vendor to issue a profit warning. Schools can't afford to pay, the Government can't afford to pay and even the vendors are barely making a profit. Yet LA's are issuing compulsory 'refresh' agreements to state schools forcing them to spend on new ICT equipment and effectively coercing them into expensively outsourcing their ICT.

Forgive me for stating the obvious. The worms will at some point collectively turn. Will state schools be able to file for bankruptcy? There's a thought! In any case there will be a crisis just after a lot of taxpayer's money has been spent/wasted on a model of ICT in schools that is too costly, too slow, too complicated and too restrictive.

Let's call it the Computing-Crunch.

The 'model' in question was driven by the upgrade cycle, proprietary software and an administrative obsession with mega databases.

ICT in the classroom, as used for education, is (or rather should be) a completely different animal to ICT used by LA's and Administrators to control monitor and generally remove citizen's rights. Now I don't for one minute think the public funded schools can fight 'big brother' nor would I advocate rebellion (I do think it is a shame they should have to pay for it themselves... bit like being made to dig your own grave), but to inflict an inappropriate corporate style computing model on the education of our students is unforgivable and stupidly wasteful.

So far so depressing, but schools still have some wriggle room.

I would suggest that schools put aside a little cash labelled 'ICT money I will use for Education' and then change to a new Open Source paradigm for the classroom. Let the mega database driven school-admin-LA-Gov project fail under its own weight and forget about it.

A Simpler Model

A step-by-step approach to reinventing ICT.

Before we start out on this particular tack one sentence on why it needs re-inventing. In case no one has noticed school ICT (GCSE et al) is a boring old fossil; anyone for groovy old 'desktop publishing' or maybe a cool 'PowerPoint' presentation?

Note the brand name of MSPowerPoint as a synonym for presentation software...a bit like 'Hoover' for 'vacuum cleaner' but marginally less exciting.

So out with the old and on with the 21st Century.

Step 1: Make sure you have a good, speedy filtered Internet connection. This is one thing you, the LA and the Government are keen on; all for different motives. If your LA is dragging its feet due to cost, tell them that is much cheaper to go for an Open Source solution.

Step 2: Get the teaching and learning materials you have the copyright to use digitised and stored somewhere. For example, e-text books provided by publishers, school worksheets and DVDs. You will need a couple of terrabytes for all those videos. A Linux solution will cost the least (<£2000) and make sure you have a an effective way of searching for things. Choice here is Silverlight (Microsoft only), GoogleDesktop (freeware), Beagle (Free Open Source).

Step 3: Set up some information servers. These are essentially web servers which incorporate a virtual learning environment and optionally a wireless access point. Using free Open Source software (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP-Moodle) the DIY price will be under £1000 each. Place them strategically. Give them access to the outside world if you wish to work from home. The information server will access the educational materials stored on the storage server.

Step 4: Setup some terminal servers: One server will 'do' 25 clients. The terminal server is there to provide a consistent school desktop when for teaching purposes you require all the students to have the same application in front of them. Use Linux Terminal Server as this is a free Open Source Software. Again the DIY price is under £1000. If you want to save on hardware and energy costs then in Step 3 specify the server a little higher and using Xen (the free Open Source virualisation hypervisor) install two OSes on the server one for the web server then another for the terminal server!

Step 5: Save time and energy. Rip the hard drives out of your existing PCs and set them to PXE boot to the Terminal Server. For ultra-quick boot up replace the motherboads with fast boot boards (5-10 secs from cold) which incorporate an embedded Linux OS.

Step 6: Turn off the photocopiers and printers.

Now, as a school you have "done your bit" as it were. Your school is now an electronic source of educational materials. You have an entire pedagogic infrastructure, which for a secondary school of 1000 students would cost (assuming DIY) well under £30,000 using Open Source products.

All we have to do now is to access this stuff.

Back to Netbooks

The explosion of low cost so called netbooks brings PCs into the accessibility bracket of iPODs. It seems (to me) that it is not unreasonable to make them personal learning access devices and the property of the student (along with conventional laptops). I know, not everyone can afford a £100 computer, but that is exactly the kind of thing that the state can intervene in to support with grants and loans. So let's leave this to one side or I will have to stop writing here or alternatively I could point out that if you actually carried out steps 5 and 6 you would be able to afford them yourselves.

The students can have whatever they like on their computers, they own them after all. They can access school materials by using them as e-books, or web browsers, (they could be running Google Chrome and web apps) or as VLE clients; anything at all. If you need big keyboards and screens don't forget all the old kit you still have with just that.

They all have wireless access and the school has wireless access points.

If you are desperate for a conventional ICT lesson where all learn to use, say, a spreadsheet (i.e. the very-same-spread-sheet for teaching purposes) you can either PXE boot to the terminal server or boot from a USB stick/cf flash card containing a super-fast standard school-linux distro (sys admins heaven). There is a lot in this sentence, more than one Windows school sysadmin has approved it.

Such an approach will I believe de-restrict ICT in school and unleash the creative power of ICT in education once again. No really it will. When was the last time you saw something different on the ICT suite? Once IT (as it was known) was the hotbed of innovation in schools, admired and feared in equal measure by more pedestrian subjects.

Leave the conventional network room behind, in fact shut it completely and turn off the air con. Leave the computers with their never-changing fossilised desktops and weary set of applications. Smell the coffee and chose freedom (ok in just one small part of the school).

Conclusion

Please pick holes in the master plan above, maybe suggest some improvements but thanks to BECTA's change of heart you can now get your Open Source software straight from the OGC Web Portal from Gov approved suppliers.

The summary is: Internet-Moodle-Netbooks.

So, schools, with what little money you have left, leave the admin bullies to their games. You can do little to stop them, and set off with your students in a new direction. At least we will have some fun and with free, Open Source software no one can stop you!

Bernard Golden is a renowned expert on open source software and author of the excellent "Open Source in the Enterprise" recently published by O'Reilly. We caught up with him at the HP Finanical Services industry Open Source Advisory Council to ask him how Open Source is changing the way Enterprises use software.

 

Q1: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wrote the report "Open Source in the Enterprise"?

I have been consulting in open source and enterprises for about six or seven years. I know folks at O'Reilly, and when they decided they wanted to examine the enterprise open source phenomenon, they asked me if I'd participate. I was delighted, especially because O'Reilly has some very innovative data mining techniques that would allow us to examine real data about enterprise adoption beyond the usual anecdotes.

Q2: Why are enterprises adopting more and more open source software?

In the report, we identified six drivers for enterprise open source adoption:

1. agility and scale
2. quality and security
3. breaking vendor lock-in
4. cost
5. sovereignty
6. innovation

Depending upon the enterprise, one or more of these drivers might motivate their use of open source. Often, the initial interest is from a cost perspective, but as the organizations gets more acquainted with open source, the other drivers come to be seen as important.

Q3: How do you measure the use of open source adoption in enterprises?

Rather than conduct surveys, which are usually suspect in their methodology or sample set, we looked at open source recruitment postings in Fortune 1000 companies, reasoning that for a company to get to the point that they want to hire a skill, it's likely that they are using the product. We found that about .2% of all F1000 job postings were for open source-skilled positions (our definition was that two open source products needed to be called out in the posting for it to meet the threshold of being open source-oriented). Given that total IT employment in F1000 companies is about 2.4%, this means that around 10% of all IT jobs are open source-oriented.

Q4: How important do you think being able to inspect an application's source code really is? Is it a red herring or do you have an example of where this has been critical in an enterprise's use of open source software?

Certainly a number of US Government security agencies have used the transparency of open source code as a reason to use the products; they are able to examine the code and satisfy themselves that it is not compromised with respect to security. Beyond those situations, IT organizations find the ability to study the code relevant when integrating with an open source product, so as to understand its behavior better and thereby create a better end product.

Q5: What value do the communities around open source projects have to enterprises?

Community is absolutely critical; absent community, open source is little better than source code availability through escrow. The Open Source Maturity Model, which I created to enable formal assessment of the maturity of open source products, measures the maturity of a number of product elements like support, documentation, and professional services, all of which increase in maturity as the product community grows and matures.

Q6: Will open source ever shake its 'beard and sandles' reputation? Or do you think its slightly alternative image is a strength rather than a weakness?

Its outer image served to attract adherents early in the open source movement. Most technologies, to achieve mainstream adoption, have to be seen as mainly being used by mainstream organizations. I feel that as more 'typical' IT organizations adopt open source as a key part of their strategy, open source will come to be seen as a mainstream choice. I'm sure, however, that there will always be tie-dyed t-shirts in the back room of the open source ballroom!

Q7: In the report you identify six core drivers for open source adoption by enterprises. Which is the most important and why?

As I mentioned earlier, the importance of the drivers varies according to the goals of an IT organization. Cost is an easy driver to initially identify, so many people consider that the primary motivator for open source use; however, as companies become more familiar with open source and integrate it more deeply into their strategies, they find other open source drivers extremely relevant to their situations.

Q8: Why should ISVs consider using open source software as their development platform?

For ISVs, there are three primary reasons:

1. Cost – with constant pressure on margins, using open source in place of licensed third party software components or self-developed components can reduce COGS significantly;
2. Time to market – leveraging existing open source rather than developing all necessary product components internally can shorten the time it takes to deliver a product to customers; and
3. Competitive secrecy – licensing a third-party component can signal market intentions to another company and thereby offer them an opportunity to respond competitively; using open source that is available anonymously allows a company to develop a product without offering information to other interested parties about what it is doing.

Q9: Why does open source licensing improve code quality?

Because so many more people – with many different skills and perspectives – examine an open source product in comparison to a closed source product, more attention can be paid to any particular piece of code, thereby raising the likelihood that bugs will be fixed. In addition, the availability of source code means that anyone that is concerned with a bug can directly work on it, avoiding the need to wait for a vendor to address it.

Q10: How does open source licensing improve security?

Just as quality benefits from, as the saying goes, many eyes looking at the code, the same is true for security. More people, with different skills and perspectives, can examine the code and address security issues. This is far more direct attention than is typically possible within a closed source software company.

Q11: Why does open source licensing enhance the quality of support?

In proprietary software companies, support is usually seen as a necessary evil, and a cost drain, detracting from company profitability. Consequently, support is usually understaffed and peopled by the lowest-possible skill set. Commercial open source companies derive the majority of their revenues from support, so they focus on delivering high-quality support services. This can be evaluated in light of the fact that Red Hat has consistently been awarded very high marks for support quality.

This does not even address the quality of community support, a very active aspect of open source, where peer members using the product can offer real-world and real-time feedback on problems encountered while using a product.

The combination of community support and high-quality commercial open source support provides very effective support, much better than the proprietary alternative.

Q12: In cost terms, what is the critical advantage of open source software over proprietary software?

The absence of license fees means that open source is usually less expensive, since at most only support (subscription) fees are required. Moreover, open source avoids the oft-encountered “mandatory upgrade fee. Finally, because open source is more of a pay-as-you-go cost model (in contrast to the front-loaded fee structure of proprietary software), open source matches value to cost much better.

Q13: How does open source licensing encourage innovation?

Obviously, the ability to modify a product to better suit the use cases of a company enables innovation for it – it can create a product better tuned to the needs of its customers. Beyond that, though, companies can make open source libraries available to let their customers experiment and innovate, thereby leveraging the better insights and inventiveness to improve the original product.

Q14: How do you suggest enterprises go about adopting open source technologies?

In the report, we identify three sets of recommendations: early adopters, mainstream users, and innovation seekers. As you might expect, it's a developmental approach in that early adopters, once they get more experienced with open source, apply it throughout their infrastructure so that it is a mainstream use pattern. Likewise, once a company that applies open source widely throughout its infrastructure examines what other ways they can apply open source, they begin to evaluate how it can help achieve innovation. There isn't enough space to describe the elements of each of the recommendations, but an extract of the report is available to download. Of course, the complete report goes into significant detail about how to implement each of the sets of recommendations.

Q15: What common mistakes do enterprises make when taking on open source software?

The primary mistake most enterprises make regarding open source is failing to understand how much it is already being used throughout the organization – it's just invisible, since it's not wired into the processes of the IT organization. It's critical to put standardized governance into place to ensure open source use moves to transparent from invisible.

About Bernard Golden

Bernard Golden is a recognised authority on Open Source software. Called a "renowned open source expert" (IT Business Edge) and "an open source guru" (SearchCRM.com), he is regularly in magazines like Computerworld, Information Week, and Inc. His blog "The Open Source" is one of the most popular features of CIO magazine's website. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences like LinuxWorld, the Open Source Business Conference, and the Red Hat Summit. Bernard Golden is the author of Succeeding with Open Source (Addison-Wesley, 2005), used as a course text in universities throughout the world. He is CEO of Navica. a Silicon Valley-based management consulting firm focused on open source and innovation.

I have become increasingly interested in what can only be described as the Windows XP effect. My previous two posts focussed on the idea that XP is, in the user's mind, the end of the upgrade journey and that even mighty Microsoft is struggling to budge them away from XP onto bigger and 'better' things.

I assert, and would expect little dissention, that change away from XP (voluntary change that is) wherein most users reside deep in their comfort zone, would need a really powerful driver. For arch conservative schools and public sector workplaces it will have to be a very good reason indeed.

This driving force will come from the Open Source community for one simple reason and that is here we find diversity. The winning strategy is lurking in the open source primordial soup waiting to reproduce rapidly and burst onto the scene we just don't know which it is yet. Corporate proprietary software programs, despite having access to huge talents and huge budgets, have 'strategic visions' and 'road-maps'. In short they plan and they fund accordingly; for them diversity is expensive, wasteful and often futile.

The Open Source community by virtue of its very core being has no plan!

Individual projects within the pantheon of Open Source software do of course have a plan. The OpenOffice project knows where it is going (for a while at least) as does, I presume, MySQL and even Java (is it Open Source now or not? I lose track). I have admittedly been a little disingenuous with my choices as all three above have one rather vast corporation in the background. Enterprise-level Open Source operating systems also have a plan just like any large corporate product, Novell's Suse and Red Hat Enterprise being obvious examples.

However, non-enterprise Open Source projects number in their thousands and reflect the interests and passions of their developer or group of developers. Projects start in one direction and may fork in another. Some die out others flourish. Taken in the round though no statement can be made about their 'direction'.

The above brings me to the point of this article, and that point the great corporation known as Google. Google has, as is well known, always fished in the Open Source pond. They have it seems followed a natural selection model assiduously. They feed the fish randomly it seems using their vast wealth and then select promising and sometimes unexpected products. As a result they now have a suite of very impressive online and offline applications the latest is the Open Source application, the browser called Chrome.

Google's Chrome Plated Genius

As discussed above, a driver for change will have to be found to wean off the XP users who after all are in the vast majority of computer users.

If it were to be a new computer to bring about change, this machine most manufacturers seem to agree, would be nicer looking, quieter, less power hungry, and a lot faster at everything than the machines they are asking the consumer to replace. I happen to think that the latter point is very significant and that Open Source software has the means to speed up computing. The basket of changes above may be enough to encourage users to move from XP and their old desktops but Google has had a better idea.

Chrome is a very fast browser as I suppose most readers know full well by now. Fast is obvious and desirable and a good enough reason to slip Chrome onto your Windows desktop, it only takes a few seconds. Don't be afraid.

But the real cleverness follows.

Chrome allows you to create menu icons for online applications which look and behave like regular apps, no sign of the browser shell. It is better to think of Chrome as a shell OS. Install Chrome on your user-comfort zone XP computer and let it take over. With a decent Internet connection you'll soon be using a faster machine that is really an Open Source computer sitting on top of a slave OS. Google have borrowed from biology again this time it's looking at the parasite strategy.

This parasite is smart too. Chrome helpfully tells Google (in confidence of course) what kind of things you like so it can be improved and because it is Open Source anyone can help improve it too. This is truly new. Chrome will rapidly evolve and adapt to its user, hosted by an increasing vestigial operating system. That is really clever, maybe I should have called the post 'Chrome eats Windows'. Chrome will put a shiny hard coat on rusting mild steel Windows, one day all that will be left is the coat.

As a strategy for change this I think is breathtaking. What then is left for Linux (or Mac) , does the same fate await Linux on the desktop? I think so, at least for the big beasts, all the computer will want is an ultra light, ultra fast operating system with a few choice offline applications that can sync with online when needed to. Maybe this is what happened to the dinosaurs.