If you are a student looking for an Office suite for college, let me inform you that Open Office 2.4 rocks; it's smart, easy to use, supports open standards, is free, can be distributed freely to your friends works on virtually any computer and now you can even get free training through the QCA approved INGOTs.

Best of all, Open Office.org's engineers have done a fantastic job reverse engineering MS's .doc, .xls and .ppt formats so that OO has an unparalleled ability to handle a range of file formats with fidelity, including VB macros. This achievement ranks with the other great interoperability open source project, SAMBA. The SAMBA team's duplication (improvement?) of MS's SMB networking protocol liberated Mac, Linux and Windows machines from their isolation.

Are Microsoft worried? I think they must be...

If you are a student and go to your favourite online today you will find something pretty similar to this; Vista Ultimate rrp £249.00.. student price £64.95; or amazingly, Office 2007 Pro rrp £395.95... a snip at £79.94.

These are some discounts, especially if we take into account that virtually the entire cohort of 16-19 year olds and 50% of the under 21s in the UK qualify. Education discounting has increased steadily over the years so lets run with this trend and see where it leads.

The trend is to zero; free, no-purchase cost, nothing; can this be a possibility?

If you're a very rich company and money is no object, heavy discounting is quite possible, maybe not sustainable on a global scale and maybe not a great way to promote your brand value either but it's the old story, market share versus profit. Can you grab/keep enough before you go bust?

Obviously, market share of the next generation of 'Office' users is everything: de Facto standards depend on near monopoly.

Imagine then Vista and Office 2007 is offered to students free (a bit like Linux and Open Office but with proprietary licencing).

Imagine also a soupcon of brand-loyalty gewgaws (aka lock-ins) such as a quirky interface (eg Mac Office 2008 ), quirkier file formats (.docx). Finally even better, one may predict that if you signed up to MS's MESH you can also expect a free laptop from an obliging ISP to run all that free software.

Is there any evidence other than the price crashes mentioned above to fuel this scenario?

In fact there are a few indicators.

For example this April, as reported in a previous post, UK Gov in partnership with Microsoft launched a Microsoft-funded £6,000,000 computer literacy drive to bring office skills to those on the other side of the digital divide. For another, Vista comes with a trial Office 2007 suite which can only save in .docx format. As an aside .docx, (possibly one of weirdest, least interchangeable, impossible to reverse engineer format currently around) very quickly puts school ICT teachers in a spin when their students bring in their work and it won't open. Yet another indicator: one ISP already offers a free Dell Laptop with a broadband account.

Finally, the famous OLPC sub $100 (£50) notebook project has just 'joined forces' with Microsoft and now sports a Microsoft Windows XP hack. Just how much of the £50 is the cost of the OS. One suspects not very much.

All circumstantial evidence, not enough to convict anyone, but it will do to be going on with. Here is a plausible scenario:

We are witnessing a live race - Open Office versus Free MS Office. The latest generation of phenomenally successful education-targeted sub-notebooks and diskless workstations are all running Open Office on Linux (excepting now of course the OLPC).

Within a very short time a great many young users will have been exposed to Open Office. QCA approved companies like INGOTs in the UK will supply training (if needed) and the dominance of MS Office is threatened in a critical sector; future users.

So who will win this race? Open Office and MS Office are now both free for 'bona fide' students. Which would you choose?

Well, three and more years ago this question would have been a no-brainer, you would have chosen MS Office. What about now? Is this still true?

Open Office looks set to follow in the footsteps of Firefox and achieve significant market penetration.

If, in this case, say 20% are OO users, 5% MS Mac Office 2004, 70% MS Office 2003 and a handful were MS Office 2007/2008, then how does your student's decision look?

Both OO and MS Office 2007/8 (in our imaginary scenario are free of purchase cost to the student), the 'something expensive for nothing principle' is very strong, so free MS Office (which costs industry and the public sector hundreds of pounds per go) still is pretty compelling, especially with that free laptop!

And, after all, the young don't think too hard about the future of vendor lock in and they also always save in the application's default format (.docx). To cap it all Becta has just signed up for another three years of the now infamous MS MOU.

It looks like a win to 'free' MS Office.

Two things may be pivotal, the need for MS to protect loss of revenue and a potential backlash from a cash strapped Public Sector and bottom-line conscious business sector.

MS Office related revenue is a serious bedrock of funds for Microsoft. It can't just be given away to everyone. In the standard proprietary software business model free, or nearly free software has to be subsidised by those paying full rate. Microsoft subsidises education hardware vendors in the UK very generously already, even so their profit on turnover ratios are wafer thin. Any loss of perceived value for bundled MS products could well further erode profits, some firms will fail. Why, for example, would a school buy a desktop computer with Vista and Office 2007 from say RM plc when a 'student' could get the whole lot pretty much for nothing and bring it in on a laptop?

Meanwhile as stated before the Public Sector and Industry are paying full price.

To the mix above add a failure of OOXML to become a Standard Format and the inability of MS Office to use already standard Open Document Formats. In which case, as in much of mainland Europe, we may see a sudden and massive, corporate and public sector switch to Open Office as firms address their bottom line and worry about backward compatibility of their legacy files. Many still use Office 2000, not the ideal software to add a .docx compatibility patch to. Open Office however has first class legacy file support.

Circumstantially it looks very much like MS's strategists are relying on 'just one more generation' of Office users before revenue streams from the on-line Web 2.0 world crank up. The strategy may not work for another reason though, one that MS is acutely aware judging by the resources it is committing.

Uptake even of free software has its own problems. The Free Open Source software world has always struggled with the lack of cost of its products! Marketing 'free-stuff' as enterprise quality equivalents to 'very expensive-stuff' is not always easy as those of us in this industry know very well. It's counter intuitive and a lot of breath gets wasted explaining how FOSS even got to exist at all let alone how it became so good.

Open Office itself gets better each version, but soon I guess it too will be as glossy and as over featured as MS Office. Then how do you chose between two products other than by familiarity and personal preference? Why also would you stay with one product, unless you were locked-in by some odd format?

A strong feature of high quality Open Source Software has been adherence to open standards and the endorsement of really major companies supporting such standards. Factors like open standards have enormously helped the deployment of OSS solutions into industry. It follows that software with idiosyncratic non-standard file formats can't even be given away...

... now I understand. That's what all the fuss is about: ODF versus OOXML! No standard means no product differentiator which means dwindling market share even when you give it away. Exciting stuff.

This post is prompted by some outstandingly depressing UK statistics:

The summer 2008 will see  fewer candidates taking GCE Computing than even the previous year's low, approximately 5000 out of the total of 800,000 GCE's, of which barely 600 are female; secondly the drop out rate for Computer Science at University is  now the highest of all subjects at over 10% and to top it all our projected industry demand for IT professionals is estimated at a massive 150,000. If all our computing GCE students went to university to do computing they would amount to under 2% of demand.

How on earth do we find ourselves in this position? To set the scene before we look at what actually happens in schools I will remind you that some months ago I predicted Linux will dominate school desktops in 5 years through low cost personal computers. Since then HP and Dell have lined up their own Open Source offerings in this sector so it may be a lot quicker than I first thought. There will be an accompanying growth in demand for Open Source engineering services. If we are to meet this demand for new engineers able to work with Linux then the statistics are even more worrying.

The Rise and Rise of ICT

A survey of school IT qualifications provides the clue. There are today a plethora of examinations relating to using computers in schools. The majority, the overwhelming majority, are ICT qualifications: this is to say qualifications in Information and Communication Technology, a title that needs a little exemplification...

ICT qualifications are offered by various QCA approved awarding bodies: AQA, EdExcel, OCR, E-Skills, ECDL, BCS and INGOTS to name most but not all. The qualifications themselves subdivide into categories: Key Skills, GCSE, GCE (AS A2), GNVQ, CLAIT (cert and diploma), BTec, HND and of course the new Diplomas which are due to replace a lot of them. We are not quite finished with categories; all of the above are divided and united into 'Levels'. Thus CLAIT operates at Level 1 through to Level 3, Key Skills are Level 3, INGOTS Levels 1-2, GNVQs Levels 1-4 and so on. AS and A2 GCE's are levels 3,4.  Many have proxy transferable Levels between categories. Confused? I hope so, most teachers are. In any case whatever qualification you get, ICT means 'Office' skills, lots of coursework (mostly institutionalized cheating) with a bit of other social stuff added in.

There are scores of intersecting ICT courses barely differentiable from each other, the vast majority date from 2000 (floppy drives anyone?), all talk about social impact of ICT, none know about social networking; all instruct about copyright, none mention patent issues or intellectual freedom; none except INGOTS know about open standards. It's not all doom and gloom though. Buried deep in the OCR course list is a nugget or two. Did you know that the OCR GNVQ course iPro is a gem or that one of the new ICT Diplomas has a great Sys Admin Level 3 course? I thought not. It's all too complicated. ICT qualifications are manifold because IT literacy is seen as an imperative and awarding bodies make lots of money from qualifications.

What does ICT really mean?

ICT courses mean proficiency in presentation, word processing, e-mail and spreadsheets. Ho Ho, I should have said, MS Power Point, MS Word, MS Outlook, MS Publisher and MS Excel. Actually, unlike a few years ago, no publicly examined course today dare explicitly require a single proprietary package for its qualification (except CLAIT which has no such qualms),  but when reality on the ground is taken into account, an ICT qualification in UK schools really means proficiency in MS Office. Nice work Bill, how did this happen and what are the consequences?

The infamous MOU

The great change happened in 1997 when the newly elected Labour Government signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Microsoft for ICT in schools. The MOU still exists but Becta is less than happy with it nowadays as I have referred to in previous posts. I can still see a happy smiling Prime Minister and the CEO of Microsoft beaming the good news through my television screen (I no longer own a television just in case). Almost overnight on a wave of funds and 'advantageous' educational licencing, ICT replaced IT in schools. No ICT course has a programming or a systems module, instead students are taught to be mere consumers of technology, and operators of applications. Complex fragile networks in schools also mean that students are locked out of the system and potentially invasive coding activities are deprecated. Thus in barely one school generation ICT wiped out computing.

If you think I am over egging the pudding, here is a timely reminder courtesy of Labour's David Lammy MP at a launch of a new 'literacy in IT'  Government initiative this week. The answer to bridging the  divide for the estimated 17 million digitally excluded from ICT is ...Microsoft's Digital Literacy Curriculum !  Yes thanks to  a $ 12 million donation from Bill those non-Microsoft users missed out by UK Gov-MS plc will at last get their chance to join the fold.

Ways Forward

Most computer engineers I know are self-taught. You will commonly hear mention of Atari, Commodore, BBC Micro, even Win 95 as platforms on which they cut their teeth. I have yet to hear of XP/Vista script kiddies. Coding and engineering requires open systems (you knew this was coming), the legendary taking the clock apart as an indication of nascent techno behaviour would not have happened if we started with quartz mechanisms; you simply can't get under the bonnet (hood). The same applies to modern appliance like computers you are not encouraged to find out what makes them tick. Open Source software gives us the tools to play with the clock again. Here is my recipe for the success of computing in our schools.

1. Move ICT courses out of the Level system of the curriculum. The accrediting and examining QA processes just freeze content. ICT is not like chemistry, it changes uniquely and continually and has no core knowledge. ICT courses should live or die according to their usefulness and should not be promoted by the state.
2. Increase the availability of computing courses at all Levels within the system. Engineering principles have a much longer shelf life and make very good qualifications as it happens.
3. Becta should do as did Newham Council last week and drop  MS's MOU

In summary for as long as school computing amounts to little more than how to use MS Office, our technological base will continue to erode. We cannot hope to compete in the modern world by relying on a few, intelligent self-motivated and self-taught individuals to escape the education system. As a first step in liberating the next generation why don't we give them a tweaked copy of Ubuntu's excellent live Linux distro. On it with all the other usual goodies will be the developer environments for Python, Ruby, Java, Gambas. Go kids, reboot those closed boxes from your live CD and learn about freedom. At least then we may have someone homegrown to recruit in the future.

Steve McIntyre is a software engineer and a long-time Debian developer. His best known contributions have been in the field of creating Debian CD/DVD images; he is the debian-cd team leader and is responsible for generating the official images. McIntyre ran for the post of Debian Project Leader in 2006 but was defeated by Anthony Towns by only six effective votes. In 2006-2007, he was named "Second in charge", a post created for him by Towns. In the 2007 DPL election, he was defeated by Sam Hocevar, again by a small margin, only eight effective votes. In 2008 he again ran for the position of DPL and was elected.

Q: What's your view on the encumbered patent deals that some Linux distributions have signed up to (e.g. Xandros, Linspire)? What do you think will be the effect on Linux in particular and FOSS in general?

I can understand that some companies may feel more comfortable by signing that kind of deal to cover themselves. Some markets like the US are notorious for problems with software patents, and I guess it comes down to a simple business decision to weigh up the costs of doing this kind of deal against the potential costs of a legal defence against a patent attack (baseless or not).

However, I strongly feel that making this kind of deal is a mistake in the longer term. It lends legitimacy to the software patent system and in particular to whatever patents may be mentioned in these deals. Doing that is bad in and of itself, but it will also lead to reduced support by the community. Free Software and its developers can only be damaged by the software patent system.

Q: Debian is sometimes criticised as being for hobbyists despite evidence that it's used by some very serious organisations for some massive deployments. Do you think the Debian project has some work to do in articulating its enterprise credentials?

I think that there's always scope for us to do more on that front. There will always be some users who won't believe in Debian as an option for the enterprise just because we're not directly backed by a large corporation, and that will be a difficult attitude to change. However, I know of lots of companies today that will provide paid support for Debian where it's required, and we already have a fine reputation for stability. I think that the next trick is to start making more of a positive impact directly in the "Enterprise" space with positive press exposure and good reviews. Maybe that's something that you can help with. :-)

Q: Debian started off as a benevolent dictatorship run by Ian Murdoch and then by Bruce Perens. Is it fair to say that the subsequent democratisation of the project has resulted in more time being devoted to politics rather than technology?

Oh, absolutely. As we've grown in size and changed our governance model over the years, clearly more of our time has been spent on talking to each other rather than *just* working on the technical issues. I think that's an unavoidable consequence of our growth, just like in any organisation. But there is still plenty of time to do the technical collaboration that we're known for, don't worry.

Q: Debian has traditionally favoured Gnome over KDE? Given the former's support for the passage of OOXML through ISO and the upcoming release of KDE 4.1, do you think this might change?

In the very early days of Gnome and KDE, we did favour Gnome to a certain extent. There were some very public disagreements between Debian and the KDE folks over licensing to start with, so for a while we did not include KDE at all in our releases. But since that problem was fixed (years ago) we've worked well with both the Gnome and KDE developer communities and we have large, active teams working on packaging for both systems. I don't expect to see that change any time soon, to be honest.

Q: What are your hopes from the upcoming Debconf in Argentina?

I'm expecting that we'll have yet another vibrant, exciting conference this year, with lots of cool technical content and (just as important) lots of time for our developers to socialise and get to know each other better. Despite our experience in Debian at harnessing internet communication methods to work together, there's still a great deal of benefit to face-to-face meetings.

There's also still time for sponsors to get involved with Debconf. We're always looking for more money to help pay for the conference itself, plus we try to help with the travel costs for many of our contributors. Many companies have already seen the benefits of being associated with us.