Things could hardly be tougher in the Whitehall front line. Last year Gordon Brown made it clear in his budget speech just what he expects – 4% annual growth in spending on front line services financed out of just 2% overall budget growth.

Enacting this latter day miracle of loaves and fishes is not going to be easy. But it will not happen at all unless Whitehall ends its chronic failure to use market power to deliver sustainable savings in the massive bill the public sector pays for software.

Nowhere else would departments or their agencies tolerate a monopoly or a monoculture. Imagine if every department decided, as policy, to buy its hardware from the same supplier. Of course innovation wouldn’t stop – improvements in manufacturing and the fundamental laws of physics would see to that. But the pace would slow – what’s the incentive if the buyer is locked in? – and the price would rocket.

And that is exactly where we are with software.

Whitehall needs to apply the lessons it has learnt everywhere else – not just that markets drive down cost and improve quality but that sustaining markets requires active fostering with regular deal flow and sufficient encouragement to the supplier community to keep stepping up to the wicket to compete for the work.

We do not expect proprietary software to disappear from the public sector. We don’t even expect, in the short to medium term at least, that there will be a massive shift away from current suppliers to a more heterogeneous world. But we do think that unless Whitehall acts to create a mixed market in software supply then long term savings will be impossible to deliver.

The open source business model is a different one from the proprietary model that currently dominates. And we think those differences mean even a relatively small use of open source will drive big changes that benefit purchasers and ultimately the public.

The key insight of the open source model is that the software you use should be yours to control and customise. It’s not a new concept: the internet depends on open source to direct you to the site you want to see. And the TCP/IP protocols that carry almost all network traffic – whether on the internet or not - have driven out proprietary alternatives not because of heavy handed marketing or the famous “fear, uncertainty and doubt” beloved of computer salesmen of old, but precisely because they are open and so strengthened by peer review.

That openness means that there is a common interest in driving improvements and innovation, making software more reliable, more robust and even simpler to use. And open source is big business: the Linux operating system, at the core of so many open source projects, might have been started in the bedroom of a Finnish student, but today it is at the heart of a multi-billion dollar industry that is revolutionising the way IT works.

We have already seen this in the private sector. Moving to new software solutions based on the open source business model is saving Specsavers, Europe's fastest growing opticians group, hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in licensing alone. Yes, there are costs of transition from one set of software to another, but they are broadly comparable to the familiar cycle of software upgrades that proprietary users have to face every two to five years. The difference is that open source delivers year on year savings once we've got over the hump of the software upgrade.

Bringing those benefits to the public sector might require some people to take what seem like counter-intuitive decisions. The first thing that the big proprietary software firms do when they hear a government department are considering opting for a more diverse range of software suppliers is pitch up at their door offering big discounts.

These tactics have worked well for the proprietary software sellers. Britain only ranks sixth amongst public sector users of open source in the EU. Yet few would claim that means we have better quality IT infrastructure or a better record of delivering IT-led service transformation.

But, like the offers in the summer sales, the discounts offered one day are recouped by mark-ups sought at a later date and, particularly when the purchasers are big central departments, purchasing decisions need to be made in the general interest of the taxpayer, not simply on the basis of who is offering the cheapest price on that one day.

And the supplier lock-in does more than keep costs high, it stifles innovation. Ten years ago the “browser wars” were big news in IT – with two proprietary solutions – Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer – battling it out to be the desktop gateway to the web. Internet Explorer – offered at the ultimate discount of the ‘free’ download (of course the costs were bundled into the cost of the operating system licence) – eventually crushed Netscape. But with the competition gone, the browser technology stagnated, with the only updates being the endless security patches designed to beat the growing army of ‘blackhats’ trying to hijack our machines.

But then, just not even three years ago, version 1.0 of the open source son of Navigator, Firefox, was released. Suddenly, competition kicked in as open source developers brought their expertise to the browser project. Today as much as a quarter of the world’s internet browsers are using Firefox and while Internet Explorer remains the default choice for most of us, it has radically improved as its developers face up to a struggle to keep market share.

The lesson is that the only way to deliver long term cost savings and sustainable quality improvements will be to actively sponsor some bio-diversity in the software world. A few years ago that could quite easily have been done though the use of proprietary software – in word processors think of Wordstar, AmiPro and Wordperfect – but that option has largely gone: only open source has had the strength to resist the monopoly.

We have been able to resist because we have been able to demonstrate quality. Two key aspects of the open source philosophy – that in general a piece of software should do just one thing but do it well and that individual pieces of software should be designed to work together through the use of open and extensible data formats – means that open source software now dominates the backbone of the internet.

Whitehall is often criticised for its aversion to risk as oppose to its willingness to manage it. Switching to a mixed market for software may strike some as a risk too far. Yet at the same time we work in a world where the Internet is taken to be a given, not just at the “five nines” level of reliability but always there, always on. That constancy is a token of open source, open protocols and open data. It is time these came to the public sector.

In a previous 2005 report the Government quango Becta showed that schools could effect considerable savings by making use of Free Open Source software such as Open Office. In their study they simply looked at 'like for like' software replacement using existing networks and computers.

Since this study we have seen the emergence of the new breed of ultra-portable Linux-based computers aimed squarely at the education sector and the inexorable build of Web 2 services such as Google Apps.

This week the Elonex One, a Linux-based laptop costing less than £100, was launched at the Education Show in Birmingham causing much excitement amongst the visitors and a very serious discussion about how best to support this new breed of Linux laptops in schools.

So much has changed so quickly that a model of Open Source school computing is emerging which could save the UK taxpayer billions of pounds and provide enormous opportunities for the home-grown technology sector based around Open Source software.

The problem

The Government does not produce figures for the total cost of ICT in schools. Our research shows however that when staffing and power use are included a typical secondary school will spend between £100,000 - £200,000 per year on ICT.

Scale this figure for the whole UK and it approximates to over £½ billion per year.

Contrary to common perception, however, only a small fraction of the cost of ICT in schools is spent on computers and software - 60% of the cost is on technical support and 20% on electricity.

Quite simply, school networks have become too complex for the purpose they serve.

The answer is to simplify the school ICT infrastructure and lower services by outsourcing more services.

Outsourcing

Outsourced services based on free Open Source software such as e-mail, content filtering and remote backup are entirely appropriate to an education sector:

• Content filtering using Dan's Guardian is very powerful and scalable.
• E-mail using Open Source software is sophisticated, highly available and secure. Easy management of webmail and accounts using GOsa.
• Rsync for secure, remote back-ups.

Examples of where such services already exist are a bi-lingual webmail system accessible to all schools in Carmarthenshire County and the fully managed web content filtering infrastructure available to all schools within the Yorkshire and Humberside region.

In both cases the use of free, Open Source technologies has driven exceptional value compared to similar systems deployed using proprietary software.

Simplifying On-Site Infrastructure

Much of the complexity and management burden to schools comes the sheer number of computers needing maintenance - typically 100-500 desktop PCs and approximately eight network servers (file-authentication server, MIS database server, e-mail server, Intranet server, VLE server, thin-client server, web content filtering servers and a firewall).

But what ICT services do students really require from their school?

• Access to suitable software for teaching and learning
• E-mail
• Safe access to the Internet
• A home folder for personal file storage
• Access to shared resources (e.g. Intranet, VLEs, Public Folders, Databases)

How does the emerging model for Open Source in ICT meet these essential needs?

• The new low-cost Linux sub-notebooks have a very large range of Free Open Source applications already installed and many more available for free download, certainly enough for 95% of all educational needs. Many more applications are available on line through Web 2.0 technologies.
• E-mail and safe Internet access will be outsourced.
• Home folders and shared resources can be provided by one computer. By using Internet protocols and abandoning the venerable Windows SMP/CIFS protocols all of these services can be provided by one Open Source database/web server.

If schools moved their ICT to this model the spiral of ever increasing cost and complexity would be broken.

Becta, having twice warned schools against upgrading to Vista or Office 2007, has effectively signalled a halt to what has been an unbroken series of expensive and increasingly ineffective upgrades. It seems 2008 is the year when schools should take stock and rethink their strategic approach to ICT.

The rewards for change are very substantial. Schools would reduce their costs by 4/5ths producing not only an enormous saving to the taxpayer but making it possible to adapt to new developments in ICT and focus more resources on teaching. New opportunities would be created for the domestic technology industry and there would be far less dependence on dominant multinational suppliers.

Implementing 100% SEF URLs in Joomla! can be a little tricky so we've written a step-by-step guide that includes how to correctly configure your LAMP server.

There are some differences in implementing SEF URLs in Joomla! 1.0.* and 1.5, principally the requirement for third-party plugins.

We'll deal with the generic LAMP server configuration issues first and then deal with the different versions of Joomla! in turn.

Assumptions

In this howto we've made some assumptions about your web server set-up, your permissions level and your familiarity with the command line. If you only have FTP access then your might have a few difficulties.

• Operating system - Debian Linux with root access (there will be differences if you use a non-Debian derived Linux distribution)
• Text Editor - VIM
• Web server - Apache2 (correctly configured for use with MySQL and PHP)
• Database - MySQL

Generic LAMP server configuration

SSH to your web server. In the website's root (e.g. /var/www/) do:

Edit your .htaccess and it should like this:

Change the RewriteBase variable to the root of your Joomla! install. For example if you've put it in /var/www/joomla this variable should read:

Otherwise leave it as it is.

Now in your terminal:

In this file change references to:

to:

Save and exit.

Now you need to install the mod_rewrite plugin into Apache. In your terminal run the following command:

Reload your Apache webserver with the following command:

With Joomla! 1.0.*

Download and install the component ARTIO JoomSEF from the Joomla! extensions website.

There are other SEF extensions available in Joomla! but ARTIO JoomSEF uses an Open Source license and seems to work very well.

Make sure that you turn on ARTIO JoomSEF in the Configuration section of the Component.

In the Joomla! Admin Panel goto Global Configuration and click the SEO tab. Select Yes to both 'Search Engine Friendly URLs' and 'Dynamic Page Titles'.

With Joomla! 1.5

Joomla! 1.5.1 was recently released and is now officially stable. If Joomla 1.5 supports all the plugins you want then it's probably worth upgrading to it. If not, then stick with Joomla 1.0.*.

One of the great advantages of using Joomla! 1.5 is that it includes SEF URLs out-of-the-box. This makes plugins like ARTIO JoomSEF unnecessary.

So, once your LAMP server is correctly configured, goto the Admin Panel select  Global Configuration. Select Yes to 'Search Engine Friendly URLs', 'Use Apache mod_rewrite' and 'Add suffix to URLs' (optional) and save.