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!

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.

... or "Linux feels the need for speed"

A recent post has introduced me to a term with which I was previously unfamiliar. 'Click-bait' was the epithet used by a US reader to describe the title of my blog and it both intrigued and disturbed me. It means self-evidently that the title is more attractive in a sensationalist sense than the article merits. The post below is hardly sensational, it's all about how Linux can speed up your computer hence the sub-title 'Linux feels the Need for Speed'.

However a brief whizz around the computing licencing at CERN (which is currently making headlines with the switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider) shows that the biggest computing development to emerge from there since the World Wide Web is the EU Grid which is released on an Open Source basis. Hence open source computing is arguably at the heart of the LHC and if so will play its part in the 'End of the World' if the more apocalyptic of our brethern are to be believed. And, since the LHC is all about really great speeds the conflation was too tempting. So apologies for the click-bait. What follows is really more prosaically about managing the end of a relationship.

Leaving XP

It's a simple question but difficult to answer: 'How do you get folk who are perfectly happy with Windows XP to change to something else?'.

In a previous post I suggested that to a whole generation, a Windows XP desktop was for them a finished work, the culmination of a succession of exciting upgrades of hardware and software.

In the Open Source world at one time, fairly recently actually, it was received wisdom that although technical superiority would win out in the server market getting ordinary users to change to unfamiliar desktops was a step too far.

I am happy  to say Microsoft has run square into the self same unfamiliarity  problem with Vista and Office 2007. They are a bit too different to the 'finished work' without offering any must-have extras.   It gets even harder for Microsoft when even official Governmental bodies like BECTA advise the public sector procurers not to change. Ironically this stricture appears not to apply to other Government organisations in education such as the QCA (Qualifications and  Curriculum Authority) who have clearly more money than sense.

Microsoft though has enough clout to follow alternative strategies for persuading its customers to change when they show signs of dragging their feet. The most obvious is by not allowing vendors to install XP on new machines and making sure lots of stuff, bit by bit, won't work on the old machines (allegedly). The Open Source world in contrast with its plethora of cool Linux distributions and manifest lack of clout (on the desktop) only has the 'hey that's a cool desktop - I must change' strategy to fall back on and that's a pretty weak opener in the desktop wars.

Why indeed would one now change desktops, why in the past were we so willing, eager even, to do just that and now are so reluctant?

Reasons to Upgrade

Readers of a certain vintage will remember the Intel hardware upgrades from the 286 to 386 to 486 to 586 Pentium processors, running parallel, Microsoft's OS went from Windows 3 to 3.2 to 95 to 98 and 2000 and Word went from Word 2 (very good it was too) through 6 to 97 and 2000. The amount of RAM fitted to a PC went up during this time from 16mb to 1gb.  We all handed over  our cash as soon as we could to experience the latest thing. 

Of course power consumption went through the roof at the same time but we did not care much back then... No, what we did care about was speed.  486 owners were lightning fast when running Word 2 when compared to lowly mortals who only had a 286. I really coveted the next upgrade, I really did.

Unfortunately but seemingly inevitably, what was also happening during this period was the emergence of 'bloat ware'. Software got more features and more code to take advantage of the new hardware power until things became  absurdly bloated.

The tale is told that even Microsoft's own engineers struggled mightily to upgrade the highly evolved XP to Vista's extra feature list but were defeated by the mighty code base and effectively started again using the simpler 2003 Server code. If true, this story provides an exemplar in what the Science Philosophers call 'paradigm elaboration'. Ultimately the accretion of ad-hoc modifications causes the edifice to collapse.

To cut a long tale short - as a result of bloated software, most computers are no longer fast, period. They are dog slow. MS Office 2007 is huge, so is Open Office (sorry guys). Running say Office 2007 or Open Office 2.4 on a budget laptop with Vista Home Premium is a dismally slow experience compared to the same machine running XPpro and Word 97/2000. Don't try this at home kids.

All good things come to an end however and this applies to this particular upgrade cycle. The emergence of new technologies may complement the status quo but sometimes they disrupt it. Those described below fall into the later category and have occurred at a time of hiatus in the prevailing paradigm.

Top 3 Disruptive technologies

1. The new Netbooks (so-called) low power (typically 6 watts) ultra cheap sub notebooks with 7-10" screens running a flavour of Linux (or at a push the undead Windows XP reincarnated by MS just for netbooks I wonder why?)
2. 'Lightweight' operating systems and applications which use far less code and system overhead than their bloated equivalents.
3. Google's Chrome browser (or is it an OS or merely very cool spyware?).

What is so disruptive? Read on and then add them together and it will become clearer.

Quick Web

Just how disruptive these three will be will depend on a range of factors but I think the biggest driver will be as it was before, speed.  Google seem to think so too. The open source browser application Chrome, out in beta for Windows, is a really really fast browser. Yes, it has a range of  cool new features that will emerge as powerful incentives to use Chrome and yes, it may be the worlds most effective spyware , but the first encounter the user has with the browser produces that great feeling, raw speed.

Chrome on Windows XP now not only speeds up browsing but  its 'Add Application' feature makes using on-line applications (eg Google docs) simpler and much faster. One more reason then not to upgrade your PC but to speed it up with software choice. When its out for Linux frankly  I can't see why I would use any other browser given that I have already sold my soul to Googleplex's logging computers.

Quick Boot

The netbooks such as the now well known Linux Xandros Asus EeePC which a year ago pioneered their introduction and proved to the world that there was a huge demand for such devices (thank you Asus) are not in themselves as supplied that quick. They after all have modest hardware specifications (and tiny power consumptions) but thanks to their embedded operating systems, boy to they do boot up quickly. Not quite instantly-on but only a dozen or so seconds.

Several mainboard manufacturers (New ASUS mainboard has 5-second bootup) for conventional  desktop and laptop computers have cottoned on to the agonizingly slow boot ups endured by users and are increasingly offering 'fast boot 'options: yes you have guessed how, they use light embedded Linux distributions on board which offer the basic applications of word processing, browsing and so on.  After a few weeks of no-wait computing, how many of you are going to opt for the 'agonizingly slow boot option' so that you can use Office 2007 to type that memo? A quick boot though is no good if the subsequent experience is slow.

Fortunately thanks to a few 'mad' developers who in the true Open Source tradition, ploughed their own furrow even when their project was not fashionable, we now have software which is truly non-bloat, let's call it 'quickware'.

Quick Software

In recent years a few developers dedicated themselves to stripping down full Linux distributions to produce lightweight distributions capable of running quickly on older computers or very fast on later models. Notable amongst this dedicated group are Puppy Linux and DSL Linux (Damm Small Linux). The entire distributions including applications were under 100mb and ran as so called live distributions. Essentially this meant booting from CD or USB Memory stick and running in RAM space.

These distributions are, or have been to say the least, for the minority... oddball Linuxistas. I confess to be  a Puppy fan and have received my unfair share of derision in the Office for my visionary abilities but trust me one day quickware will rule the world.

How many of us Linux users are more productive with Compiz et al and every package under the sun installed as default? Linux has shown it can match and beat the eye candy of Vista Ultimate and MacOSx. Maybe now the thrust will be to make the desktop as fast as stable and as well engineered as our server products.

The following distributions have weighed in and show a very active rate of development:

• wattOS :  an ultra light weight, Ubuntu-based Linux distro.
• XFCE : Ubuntu's official light distro
• LXDE: Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment
• Breezy : Puppy Linux tweaked for EeePC works on EeePC = super fast compared to Xandros, boot from flash card. Breezy is nearly as quick as LDXE!

Below are yet more ultra light  Linux distributions optimised capable of running on computer with as little as 128mb RAM and booting from USB drives

• Feather Linux
• DeLi
• Pendrivelinux
• Portable SUSE USB Flash Drive installation via the Live CD
• Wolvix Cub
• Mandriva Spring-Gdium

I think the point made by this non exhaustive list is the day of the speedy distro is nearly nigh.

Take any of the above and boot it from USB onto a bare metal computer sporting a pentium class processor and half a gig of ram and it will fly; all we need now are some speedy applications to help it on its way. In the Open Source 'Office'  portfolio let me suggest AbiWord as a replacement for Open Office or MS Word. It'll do all you want and will open in a twinkle of an eye; ditto Gnumeric instead of OO Spreadsheet or Excel. Don't believe me? Download them and see for yourself. Then there are Inkscape, Scribus....

It's all out there.

Conclusion

There is now the possibility that sanity may be coming to the PC's desktop. In many ways the XP generation with whom I opened this post have a point. XP  circa 2001 does all they need it to do. Any improvement (for them) would be  merely to do it all faster.

Performance has always characterised the server market and consequently I assert accounts for the  superb growth of Open Source server deployments. The desktop has in contrast, especially recently, been characterised by 'features' to the detriment of performance. Computers have grown ever more powerful to take advantage of ever more irrelevant interfaces, or is that vice versa? 

Now thanks maybe to an economic downturn or global warming or the imminent destruction of the universe by minitiure black holes or whatever, many users have had enough.

The solution is to break the upgrade cycle; just use free speedy software and become more productive!  Open Source will love you, Google will love you, your boss will love you but I can't guarantee that Intel and Microsoft will feel the same.

For me, my next computer will be a GDium 10" notebook booting LDXE from an 64gb USB stick and with a Chrome browser. I can feel your envy.