Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your role at the North West Learning Grid?
I’m Chief Executive of the North West Learning Grid , previously I worked for 8 years with Knowsley Local Authority. Knowsley is widely recognized as having a very progressive ICT strategy and is one of the first Authorities to implement a Building Schools for the Future Program.
How does the NWLG work with schools in your region?
NWLG is funded by each of the 18 Local Authorities and delivers services that are commonly required by all. This is difficult as North West Authorities are as big as Cheshire, as small as Blackpool, they include Manchester and Liverpool and each LA has very different needs and development states. We don’t work directly with schools, we provide services to Local Authorities who then work with their schools to exploit the benefits of regional aggregation.
Who do you partner with to deliver services to schools? How do you complement each other?
We provide 1GB of Internet transit to North West schools, through JANET and funded by BECTA . So JANET and BECTA are important partners. Our Interconnect between Local Authorities is provided by THUS. All of our other partnerships are within the Education Community. The way you work with any delivery partner requires both parties to be very open and transparent about what each needs and expects and for each to be highly committed to improving the education of our young people.
Why do you think Open Source Software is so important to the future of ICT in schools?
ICT in education is very fast moving and the UK Government has had a recent history of subsidising the commercial market by funding schools to do things such as buying digital resources and implementing learning platforms. Many of the products and solutions picked have very different proprietary standards. The Open Source Community is driven by, and can only flourish, by common open standards and this model suits the needs of schools and indeed the needs of any sensible ICT strategy, far more than the patchwork quilt of commercial solutions currently across UK education. Schools are not individual institutions, they form one cohesive body of educators and it is essential that they are able to use local variations of products that have the same standards at their core.
Why is Open Content so important in education?
Whilst I accept the position of commercial content developers and the innovation some of them have brought into learning resources in schools I am also aware that some £465M of public funding was used for schools to purchase resources out of eLearning Credits. Now that funding has finished schools are left with a list of subscription licences and no content assets to keep and use within their shiny new Learning Platforms. The nature of education and the way in which collaborative learning takes place, requires permanency and mobility of learning assets. We have exactly the opposite from the eLearning Credit Strategy and quite the opposite from how most of the commercial providers operate. They seem to understand the weaknesses of government grants far more than the customer base they hope to retain. Open Content is very important but we have self imposed barriers as well as having a schools community that understands very little about IPR and has very few tools that make content creation and sharing particularly easy.
What commercial and technical benefits do you think UK schools can gain from using more Open Source Software and Open Content?
I think that Open Source will enable schools to break a commercial monopoly that isn’t doing anybody any favours, and that includes the commercial companies themselves. Easy ways to share content creates easy ways to make it available to schools and therefore reduce sales costs. Common Open Source code in Learning Platforms reduces a company’s risks in development and enables them to innovate around that standard core. Reduced costs across the education system means more money can be invested in exploiting the technology, leading to continued demand.
What do you see as the remaining obstacles for their adoption?
Leadership. Why do we spend millions on MS Office in our schools when a bit of government expenditure helping schools to understand how Open Office can be installed and used would save all this money? Why didn’t we have an Open Source Core Learning Platform funded and developed four years ago rather than encourage 30 or more commercial products to compete against each other with 30 or more separate developments taking place, putting 30 or more barriers between schools in sharing any learning resources they create?
BECTA should have, and still could, form an Open Source Unit that concentrates purely on identifying and establishing Open Source Communities specifically for use within our education institutions. I’m aware of their sparring with Microsoft and the School’s Open Source Project but these are token gestures. We have much to learn from other countries who are both smarter and a lot more resilient when it comes to implementing Open Source within Education. How about Macedonia where they note that: “with the use of free and open source software, our education system can provide computer-based education for all school children within the limited financial and infrastructural confines that most institutions face today." Now there’s a good idea that ‘we’ didn’t think of. Let’s consider schools to be a single business community with a common set of goals and a huge ICT budget, and look for the most economical way to deliver their needs and get Value For Money.
Too much money available makes funding policy lazy and wasteful. Maybe now leaner times are here, Open Source will be seen as the ONLY way forward if we are to maintain ICT levels in schools?
Which Open Source projects excite you the most at the moment? What can you tell us about them?
North West Learning Grid has been trying to tackle the issue of how schools who have different Learning Platforms can share digital learning resources. If a Local Authority has £50,000 of education materials created by its City Learning Centres or its Specialist schools then that becomes £7.5M of resources across our 150 Local Authorities but each can only see and access just the resources they themselves have funded. What they lack is an easy way to collect these resources, apply a common set of standards across them and then deliver 150 times as much. We’ve found a great Open Source Repository product in Spain called AGREGA and over the next few months will be working with Sirius Corporation to implement a system where every Local Authority can easily share these resources. So for less than £100K we’ll release several million pounds worth of public assets and make every future digital resource investment worth 150 times more than it would have been!
How do you see the VLE market in UK schools maturing?
I see just a few major companies winning Building Schools for the Future (BSF) contracts and dominating the market and the innovators being squeezed out by the risk of having to innovate and a lack of major contracts. I would hope that Open Source competes against this through more developments around Moodle but it would take a brave BSF Local Education Partnership to go down the Open Source route when the project is heavily weighted towards having a single commercial supplier solution.
How do you see the role of regional grids for learning evolving over the next five years?
Regional Learning Grids will always have a role to play in aggregating expenditure from schools and Local Authorities but the agenda has moved on from broadband to sharing expertise and providing things that, by doing them regionally or cross regionally, they are done once rather than 20 or 30 times. Maybe, in the absence of effective national leadership on ICT development, the Regional Bodies will use Open Source Projects to deliver solutions that will redefine where that leadership comes from?
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:
agility and scale
quality and security
breaking vendor lock-in
cost
sovereignty
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:
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;
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
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.
Last summer the list of ‘thriving’ UK PC manufacturers contained a very familiar list of players. These were RM plc, Akhter plc, Evesham Computers Ltd and Viglen Ltd.
The industry collectively had concentrated on the public sector market, especially the education sector, since it was becoming clear that retail selling in an ultra cut-throat market was untenable.
The dangers of retail selling were graphically illustrated by the sudden collapse of much loved Evesham computers in late 2007 following Gordon Brown’s axing of the Home Computer Initiative. Their education public sector contracts, which we shall see were being squeezed too, were not sufficient to save them.
This is where it starts to get interesting.
Of the players left, for Viglen, Akhter and RM, times are getting very hard indeed.
RM has posted figures this Spring showing a small profit-to-turnover ratio, despite the successful launch of the Linux EeePC into the education market.
Akhter’s position in fact is very difficult to analyse as they are part of a very diverse engineering group and have strong trade in Pakistan, all of which are making sensible profits. They are ironically in a stronger position to weather any storm than their bigger rivals.
Viglen too currently seem OK due to a strong presence in the server market but they see problems ahead. Their CEO, Bordan Tkachuk of Alan Sugar’s ‘The Apprentice’ fame, sees ‘little appetite for major Vista deployments’ and thinks that the for the education sector the future will lay in the Linux sub notebooks as espoused by RM.
It’s in Bordan’s ‘Vista’ comment that the original conjecture regarding the health of UK PC companies lays.
The trail leads straight back to Becta’s infamous procurement frameworks.
The ICT procurement frameworks are populated by a very select few which in addition to the above companies include the outsourcing specialists Capita and Serco.
Up to about 2005, being on the list was a licence to print money. Schools were very generously funded for ICT equipment and BECTA had signed its memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to ensure that schools used their products.
During these days many of the un-favoured went to the wall, Acorn computers being the most renowned supplier to the education sector.
After 2005 however the situation started to change for the UK PC manufacturers.
Firstly, the rise of cost-cutting outsourcers such as Capita pushed hardware procurement into generic commoditised products making it harder to sell desktop PCs at a profit when badged with RM or Viglen logos.
Secondly, subsidies for school software (the e-credit scheme) came to an end at the same time as did ring-fenced ICT funding for schools.
Thirdly, and this will prove to be the killer blow, BECTA advised schools in 2007 and 2008 not to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007.
The hand that fed the big companies had suddenly decided to throttle them.
A survey of the surviving manufacturer’s product list on their web sites for 2008-9 shows a hint of desperation. RM and Viglen are hovering over a decision to commit to Linux through the netbook market, Akther, RM and Viglen are dabbling with green computing. None show any confidence that they can see the way forward.
Without the upgrade cycle and the subsidised software that built these companies over the past 15 years the money will run out very fast. I expect to hear a few more hard luck stories in the coming year or two.
Once again, it will be hard luck on schools. The likes of Capita and Serco will soon dominate. They are however management companies not innovators. There are no (approved) companies that can take forward the coming Open Source revolution, so it looks like the taxpayer will be left in the hands of the big outsourcers.
Well done Becta in your time you may yet preside over the complete extinction of the UK PC business with one notable exception hitherto unmentioned, Elonex.
The British company Elonex are now shipping their Elonex One, the well-received ultra-low cost sub-notebook running on (of course) Open Source software.
