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How is the UK doing for Open Source Adoption?
munchola writes "CBRonline has put together an article looking at the state of open source adoption in the UK , bringing together data on central government policy and adoption within local government, public services, education, and the private sector. While overall the transition to OSS has been successful, there have been a few setbacks." From the article: "Not all of the organisations involved in the open source proof of concept trials have proceeded with open source adoption, however. In particular, the Central Scotland Police dealt a blow to open source supporters in August 2005 when it abandoned Linux and Sun's StarOffice in favour of Windows. The police force moved to StarOffice in 2000 and later adopted Linux for a new Area Command office at Falkirk. It also worked with IBM Corp to adopt Linux for a server-based document management system to meet Freedom of Information Act requirements, claiming savings of between 20,000 and 30,000 pounds ($36,000 and $54,000) over five years on hardware costs."
How is the UK doing for Open Source Adoption?
Shouldn't this read "How is the UK doing with Open Source Adoption?"
Or else, "What is the UK doing for Open Source Adoption?"
I think it's a case of evaluating the costs/benefits of different products be they open source or not. It may sound like an obvious process, but often overlooked.
In my experience (middleware), many of the open source products do the job well but require massive investments of time and expertise to get of the ground and maintain, whereas the comercial solutions come with proper support, documentation and decent GUIs. The question that needs to be asked is does it cost more for the licences or more for the manpower?
Don't get me wrong, I'm writing this on ubuntu, I develop using open source technologies and I contribute to various OS projects, but I've watched the UK government pour millions of public money into open source products that would have been beter spent on licences for comercial ones.
Java is the best language for learning OOP, it's straightforward makes sense and most importantly : doesn't cause hours of headaches as students try to figure out what's causing a null pointer exception. Considering it's no longer reallu possible or practical to start students off on some form of BASIC they need a language that's fundamentally simple and has functions built in that make sense. Expecting students to learn how to make strings is something that should be one of the first things they learn yet C requires them to either use Arrays or use object functions to do so. Needing to know more advanced concepts to make one of the fundamental data types is just one of the things that makes C a language which is a nightmare to learn from scratch.
While the government and public services are discussed, I thought I'd point out that almost all computation-requiring research done in University science departments I have come across is on Unix machines. Granted, that's only 2 universities I've been at, but speaking to my friends in other science departments and institutions it seems to be rare for scientists to use Windows.
My friends working in the arts or social sciences do tend to use Windows--although they're using it for writing up, as opposed to computations for research.
Are those savings seperate to the savings by using Linux or inclusive? All that seems to indicate is that their new server system means they need less hardware and save money. The Linux side of things is irrelevant if the reason they're saving money is mostly because they're using a centralised server system.
The UK also has some initiatives such as the UK Free Software Network (UKFSN) which seem to be doing really well. It's a zero-support ISP which donates profits to open source projects.
Well, if you make the decision to adopt, I don't think it matters if you are using open source or not. What matters most is whether you are providing a loving family and are willing to meet the child's needs.
I know for a certainty that there is at least one freshly installed Linux box in the server room of http://www.glenmorangie.com/ because I put it there. It's doing file sharing/storage. Hardware costs low, server OS costs nil, CAL costs nil and setup costs negligable (doesn't take long to copy a few stock config files and change a couple of domain names and IP addresses). You couldn't buy an proprietary operating system solution for what the hardware cost, indeed why would anybody want to pay more for the operating system than the hardware that runs it.
The web proxy and firewall are linux based network appliances as well.
I think this is where the most benefit is to be had from linux deployments, in the server room, not necessarily on the desktop as an office system.
As IT manager for a small non-profit, I can say that even we are still running mostly proprietary software.
The biggest hurdle is the users, I tried letting people have a go with a Linux distro, OpenOffice etc and the first thing they said was "Where's publisher?" and "How do I use this digital camera (with locked drivers for Windows)" etc etc. Far too many problems. Plus we have a fair few Access databases.
For those who only needed Word, Excel and a few other things I tried giving them OpenOffice but they just moaned and asked for the "Standard Microsoft" products.
For a while we've been using Mozilla Thunderbird, but as more and more people are needing access to their email remotely, and IMAP is far from brilliant in said client (folders refusing to delete properly and other such niggles) I think Exchange and Outlook are not far off the horizon. Simply because, dare I say it on Slashdot, Micrsoft software is generally the easiest to use in the eyes of the non-computer-literate. [With the exception of Office 2007 beta as it stands, that's bloody awful to use]
I'd love to go OSS and I'm sure in an organisation with slightly more intelligent staff it wouldn't be a problem. But this lot at my place are *very* easily confused. A shining example would be one guy today, who panicked that his box was "going beebeebeebeebeebeebeep". I went to his desk and found a ring binder sat on the keyboard. Another one, a little while ago but still there, was desparately trying to shove a floppy in a Zip drive. These are the kind of people I have to deal with, so any less-than-minor change would have them baffled for months. Trying to tell them how to do all the various workarounds and procedures usually needed in OSS software to do various things that are point-and-click in Windows is out of the question really.
The only OSS app which *has* gone down well is Firefox, perhaps because it's got a very familiar/intuitive interface for ex-IE users, it's feature-complete (I've seen so many OSS alternatives that can only be described as half-finished) and generally very well written. The staff love not having to deal with malware, popups and self-installers, even if it does take an age to load in comparison with IE.
Who knows, maybe the situation will improve eventually... but right now the demand is for "Standard Microsoft" software and giving them alternatives just tends to upset them.
The UK has lots of open source developers and a large community but how is the UK doing for Open Source Adoption?
Not Very Well at all.
#!/usr/bin/python
foo='ck'
bar='it'
progress = "fu" + foo + "ing " + "sh" + bar
print progress
I have been trying to think of famous British open source people/projects. Here is what I have come up with so far:
Xen
Mark Shuttleworth (sort of - has a British passport now and wanders around London sometimes).
Tim Berners Lee, WWW
Rob Hartill, Apache
Simon Tatham, Putty
Ian Jackson,ex-Debian Lead
Alan Cox of Redhat and one-time kernel fame
Alan Turing, father of computer science
Jim McQuillan, Linux Terminal Server Project
Dr John Pugh, MP and Linux activist
Can anyone think of any more?
My little Linux and tech blog
> I have been trying to think of famous British open source people/projects. Here is what I have come up with so far:
I wouldn't say famous, but four more British open source projects/people are:
JamVM - a free open source Java Virtual Machine, written and maintained by Robert Lougher
Squashfs - a compressed filesystem for Linux. This is the most widely used filesystem for LiveCDs, used by most major Linux distributions. It is also extensively used in embedded systems (i.e. most Linux based wireless routers). Written and maintained by Phillip Lougher (myself).
JFFS2 - a compressed filesytem for NAND flash. Originated and maintained by David Woodhouse.
Ext3 - written and maintained by Stephen Tweedie (and others).
There is pretty much no Linux compatible hardware around here, and as people are too lazy to demand the manufacturers release hardware, Linux is not being well adopted. Perhaps we should start an open-source campaign in Britain?
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.