The OSC is intended to reassure customers who wish to hire a consultancy for work with free software. Much of the FUD surrounding free software suggests that business cannot rely on the smaller players in the industry. OSC is here to address this issue. It also provides a forum for interested parties to collaborate on tenders that would otherwise be out of reach of all but the largest players.
The links you provided were to Open Forum Europe. The OSC and the Open Forum Europe are not the same organisation. OSC has to deal with various different groups to function effectively, and Open Forum Europe are but one of those groups.
Please view the OSC as a special interest group for UK/Eurpoean consultants trying to win tenders on governmental/Public sector free software projects. The OSC website is aimed squarely at the client not the/. crowd.
Stephen Peters Steve.Peters@OpenSourceConsortium.org
P.S. I work for Sirius one of the firms involved with the OSC. www.siriusit.co.uk
I think that learning how to live without the grid will be a vital skill for anyone now living in the industrialised world today. It is clear from recent and past world events that oil supply is going to be a future problem, that governments have yet to address. The uk oil blockade during 2000 brought that home to me very clearly. During that time food was unavailable in supermarkets, travel was limited and the scope of emergency services were limited. I expect to see that type of problem occur again within my lifetime.
I am employed and can afford to have contractors to work on my house, however I chose to landscape my own garden and fit my own kitchen. During the past year especially I have had practical experience in many forms of building work and spent the cash I saved on the tools I needed. If I ever have to live off the grid I know that I have at least some of the neccesary skills already. I do quite a lot of work for a large London based building contractor, and even there most of the surveyors and estimators have zero hands on experience. They mostly seem surprised that I want to do this kind of work myself.
I read a lot to gain the skills I have learnt, and while most of the books I read are not really on self suffiency they may be of interest.
Taunton Press do a whole range of good books on a whole range of building and woodwork related subjects. They can be found at www.tauton.com. They also publish magazines such as Fine Homebulding and Fine woodworking . I have bought quite a few of their books in the past, and they are mostly very good.
Lindsay books publish a whole load of obsolete engineering books, as well as the classic Gingery series. These are invaluable for those wanting to make tools on a very low budget.
I also found that the old fashioned Tilley lamp to be an excellent source of heat and light in my garage. They are cheap to buy from ebay, portable and easy to service. Great for your power cut needs. Spares are available from Base Camp in the UK.
This kind of array may start becoming more common in the corporate world not as cheap online storage, but as cheap backup. The cost of a single IDE/SATA drive roughly compares to the cost of enterprise backup media such as DLT tapes etc. This kind of array would make for a quick and inexpensive way to backup a large server storage volume, such as a SCSI array.
These small cheap arrays could be bought in volume and simply stored offline in existing off site storage facilities, negating the long term reliability issues of IDE quality disks. Costs for backup may also fall with this solution as no expensive hardware such as tape libraries are required.
Users today want to rip, mix and burn if the user questions asked in our office are anything to go by. Apple hardware and software is easy to use from the users perspective, and until GNU/Linux distributions match this they will be used by the average user.
As Microsoft seems to be increasing the level of complexity in their products the users over the next few years are likley to migrate slowly to OSX and GNU/Linux in that order.
In articles like this much is made of the inevitable decline of Windows desktops in favour of GNU/Linux. Journalists like to predict when Microsoft will die and which distribution will be the new OS star. This however may all be irrelevant to average users, as neither Microsoft nor Open Source Software have yet produced an operating system that the average computer illiterate user considers useable.
Microsoft is driven by its marketing machine to produce more and more features in a relentless treadmill of unecessary upgrades. So providing a horrific mess of options and menus to the user.
Development of Open Source operating systems have been driven by the needs of its developers. While many of the packages are indeed excellent they do not provide an easy to use system for the end user. No one has yet produced a free distribution that the average user would find easy to use. Each desktop has its own quirks and way of doing things.
I belive that the next few years will see GNU/Linux or ****BSD becoming the dominant server operating system. This is something that Debian excels at. The desktop market is up for grabs as Microsoft seem to be faltering. Apple seem to understand the useability angle as their current systems are eminently user friendly. If Apple keep the costs of their hardware down they are well placed to own the desktop market for a while.
Only when a distribution such as Debian tries to produce a distribution with usability as the overiding priority will users switch to GNU/Linux.
In the long term though Open Source Software will inevitably be the only choice for the majority of software worldwide, not just the desktop.
This is not a good comparison, at least for Sun hardware. Taking the Sun A1000 disk array as an example, the cache backup battery is intended to be replaced after two years in use. However this does not mean that the battery fails after two years, just that this is the interval that Sun suggests to minimise unintended downtime.
The/usr/lib/osa/raidutil command can display the current age of the battery in use on an array, and can also reset the remaining battery lifetime back to two years. In practice the battery in an A1000 should last for four years. If your data/service is not critical you may feel that it is more cost effective to simply reset the battery life after two years and replace it when it actually fails.
A1000's sometimes come up on ebay, and would make a great mp3 store. You may not feel that maximum reliability is that important at home:-)
I have implemented several print servers for NT4 workstations using Samba, so I will assume you have limited experience with this.
To set up a print server I usually use the Common UNIX Print System (CUPS) as a backend running on a Debian GNU/Linux box. Samba makes an excellent front end for Windows, as it now supports native WinNT printing. So the users can install a printer themselves without administrator intervention as with a real NT4 server. In fact from the users point of view the CUPS/Samba server is a WinNT server, they really can't tell the difference!
CUPS is a high quality backend as it will support most if not all the commercial *NIX variants. It also works out of the box with Mac OS X (Making my iBook easy to use on site).
If you have problems with a free software package try to find help in the community. Most free software comes with good documentation as well as a useful FAQ on the project web site. Usually a free software project will also have a mailing list where you can ask questions. Try using google to see if anyone else has a similar problem. As an example the Samba team have a site at http://www.samba.org from there you can find documentation and their mailing list. The CUPS project can be found at http://www.cups.org where you can find similar material. Most distributions of GNU/Linux have documentation available on the system. Debian for instance put documentation in/usr/share/doc/ or you can try using the manpages.
Free software may seem harder to use at first, but there are a lot of people willing to help if you just ask.
Steve Peters
www.siriusit.co.uk - open source solutions - your future is now your choice.
Making changes to the core network at an organisation is usually best done gradually. Few company directors will be willing to replace a complete network in one go. The major benefit of free software from a directors point of view is likley to be the massively reduced software license costs. Other benefits such as TCO, reduced staffing, reliability etc. are secondary.
Most IT costs are written off over time, so a Win2k server costing £4000 may have £1000 taken off its value in company accounts each year. Therefore two years down the line your server is valued as an asset worth £2000 in the company accounts. After four years have passed the server will not show up on company accounts. The amount of time purchases are written off over varies from company to company, so check how your organisation operates. In my experience few finance directors are willing to replace assets that still have value to the company, so don't plan on replacing that new Exchange server just yet.
When you try to convince your management to go with free software try to honestly compare different products/technologies. I have successfully implemented several Debian GNU/Linux servers running Sendmail at a company simply by comparing the product costs in front of company directors. The comparison can be quite simple, for instance the one I used for proving email simply put the costs of Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Debian GNU/Linux Sendmail side by side like so:
License costs
Microsoft Exchange £50,000 Lotus Notes £15,000 Debiam GNU/Linux £0
This will of course provoke an argument popular with company management that the free option must be cheep and nasty. So you will need to be able to show that *NIX has been perfected over thirty years, or that the server sofware you are choosing is the best in its class for your purposes.
Once they are used to the idea you can introduce added extras such as increased reliability, improved staff motivation and management benefits like cost/performance improvement and less management overhead.
For some more hopefully helpful information look at http://www.siriusit.co.uk
Comment caveats:
1 I am not impartial, I spend most of my time implementing free software solutions so I may have a slight bias:)
2 The company I work for http://www.siriusit.co.uk specializes in free software implementation so they may have a slight bias too:))
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it's the best way to cool down the OSC server after the slashdotting.
Steve
The OSC is intended to reassure customers who wish to hire a consultancy for work with free software. Much of the FUD surrounding free software suggests that business cannot rely on the smaller players in the industry. OSC is here to address this issue. It also provides a forum for interested parties to collaborate on tenders that would otherwise be out of reach of all but the largest players.
/. crowd.
The links you provided were to Open Forum Europe. The OSC and the Open Forum Europe are not the same organisation. OSC has to deal with various different groups to function effectively, and Open Forum Europe are but one of those groups.
Please view the OSC as a special interest group for UK/Eurpoean consultants trying to win tenders on governmental/Public sector free software projects. The OSC website is aimed squarely at the client not the
Stephen Peters
Steve.Peters@OpenSourceConsortium.org
P.S. I work for Sirius one of the firms involved with the OSC. www.siriusit.co.uk
Thanks for the book references.
I think that learning how to live without the grid will be a vital skill for anyone now living in the industrialised world today. It is clear from recent and past world events that oil supply is going to be a future problem, that governments have yet to address. The uk oil blockade during 2000 brought that home to me very clearly. During that time food was unavailable in supermarkets, travel was limited and the scope of emergency services were limited. I expect to see that type of problem occur again within my lifetime.
I am employed and can afford to have contractors to work on my house, however I chose to landscape my own garden and fit my own kitchen. During the past year especially I have had practical experience in many forms of building work and spent the cash I saved on the tools I needed. If I ever have to live off the grid I know that I have at least some of the neccesary skills already. I do quite a lot of work for a large London based building contractor, and even there most of the surveyors and estimators have zero hands on experience. They mostly seem surprised that I want to do this kind of work myself.
I read a lot to gain the skills I have learnt, and while most of the books I read are not really on self suffiency they may be of interest.
Taunton Press do a whole range of good books on a whole range of building and woodwork related subjects. They can be found at www.tauton.com. They also publish magazines such as Fine Homebulding and Fine woodworking . I have bought quite a few of their books in the past, and they are mostly very good.
Lindsay books publish a whole load of obsolete engineering books, as well as the classic Gingery series. These are invaluable for those wanting to make tools on a very low budget.
I also found that the old fashioned Tilley lamp to be an excellent source of heat and light in my garage. They are cheap to buy from ebay, portable and easy to service. Great for your power cut needs. Spares are available from Base Camp in the UK.Steve
This kind of array may start becoming more common in the corporate world not as cheap online storage, but as cheap backup. The cost of a single IDE/SATA drive roughly compares to the cost of enterprise backup media such as DLT tapes etc. This kind of array would make for a quick and inexpensive way to backup a large server storage volume, such as a SCSI array.
These small cheap arrays could be bought in volume and simply stored offline in existing off site storage facilities, negating the long term reliability issues of IDE quality disks. Costs for backup may also fall with this solution as no expensive hardware such as tape libraries are required.
Steve
Users today want to rip, mix and burn if the user questions asked in our office are anything to go by. Apple hardware and software is easy to use from the users perspective, and until GNU/Linux distributions match this they will be used by the average user.
As Microsoft seems to be increasing the level of complexity in their products the users over the next few years are likley to migrate slowly to OSX and GNU/Linux in that order.
In articles like this much is made of the inevitable decline of Windows desktops in favour of GNU/Linux. Journalists like to predict when Microsoft will die and which distribution will be the new OS star. This however may all be irrelevant to average users, as neither Microsoft nor Open Source Software have yet produced an operating system that the average computer illiterate user considers useable.
Microsoft is driven by its marketing machine to produce more and more features in a relentless treadmill of unecessary upgrades. So providing a horrific mess of options and menus to the user.
Development of Open Source operating systems have been driven by the needs of its developers. While many of the packages are indeed excellent they do not provide an easy to use system for the end user. No one has yet produced a free distribution that the average user would find easy to use. Each desktop has its own quirks and way of doing things.
I belive that the next few years will see GNU/Linux or ****BSD becoming the dominant server operating system. This is something that Debian excels at. The desktop market is up for grabs as Microsoft seem to be faltering. Apple seem to understand the useability angle as their current systems are eminently user friendly. If Apple keep the costs of their hardware down they are well placed to own the desktop market for a while.
Only when a distribution such as Debian tries to produce a distribution with usability as the overiding priority will users switch to GNU/Linux.
In the long term though Open Source Software will inevitably be the only choice for the majority of software worldwide, not just the desktop.
Steve
This is not a good comparison, at least for Sun hardware. Taking the Sun A1000 disk array as an example, the cache backup battery is intended to be replaced after two years in use. However this does not mean that the battery fails after two years, just that this is the interval that Sun suggests to minimise unintended downtime.
/usr/lib/osa/raidutil command can display the current age of the battery in use on an array, and can also reset the remaining battery lifetime back to two years. In practice the battery in an A1000 should last for four years. If your data/service is not critical you may feel that it is more cost effective to simply reset the battery life after two years and replace it when it actually fails.
:-)
The
A1000's sometimes come up on ebay, and would make a great mp3 store. You may not feel that maximum reliability is that important at home
Steve
I have implemented several print servers for NT4 workstations using Samba, so I will assume you have limited experience with this.
/usr/share/doc/ or you can try using the manpages.
To set up a print server I usually use the Common UNIX Print System (CUPS) as a backend running on a Debian GNU/Linux box. Samba makes an excellent front end for Windows, as it now supports native WinNT printing. So the users can install a printer themselves without administrator intervention as with a real NT4 server. In fact from the users point of view the CUPS/Samba server is a WinNT server, they really can't tell the difference!
CUPS is a high quality backend as it will support most if not all the commercial *NIX variants. It also works out of the box with Mac OS X (Making my iBook easy to use on site).
If you have problems with a free software package try to find help in the community. Most free software comes with good documentation as well as a useful FAQ on the project web site. Usually a free software project will also have a mailing list where you can ask questions. Try using google to see if anyone else has a similar problem. As an example the Samba team have a site at http://www.samba.org from there you can find documentation and their mailing list. The CUPS project can be found at http://www.cups.org where you can find similar material. Most distributions of GNU/Linux have documentation available on the system. Debian for instance put documentation in
Free software may seem harder to use at first, but there are a lot of people willing to help if you just ask.
Steve Peters
www.siriusit.co.uk - open source solutions - your future is now your choice.
Making changes to the core network at an organisation is usually best done gradually. Few company directors will be willing to replace a complete network in one go. The major benefit of free software from a directors point of view is likley to be the massively reduced software license costs. Other benefits such as TCO, reduced staffing, reliability etc. are secondary.
:)
:))
Most IT costs are written off over time, so a Win2k server costing £4000 may have £1000 taken off its value in company accounts each year. Therefore two years down the line your server is valued as an asset worth £2000 in the company accounts. After four years have passed the server will not show up on company accounts. The amount of time purchases are written off over varies from company to company, so check how your organisation operates. In my experience few finance directors are willing to replace assets that still have value to the company, so don't plan on replacing that new Exchange server just yet.
When you try to convince your management to go with free software try to honestly compare different products/technologies. I have successfully implemented several Debian GNU/Linux servers running Sendmail at a company simply by comparing the product costs in front of company directors. The comparison can be quite simple, for instance the one I used for proving email simply put the costs of Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Debian GNU/Linux Sendmail side by side like so:
License costs
Microsoft Exchange £50,000
Lotus Notes £15,000
Debiam GNU/Linux £0
This will of course provoke an argument popular with company management that the free option must be cheep and nasty. So you will need to be able to show that *NIX has been perfected over thirty years, or that the server sofware you are choosing is the best in its class for your purposes.
Once they are used to the idea you can introduce added extras such as increased reliability, improved staff motivation and management benefits like cost/performance improvement and less management overhead.
For some more hopefully helpful information look at http://www.siriusit.co.uk
Comment caveats:
1 I am not impartial, I spend most of my time implementing free software solutions so I may have a slight bias
2 The company I work for http://www.siriusit.co.uk specializes in free software implementation so they may have a slight bias too
Steve Peters