Commercial Open Source Software

Tom Hoffman, project manager of SchoolTool, an initiative funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation to create an open source framework for schools using Python and Zope, recently gave a presentation titled “Managing an International, Philanthropically Funded Open-Source Project from a Victorian in Elmwood.”

Schoolroom by cake_land

But while schools may pay large sums for information systems, they often cannot add a feature or change an option to accommodate a particular scholastic arrangement. This causes problems for school administrators constantly. With proprietary software, it may even be illegal to analyze the technology in an attempt to make such changes.

He said.

Schools face difficult challenges because their scheduling, resources and classes regularly change and, importantly, differ from one school to the next. Open-source projects such as SchoolTool are based on collaboration between the author and users, who can improve and alter the source code to meet a specific need.

It is difficult to bootstrap this kind of open-source project in schools that have stable technical infrastructure like here in the United States or in Europe. SchoolTool is more explicitly philanthropic and aimed at the developing world in the long term.

So SchoolTool is not specificly addressed to schools already having a stable infrastructure.
Tom has also wrote a letter to to Kenneth Whang, the NSF program officer in charge for the Scratch programming environment asking to publicly release the source code of the project, supposed to be already available as stated by the website.

Apparently Mitch Resnick from the project replied, but his answer wasn’t fully satisfactory indeed.

About Tom Hoffman.

As a teacher, free software project manager and developer, and blogger, Tom Hoffman advocates for progressive educational reform and practical open source technology in schools. Since 2004 Tom has managed SchoolTool.

About SchoolTool.

It is a project to develop a global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an open-source license and designed to be used on an unlimited number of machines by an unlimited number of clients. Via a Web browser interface accessible through any operating system, SchoolTool allows schools to manage enrollment information, scheduling, attendance and grades, generate reports, and import and export data.

About Scratch.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to enhance the technological fluency of young people, helping them learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, and they gain a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Technorati Tags: open source, schooltool, scratch

Reading the Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) I happened to read “Care and feeding open source programmers” an article about the “HandBrake manifesto“, a post defining what Open Source is for his author.

Open source is:

- A means to encourage software innovation among diverse groups of programmers
- A policy of open inspection and analysis of source code, both to educate and provide a means for constructive criticism
- A means by which programmers can “scratch their itch” for mental stimulation while at the same time solving computing problems that are frequently applicable even to non-technical users
- Free, both intellectually and in terms of cost

Open source is not:

- A way to get commercial-quality support at no charge
- A free-for-all forum to ask for pie-in-the-sky software features and expect them to be implemented as requested and with no delay
- An invitation to harass and otherwise frustrate a small and dedicated development staff because they didn’t do what you wanted

I can see here many disagreeing on that, but I believe there is no doubt that any author can choose his/her community, choosing not to have one (or even something like that).

Authors have the power, and users too indeed! I start thinking Rubini is pretty right…

Technorati Tags: Open Source Community, HandBrake

Matthew Aslett’s article “Novell apologizes for false free software funding claim” tells the full story of Novell’s head of marketing for Linux and open source, Justin Steinman, who just apologized to the FSF after making misleading statements about the company’s financial contribution to the FSF.

Steinman made the claim in an online interview last week but was quickly forced to retract the statement after the FSF’s executive director Peter Brown disputed it via a statement to the Groklaw web site.

“Novell last gave funds to the FSF in October 2005, when they donated $5K as part of FSF Corporate Patron program. Since their deal with Microsoft was announced we have not asked them to renew as a patron, nor would we. Novell is not ‘a significant financial contributor to the Free Software Foundation’,” Brown stated.

In his apology Steinman stated that he believed his original statement to be true at the time he made it, but nevertheless apologized for misrepresenting the facts.

“Further research inside Novell confirms that Peter Brown is correct and I spoke in error. I want to make it clear that I had no intention of making false claims or providing misinformation to the market,” he wrote. “I want to apologize to the Free Software Foundation and to the open source community for making this misrepresentation. I should have double-checked the accuracy of my information before speaking, and for that, I offer no excuse.”

Read the full story and wonder what is going on at Novell, I have no clue..

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the only public interest group attending Digital Video Broadcasting’s closed technical meetings, just reported some feedbacks on these meetings, quite harmful indeed.

Today, consumers can digitally record their favorite television shows, move recordings to portable video players, excerpt a small clip to include in a home video, and much more. The digital television transition promises innovation and competition in even more great gadgets that will give consumers unparalleled control over their media.

But an inter-industry organization that creates television and video specifications used in Europe, Australia, and much of Africa and Asia is laying the foundation for a far different future — one in which major content providers get a veto over innovation and consumers face draconian digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on the use of TV content. At the behest of American movie and television studios, the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) is devising standards to ensure that digital television devices obey content providers’ commands rather than consumers’ desires. These restrictions will take away consumers’ rights and abilities to use lawfully-acquired content so that each use can be sold back to them piecemeal.

Consumers would never choose this future, so Hollywood will try to force it on them by regulatory fiat. DVB’s imprimatur may put restrictive standards on the fast-track to becoming legally-enforced mandates, and existing laws already limit evasion of DRM even for lawful purposes. In effect, private DRM standards will trump national laws that have traditionally protected the public’s interests and carefully circumscribed copyright holders’ rights.

Hollywood has long pursued this goal in the U.S., but its schemes in DVB have taken place behind the public’s back and outside of scrutiny by elected officials. In this paper, we will summarize and expose Hollywood’s plan.

Read the full article, or download the paper.

Technorati Tags: digital freedom, DVB, EFF, DRM

ASmallWorld is a private high-trust social network by invitation only, designed by its founder, Erik Wachtmeister - a former investment banker - for people already connected to each other in the (offline) world. Erik has participated at the DLD conference and the video is available.

I recently read an Eric’s post about the event, here a short excerpt:

Social Networks have emerged over the past 3 years as a useful tool in creating and recreating networks, and establishing new unfettered distribution channels. The original idea behind aSmallWorld was based on the need for a large group of people with similar needs, to connect, reconnect, and exchange trusted information. It was not based on creating a free-for-all where anything under the sun and on the WWW goes. What is missing in almost every other social networking site is notion of Relevance and Trust. I believed there was a need for ASW because of the enormity and chaotic nature of the unlocked beast that is the Internet. MySpace and others have been feeding this beast and indeed creating exciting new forms of entertainment. Our goal, however, has been to come up with an alternative to the chaos, with endless “noise” drowning the “signal” we are searching for when we go on line.

There is a lot of talk about web 2.0 and recently web 3.0. Web 2.0 is about connecting people with people and data, not WebPages. Web 3.0 is about connecting people with meaningful people and data. In that vein, aSmallWorld is all about filtering out information overload, spammers, scammers, stalkers, and irrelevant and unfiltered data that makes up 99% of what is out there. Add to this our over 100,000 trusted experts who can make our little world the most trusted place to go to online.

I see a clear trade-off between unattended and open communities, like Orkut, and deeply controlled and closed communities like asw. I believe Eric is right saying that there was a need for communities like asw, just wondering if we might eventually see communities with an high level of trust democratically controlled by its own members..

Technorati Tags: Social Networks, asw, DLD

FSFE stating that everyone would like that free software licences were shorter, talks about GPL and LGPL lenght, claiming that a longer GPL doesn’t have to mean more complex.

FSFE Fellowship initiative by Stefano Mainardi

The number of words needed to ensure that software users had the four freedoms in the 1970s was zero. There were no software patents, no DMCA/EUCD laws, software generally came with source code, and there was generally nothing limiting a person from redistributing software.

As software distributors started blocking these freedoms by legal and technical means, it became necessary for software that was intended to come with those freedoms to be accompanied by licences granting those freedoms and requiring others to pass them on when they pass on the software.

GPLv1, written in 1989, had 1,500 words. GPLv2 has 2,300 words. Draft 2 of GPLv3 has 4,000 words. The most important implementation detail is that it has to work in court, and this can’t be compromised for the sake of making a shorter text. But if you can see ways to make it simpler, that would be very useful because it’s not only technology lawyers that have to read the GPL, it’s software developers and judges too.

Read the full article.

Technorati Tags: GPL, LGPL, FSFE

Palamida, a firm providing software assurance management products and audit services arrived on the scene about one year after Black Duck Software, states that legal concerns over Open Source Intellectual Property are not over yet.

Lawyers in pants by LordKhan

Mark Tolliver, Palamida CEO, talking to Martin Veitch said:

The SCO furore might have died down, but the bigger issue of mixing and matching code from various sources has not gone away. I don’t know when the last time was I discussed SCO. It’s not particularly relevant to today’s world, but one of the outcomes of the rise of open-source software is that you have less visibility as to what’s in your code.

I really doubt that with open source you have “less visibility as to what’s in your code”, I would rather say the opposite, don’t you?

Open Source Insurance firms are looking for cases, but Tolliver talks also about mergers and acquisitions:

If you’re buying or selling software companies, there’s a large question as to what you are buying and how to value that. Palamida frequently gets involved in the nitty-gritty of deals, and often turns up surprising omissions in the declarations of what code bases contain. In one deal, the target company had disclosed [code from] three open-source products and our work showed 98 products. In our experience it’s zero malicious intent, just poor record-keeping.

This makes definitely more sense to me.

Read the full article.

Technorati Tags: Open Source Insurance, indemnification, Palamida, SCO

The Centre for Inclusive Technology looked at some Open Source CMS in order to assess which would be most suitable from an accessibility point of view. Read the article edited by Josuha O’Connor, Senior Accessibility Consultant CFIT, screen test were executed by Paul Traynor, Expert Screen Reader Evaluation.

Methodology

In order to give these tests a real world flavour and to ensure they were ecologically valid, we consciously did not use any particular testing method or script in order to access how intuitive these systems are out of the box.

For the tests we looked at:

• Jadu
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• Mambo
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• Joomla
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• Quick and Easy
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• Expression Engine
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• Plone
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• Drupal
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• Textpattern
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• Xoops
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• Typo3

Results

Our feedback derives from user testing and observation of a screen reader user performing the following basic tasks, as well as the same tasks being performed by a user with no Assistive Technology/Special User Agent requirements and with an average computer skill level.

The tasks included:

• Uploading content and, where possible, editing and formatting content (using a WYSIWYG editor).
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• Creating new pages (Category/Section headings and sub categories/headings).
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• Basic administration of user groups and permissions.
  .

Some excerpts from the results:

Joomla

Visually, the graphic style of the Mambo interface was pleasant to work with and the style of the Windows operating systems graphics would no doubt be appealing to many users and would not be too much of a departure from what they are used to, so this could be an advantage.[..]

Some problems encountered were:

1. Some links reading On Mouse Over could not be activated by pressing the Enter key.
   .
2. Various items had checkboxes, etc. that weren’t very intuitive. The labels didn’t convey their purpose effectively to the screen reader user.
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3. Radio buttons read well but their labelling could be improved. They often were not understandable as to what purpose they served.

If these problems could be addressed, we would recommend Joomla.

Plone

From a usability perspective our first impression of Plone was that it is not that intuitive. This is primarily down to the labels and page types but this could be improved, as Plone is highly customisable. It is very feature rich out of the box and this may be why it feels rather unwieldy and a little intimidating.[..]

The negative points are:

1. Overall lack of consistency between what elements are visible when in forms mode/virtual PC mode.
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2. The naming conventions for items used in the interface are a little unintuitive. Use of terms like Smart Folder wasn’t great, and we had no idea what a Smart Folder does. However, reading the manual would no doubt shed some light on this, which as previously stated, we have not done for this test in order to assess the CMS’s level of instant usability.

Overall, Plone was a good CMS and highly customisable and extendable. We would recommend it.

Drupal

In terms of the interface out of the box, Drupal takes the opposite approach to Plone. The interface is simple uncluttered and clean.[..] It could however be improved. For example the labelling of checkboxes in the blog administration page is not very good. There are checkboxes that allow the administrator to set permissions for anonymous and authenticated users that are also not labelled very well. This makes it difficult for a screen reader user to administer the site well as they cannot associate each checkbox with its relevant command.

However, these are our first impressions and we feel that Drupal is one of the best that we have come across and would recommend it with some customisation.

Read the full article.

Technorati Tags: open source, CMS, Plone, Drupal

Ocean Blue, a UK software house developing software solutions for the digital home, Digital TV, mobile TV and Digital Video Broadcasting markets, has chosen Linux for advanced Set Top Boxes.

Bristol, England - 20 March 2007 - Ocean Blue Software, the specialist digital TV software developer, has released a Linux version of its Sunrise, Voyager, and SurfSoft software products, with ports to the leading hardware platforms complete or well under way. The company reports that Linux is emerging as the preferred platform for developers of set-top boxes, particularly at the high end, such as Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) and IPTV.

set Top box Diagram by drazen

Ken Helps, Managing Director of Ocean Blue Software, commented:

The major chipset manufacturers are introducing new Linux platforms almost monthly, IT vendors that wish to produce products for the Digital Home and are used to working with Linux in the past, now have the option of using Linux based DVB and MHEG-5 Digital TV software products. The Linux operating system features in many of the new raft of IPTV Set Top Boxes, being powerful enough to support advanced functions but not requiring a license fee. All the industry reports indicate strong growth in this area and we are developing our software to support most platforms.

Today I asked Ken if they are using non-commercial Linux distros:

Chipset vendors such as NXP ( formerly Philips semi-conductors) and Toshiba Electronics usually adopt or develop a mature, robust version of Linux for the embedded set top box market sector. The Set top box (STB) market is different from the pc market as these digital TV set top boxes are generally closed boxes, with no floppy or CDROM drives, no USB connection and therefore no way to update the software inside the set top box. Hence the Linux and Digital TV middleware software inside these TV receiver devices has to be robust, tested to Digital TV software industry standards, fault tolerant if possible , compact and mature.

As far as I understand players like Montavista, providing commercial-grade Linux OS for embedded systems, are welcome in some niche markets, and Television and Home Entertainment is definitely one of them.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Embedded Linux, Montavista, Ocean Blue

Venture Development Corporation, a technology market research and strategy firm, has recently published “Linux in the embedded system market“, a study revealing that embedded hardware makers prefer non-commercial Linux solutions over commercial ones.

The author, Stephen Balacco, stated:

While some OEMs have chosen to use a commercial Linux solution, more are using and/or expect to use a publicly available Linux solution in future project development. It is this trend that will continue to put pressure on commercial Linux suppliers to provide value above and beyond the growing sophistication of publicly available Linux solutions.

VDC survey’s graphs (current&expected users), reported by Linuxdevices.com

Survey respondents, chosen from embedded systems developers, were 428. As you can see 12% of them use non-commercial Linux distro, while only 3 percent use a commercial Linux OS. VDC asked also about future plans and discovered that 20% of interviewed developers plan to use a non-commercial Linux distro and only 5% a commercial one.

No surprise that non-commercial is the hardware makers’ favourite choice, allowing them to avoid the burden of licensing and to make savings maintaining internally their platforms.

Balacco talking about the preference for non-commercial distros said:

[the preference] will continue to put pressure on commercial Linux suppliers to provide value above and beyond the growing sophistication of publicly available Linux solutions.

I totally agree, let’s see how will eventually react commercial Linux suppliers to this challenge..

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Embedded Linux, VDC