Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contents
1. INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................3
2. OVERVIEW.........................................................................................................................................3
2.1 Support Anxiety - the highest barrier to open source deployment? - Sebastian Rahtz,
OSS Watch.................................................................................................. ......................3
3. CONFERENCE TOPICS....................................................................................................................4
3.1 Do It Yourself................................................................................................ ...................4
3.1.1 Bodington VLE at Oxford - Adam Marshall, University of Oxford..............................4
3.1.2 Deploying Open Source Solutions in an eProduction System - Joel Greenberg, The
Open University........................................................................................ .........................5
3.2 Join a Consortium........................................................................................................ ....6
3.2.1 JA-SIG & uPortal, The Hull Experience - Ian Dolphin, Head of e-Strategy U. Hull
JASIG Board......................................................................................................... .............6
3.3 Get Consultancy Support................................................................................................ .6
3.3.1 Getting Consultancy Support - Michael Sekler, OS Consult................................... ...6
3.3.2 Consultancy Supported Open Source Software - John Merrells, Parthenon
Computing Ltd.................................................................................................................. ..7
3.4 Vendor Support............................................................................................................. ...7
3.4.1 Open Source and Linux within the Novell Value Proposition - Simon Lidget, Novell
UK Limited.................................................................................................. .......................7
3.4.2 Java Education and Learning Community (JELC) - John Heath, Sun Microsystems 7
4. REFERENCES.....................................................................................................................................8
1. Introduction
The ‘Support Models for Open Source Deployment and Development’ conference
June 2004 at The Diskus Conference Centre in central London was the second
conference of the JISC funded OSS Watch Open Source Advisory Service [1]. More
than 70 people attended this event, which was focused on four support models for
open source deployments:
• Do It Yourself
• Join A Consortium
• Get Consultancy Support
• Vendor Support
The day began with an overview presentation from Sebastian Rahtz, Manager of
OSS Watch, setting the scene for the day.
2. Overview
2.1 Support Anxiety - the highest barrier to open source deployment? -
Sebastian Rahtz, OSS Watch
The main issue that tends to be raised as a concern with OSS is the lack of
support. This view is highlighted by Ray Lane, a former Oracle executive in a
keynote speech at the Open Source Business Conference 2004 [2]. The article
suggests that OSS applications are not appropriate for mission critical services.
Roy Lane cites six problems with OSS:
• Informal support
• Velocity of change
• No roadmap
• Functional gaps
• Licensing caveats
• ISV endorsements
The main purpose of Sebastian’s talk is to prove this is not the case by turning the
six problems into assets by:
• make a virtue of velocity of change – you don’t have to buy, install and
learn the new version of the software every six months.
• celebrate no roadmap – the community can influence the development of
the software.
• plug functional gaps – if the software doesn’t do everything you need you
can add the functionality yourself.
• make light of licensing caveats
• stand aloof from ISV endorsements
Sebastian suggests that all of the above relate to support issues. Some possible
solutions to the support concerns:
• Do it yourself
• Join a consortium
• Employ a specialist consultant
• Stick with you existing vendors
3. Conference Topics
3.1 Do It Yourself
Some of the perceived benefits of using the Bodington OSS VLE were:
The main ‘good things’ that have come out of going the OSS route:
The Open University have increasing exploited online learning and teaching with
many courses now being presented totally online. Over 90% of their students
have access to networked PCs and 48% of courses require online access. The
Open University employ a ‘managed production environment’ using a number of
authoring packages such as MS Word to author XML and output to a number of
media including web pages, PDF and PDA format pages.
The Open University policy when developing their system was to choose the best
components available for specific tasks whether open source or not. They did
place an emphasis on interoperability and compliance with open standards and
acknowledged they had some issues with trusting closed source solutions.
They presented a case study of the way they used various components based on
their ‘TeachandLearn.net’ site [8]. This system uses a number of components
including MS Word for authoring, an in-house developed workflow system called
‘Tracker’ and the open source Apache Cocoon system [9] to render the XML to
HTML.
Some issues highlighted from the questions following the presentations were:
There were many references made to the ‘Open Source Software Use Within UK
Government’ Policy Document [10]. The key policy decisions outlined in this
document are:
3.2.1 JA-SIG & uPortal, The Hull Experience - Ian Dolphin, Head of e-
Strategy U. Hull JASIG Board
Ian gave a brief overview of the Mellon funded uPortal system. He found that
there was some resistance at Hull to using OSS mainly due to a lack of familiarity
and general management distrust of ‘free’ software. It was felt that clear and
articulated criteria had to be used to evaluate the software and overcome the
resistance. The final stage of the evaluation involved a full installation of the
software as part of an extended review. The staff skills required for this process
were development, support, and DBA which amounted to 1.7 FTE.
• Flexibility – the uPortal product was found be both flexible and adaptable.
• Support comes mainly from the uPortal community email lists.
• The cost of implementation was as anticipated.
• Participation in community – Hull has contributed to the uPortal
accessibility work, quickstart document and RSS channel.
John stated that he believed that 99% of the OSS on Soundforge was ‘rubbish’.
Only 1% is of good quality due to having teams of more than seven people and
frequently some sort of commercial backing. He then outlined the professional
consultancy support as provided by Parthenon:
Parthenon offer the full range of OSS support covering architecture and design,
configuration and deployment, development, maintenance and general support.
They have particular expertise in XML processing, databases, identity and
security. They currently support a number of profile projects including the Xerces
XML parser, the Pathon Xpath processor and the Berkeley XML database.
3.4.1 Open Source and Linux within the Novell Value Proposition - Simon
Lidget, Novell UK Limited
Simon gave a rather complicated presentation that essentially outlined how Novell
can support the implementation of OSS within higher education by providing
commercial support. He described the Novell view of the academic landscape and
outlined how the academic challenges of balancing the requirements of business
agility such as pursuing new opportunities with the need to ensure secure
information and transactions.
Simon then described a number of the product packages Novell offer to achieve
the above at various levels of scale and cost. Novell deploy their solutions using
the Linux platform which they believe is very stable and secure.
Simon emphaised that Novell have made a long term commitment to open source
and that they are migrating the full range of their own systems to OSS right
through from their back end servers through to desktop machines and software
such as OpenOffice.
3.4.2 Java Education and Learning Community (JELC) - John Heath, Sun
Microsystems
Sun have set up the ‘Java Education and Learning Community’ to be a “place to
find, develop and share Java-related open source educational tools, open learning
standards implementations, and open course learning materials”. The JELC
community consists of a wide range of people including teachers, programmers,
students and researchers.
JELC also have a community portal running discussion forums and mailing lists,
hold a number of events and publish a number of white papers and newsletters.
4. References
[1] OSS Watch Open Source Advisory Service
< http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/ >
[2] ZDNet article ‘Six barriers to open source adoption’ by Dan Farber
<
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/Six_barriers_to_open_source_adoptio
n.html >
[3] Bodington Open Source Project
< http://www.bodington.org/ >
[4] JISC e-Learning Framework
< http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=elearning_framework >
[5] uPortal by JA-SIG
< http://www.uportal.org/ >
[6] phpBB open source bulletin board
< http://www.phpbb.com/ >
[7] SAKAI - Open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software
< http://www.sakaiproject.org/ >
[8] TeachandLearn.net
< http://www.teachandlearn.net/ >
[9] The Apache Cocoon Project
< http://cocoon.apache.org/ >
[10] ‘Open Source Software Use Within UK Government’ Policy Document. July
2002.
< http://www.ogc.gov.uk/index.asp?id=2190 >
[11] IMS Global Learning Consortium
< http://www.imsglobal.org/ >
[12] Schools Interoperability Framework
< http://www.sifinfo.org/ >
[13] Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)
< http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scormabt >
[14] Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
< http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ >