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Report on the ‘Support Models for Open Source

Deployment’ Conference, 3rd June 2004

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Author: Adrian Stevenson
Report on the ‘Support Models for Open Source Deployment’ Conference, 3rd June
2004

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

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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

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These form the general themes for the day.

3. Conference Topics

3.1 Do It Yourself

3.1.1 Bodington VLE at Oxford - Adam Marshall, University of Oxford

The University of Oxford Computer Services has decided to implement the


Bodington Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) [3] as developed by Jon Maber at
Leeds University. It was felt that the support for commercial VLE’s was too
expensive. It was acknowledged that support for Bodington can be somewhat
cumbersome and it dependent to some degree on on Jon Maber. On the plus side,
there has been a great deal of testing of Bodington from the open source
community and more bug reporting occurs than tends to be the case with
commercial products.

Some of the perceived benefits of using the Bodington OSS VLE were:

• Faster development cycles


• The application is more robust due to greater use
• The funding stays within the HE sector
• In-house staff gain development skills
• The University gains publicity and prestige (assuming the application has a
good reputation)

Some future benefits are:

• The product can be adapted to meet future needs such as the


requirements of the JISC e-Learning Framework [4]
• The institution benefits from knowledge retention – such as the
requirements of the JISC e-Learning Framework
• The product is more likely to integrate with other systems such as uPortal
[5], phpBB [6] and SAKAI [7]

Some of the requirements that Bodington met were:

• Look and feel can be adapted to house styles


• Structural versatility
• Meets SENDA accessibility guidelines
• E-Learning standards compliance (e.g. IMS)
• Anonymous access
• The VLE resources are ‘real URLs’ that can be accessed through a web
browser

A major perceived benefit of implementing Bodington was the cost. A ‘major


player’ system would cost about £20,000+ per year, plus 8 Sun SPARCs, Solaris,
and Oracle. Bodington requires 1 PC, Linux, and Postgres. Both solutions require
0.5 staff developer and 1 systems admin with the money saved paying for Java
developers who can generate revenue. The developers have brought further
funding in via various JISC middleware and e-learning tool projects.

The main ‘good things’ that have come out of going the OSS route:

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• Rapid bug fixing


• Quick response to user requests
• ‘Free’ enhancements - other developers may have plugged your
requirements gap.
• Many developers improve the broth!
• Good community working atmosphere

Some ‘bad things’:

• Jon Maber totally indispensable


• Coding is more fun than documenting – lack of good documentation
• New features more fun than bug fixes – can be slow to get bugs fixed

3.1.2 Deploying Open Source Solutions in an eProduction System - Joel


Greenberg, The Open University

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 found to be some scalability problems with Apache Cocoon.


• There can be a danger of getting caught between a vendor and the
underlying software e.g. Apache may recommend an upgrade for security
reasons but the vendor may only support their product on a previous
version of Apache.
• Concerns were raised about the dependency of Bodington on Jon Maber.

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:

• UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT


procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.
• UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support
open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
• UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and
services.

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• UK Government will consider obtaining full rights to bespoke software code


or customisations of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software it procures
wherever this achieves best value for money.
• UK Government will explore further the possibilities of using OSS as the
default exploitation route for Government funded R&D software.

3.2 Join a Consortium

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.

Their experiences so far:

• 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.

Issues arising from the questions were:

• There were no problems adapting software developed in the US to UK


needs.
• A significant factor in the choice of uPortal was the well respected
members of the consortium. This enables Hull to be associated with some
of the big American Universities such as Yale.
• The development of uPortal can be a bit ‘random’. There is no
development roadmap and is dependent on developers having the time
and inclination. However commercial milestones are frequently not met so
perhaps OSS development has more realistic milestones.

3.3 Get Consultancy Support

3.3.1 Getting Consultancy Support - Michael Sekler, OS Consult.

Michael outlined the services that the OS Consult independent consultancy


provide, these being software development, outsourcing, support and training.
They work closely with the makers of Apache Lenya, an open source content
management system based on Apache Cocoon. Michael listed some of the
support goals and long term goals that may apply to OSS. OS Consult offer the
following types of service on the full range of operating systems and a wide range
open source software options:

• Consulting, design, development, installation,


• Outsourcing

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• Per incident support


• Longer term support contracts
• Training suited to your requirements

3.3.2 Consultancy Supported Open Source Software - John Merrells,


Parthenon Computing Ltd.

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:

• Expertise - consultants are often the founders and term contributors to


open source projects.
• Flexibility - as much or as little consultancy resource when needed.
• Team - a team with mixed roles is better than a multi-talented individual.
• Vaule - expertise, flexibility and a strong team represent good value

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 Vendor Support

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.

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The community focuses on open source java based project implementations


covering e-learning, interoperability and digital libraries. Open standards and
specifications form the basis of the software projects including IMS [11], SIF [12],
SCORM [13] and METS [14]. Two core aims of JELC are:

• Giving global visibility to best-of-breed open, standards-based education


projects
• Establishing a common set of interoperable tools with less risk and cost for
Ministries of Education

The JELC projects cover the following areas:

• Open desktop tools


• eLearning framework
• Library and archive tools
• Management tools
• Tools for teaching
• Academic research tools
• Learning resources
• Student projects
• Public policy

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.

John described the main advantages of participating in JELC as:

• An open reference architecture for the creation and delivery of learning


content
• A wide range of Java-based open source tools and applications for
education
• Access to global educational experts sharing best practices and lessons
learned through forums and projects

There are a number of ways to participate in JELC including joining an existing


project or starting a new community project. You can also link your site with the
JELC portal or build on existing open source java-based framework components.

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/ >

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[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/ >

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