Yearly archives: 2005

Open Source as an Economic Model 1

 in Business by

Open Source Software and Activity has brought about the creation of many tangible items including the Linux Kernel, OpenOffice, Apache web server, PHP scripting language, Perl programming language, and MySQL DBMS. All of these are used directly or indirectly to produce Goods and Services. So a Bicycle manufacturer could be using OpenOffice to produce written reports and the Apache web server to host a website promoting its products.

Thus it can be argued that Open Source Software and Activity even if supplied free of charge to the user nevertheless adds to the Goods and Services available within an Economy. The ultimate extension of this theory might be to speculate on the possibility of a fully functional Open Source Economy.

Communism is an Economic theory that in essence originates via the work of Karl Marx although of course some forms of Communism follow his work more literally than others. So for example China is a Communist country but not in the way the former Soviet Union was under Joseph Stalin or Lenin. One of the many differences between the way Communism appears to operate and Open Source Activity is that the latter simply does not have the restrictions of the former. Indeed it could be argued that Open Source Activity is far less restrictive than uncontrolled Capitalist or Laissez-faire Activity, which amongst its possible faults has monopolistic tendencies.

A similarity with worker controlled Co-operatives could be made with those (workers) who contribute to and control Open Source Software Projects. In Mondragon, Spain a successful Co-operative Economy has operated for many decades.

Perhaps a mixed economy with each economic model competing with the other is the safest and most practical way to achieve a successful modern economy. However Open Source is yet to become a fully established player within the kind of mixed economy found in the UK and elsewhere. In that respect is it destined to be the next great advancement in Economics?

Mark Elkins

Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) 1

 in Legal / OSSG Article  tagged article by (updated 1762 days ago)

The article shown below, which I originally posted on the now reorganized Members Forum in February 2005 has some relevance to the Licensing Issues in OSS Discussion Forum as well as topics in this Discussion Forum. It highlights an organization that has been created to provide free legal support to free and open source software (FOSS) projects.

The original article was prompted by a posting by cboldyreff at 2005-02-03 11:18 AM on a different topic about an ACM TechNews item headlined – Open-Source Leaders Accept New Challenges.

• Re: Open Source item in ACM TechNews Posted by markelkins at 2005-02-03 02:16 PM

Yes a very interesting article giving a snap-shot idea of the organization of Open Source Development.

On the same page as this article is another “Open Source Law Center Opens Doors”. The full article can be found at http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3466751

Clearly with an initial $4 million investment from Open Source Development Labs for the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) things are getting serious on the legal front. Plans are being made to establish other centres outside the USA.

Mark Elkins

BCS OS Licence 15

 in Licensing by

I was looking at the state of OS Licences (IANAL)
and concluded that it would be useful to the
OS community if the BCS itself operated an OS Licence.

If it good enough for the The Regents of the University of California,
then why not for the BCS itself?

Advantages:
1) Open Source licencing has matured. The principles and pitfalls
are better understood. The BCS can offer a good licence.

2) The BCS can offer protection from a perceived problem with
current licences – the ability to transfer copyright and then
revoke the openness (Estoppel not withstanding).

3) The BCS would be an ideal home for the copyright for national UK
OS projects e.g. Health, Local Government, Defence, Transport.

Disadvantages:
1) The BCS charter may prevent it.
2) The BCS board may not like it.

Both disadvantages are not immutable, though they may take time to resolve.

Malcolm Kendall

Open Source in Schools meeting on 7th June 2005 from 6pm to 8pm

 in OSSG News by (updated 6548 days ago)

The British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group is pleased to announce Open Source in Schools meeting on 7th June 2005 from 6pm to 8pm. Meeting location details below. The speakers are John Osborne, Deputy Head Orwell High School, Felixstowe and Andy Trevor, Technical Director Cutter Project

John Osborne – Deployment of Open Source at Orwell High School
The new Orwell IT system has been featured on the Working Lunch program, and in the Times Education Supplement. Orwell High School has been invited to join the Specialist Groups’s ICT Register to advise schools thinking of making similar changes.

John commented:

“As part of the reorganisation of our computer systems we have made a switch to an Open Source platform. This will allow us to make significant savings on our software licensing bill without compromising on the quality of the software available to our students.” “Instead of using Microsoft Windows and Office systems we have switched to a Linux and Star Office platform. Many organisations and businesses have already made this change.” “Students now have secure individual user accounts, email addresses and can access their mail and work from home.” “Security has improved tremendously, and we are able to run our computers for longer before they need replacing.”

Andy Trevor – Open Source technology in education
commented:

Cutter is a low-cost low-maintenance desktop software environment intended for schools, academic institutions and other organisations wishing to use reliable, low-cost desktop software for office automation and other tasks. “Cutter’s goal is to simplify the process of selecting and installing software that works well and to ensure that there is commercial support for its users. The judicious use of Open Source components with full commercial support is at the core of Cutter’s approach.” “Cutter draws from tried and trusted sources to provide a framework that is easy to install and maintain, has good reference sites and is known to work. Cost of ownership and simplicity of management is essential. Cutter doesn’t just work well locally: the fully integrated remote access facilities are a boon to those working from home or maintaining Cutter systems.” “Cutter is predominantly based on Open Source software such as Linux whilst maintaining excellent support for applications that will only run on Microsoft Windows. Dramatic savings in hardware, licensing and administration costs are only one of the reasons for selecting Cutter: peace of mind and high levels of immunity to viruses and security threats may be just as important.”Registration details of this meeting are available at our events section

OSSG Captures Interest at BCS Specialist Groups Assembly – London, 7th April 2005

 in OSSG News by (updated 6548 days ago)

Two OSSG committee members, Patrick Tarpey and Mark Elkins, attended as Delegates at the BCS Specialist Groups Assembly on Thursday 7th April 2005 held at the BCS Offices in Southampton Street, London. Patrick, newly elected Chair of OSSG, gave a well received talk about our new group. This generated much interest not only amongst delegates from other Specialist Groups but also from full-time BCS staff including the BCS President and Chief Executive.

Some interesting information was given out at the Assembly. Chris Webb, BCS Press and PR Manager stated that every Specialist Group (SG) should have at least one trained and briefed media specialist. Training by his Department will be made available to SGs. Chris also mentioned that a column is available in Computing Magazine to BCS, which in theory any SG could make use of.

Matthew Flynn, BCS Commissioning Editor – Books Programme, said he was actively looking for new books to publish. The proposed book by OSSG on Open Source will be a welcome new addition to the BCS book list.

Brian Runciman, BCS Managing Editor, who edits ITNOW (formerly Computer Bulletin) was particularly interested in articles on careers and training at the moment. In addition he also suggested a theme for a regular column based around a day in the life of an IT professional.

Colin Chivers, Specialist Groups and Branches Accountant, outlined the current healthy state of funds. As a result he mentioned that money is available to SGs for special funding where a good business case is presented. He said that the best time to bid for such funding was at the start of the year but if the business case is strong enough then this can be made available at any point during the year.

A main theme of the Assembly was a call for more interaction between SGs. This might involve better ways of sharing information, sharing venues for meetings, or holding joint meetings. For OSSG this is undoubtedly well under way, because our expanding membership has already attracted quite a few to join us from other SGs.

Microsoft Monopoly fact, fiction, and Open Source opportunity 1

 in Knowledge / OSSG Article  tagged article by (updated 1762 days ago)

A monopoly essentially means that there is no other choice available. For example where there is only one supplier of coal. With computer software there are many choices available. The main types are Bespoke, Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS), and Open Source. Microsoft are, with very minor exceptions, one of several COTS suppliers.

Therefore how is it that many claims are made that Microsoft have a monopolistic hold on the software market? It is true that sales of Microsoft products account for a large share of the software market in the UK . However because there are other choices available this might suggest that this situation has developed through customer choice rather than supplier design.

What is surprising about this so called monopolistic situation is that in both the Public and Private sectors there are complaints about it, but many of those complaining continue to buy Microsoft products and have had a tendency to ignore other choices. Arguments about Total Cost of Ownership and lack of non-Microsoft skills are frequently quoted to justify this practice.

Compounding the skills argument is the claim that the Education sector must provide the skills the market demands. Thus if many employers mainly buy Microsoft products then they will correspondingly mainly want IT and other staff trained in those products. As a result it is common for employers to insist that IT staff should have Microsoft qualifications and that other staff should be trained in the use of Microsoft products. Indeed there has been a lot of media discussion on the importance of the State Education sector supplying IT training linked to the attainment of software vendor qualifications. Also UK universities are often criticised that the training given to IT undergraduates is too broad and should be more industry focused.

Every cloud has a silver lining and in the case of software the above arguments can be used in favour of Open Source by bringing them out in the Open. It therefore follows that one of the main aims of the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) is simply to promote an alternative choice. Ironically informing UK organizations of this choice also has a benefit for Microsoft in that its existence offers proof that they do not have a monopoly.

Mark Elkins

Voice control 3

 in Accessibility / OSSG Article  tagged article by (updated 1762 days ago)

A good number of people who were at the meeting yesterday (14th March 2005 for those reading this sometime after posting) will no doubt have discussed this in the break. It got me thinking a bit since the IBM ViaVoice has been discontinued on the Linux platform and I couldn’t think of any current projects in the field. I had a vague feeling in the back of my mind that I had read something related to one of the desktops, probably Gnome as that’s the one I’ve had most interest in (although I use XFCE myself), but this could easily have been a discussion that there should be something!

Anyway, I couldn’t imagine that there was nothing at all on the subject, even if there was nothing useable, so I’ve delved into Google and my bookmarks and come up with a few useful links – and since I said I’d post anything I found on the site, here’s a new forum as well

OK, starting with the more generic stuff:

First up there’s an old artilce in the Linux Gazette, although this doesn’t get into anything technical and is far to high level to be of any real use: http://linuxgazette.net/issue87/lodato.html

There’s also an article in Linux Journal on using ViaVoice with XVoice. I’ve not read it yet, but since ViaVoice is no longer available it seems of little use: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6383

There’s some discussion on integrating ViaVoice with KDE as well, but I’ve not found more than some basic discussion of whether it is a good idea so far. I’ve also come across comments on GVoice for Gnome, but nothing particularly useful on it yet, and I think it is basically dictation based.

There’s a links page with various speech related sites, some of which no longer exist, here: http://www.linux-sound.org/speech.html (not all voice recognition though, much is synthesis).

Getting into the more specific implementation based sites I have have the already mentioned XVoice:

http://www.zachary.com/w/XVoice
http://xvoice.sourceforge.net/

this looks to me more dictation based unfortunately and also relies on ViaVoice.

The Open-Source Speech Recognition Initiative site looks pretty dead, but the list appears to still be active and may be worth a look: http://www.ossri.org/

The FreeSpeech project has renamed itself to Open Mind Speech and looks promising, but is still in the fairly early stages of development: http://freespeech.sourceforge.net/

There’s a site on Automated Speech Recognition that looks to be research based with some code available, although I’ve not quite managed to get my head around exactly what is going on there yet!: http://www.isip.msstate.edu/projects/speech/software/index.html

CVoiceControl appears to have taken over from KVoiceControl and then stalled and is looking for someone to take over the project: http://www.kiecza.net/daniel/linux/index.html

There’s a couple of sites on CMU Sphinx which looks interesting, but I’m not sure whether it is able to work with desktop/application control or not – it probably depends how much development work you’re willing/able to put in There’s two links:

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/Sphinx.html

Most promising of the lot looks to be PerlBox which acts as a front end to the above CMU Sphinx system (amongst others) and from a reference article looks to be able to control the desktop to some extent with PerlBox Voice. It is customisable, but looks to be mainly application launching based, so what is involved to get more application control I’m not sure. It also looks to be of most use if you are using KDE.

Hopefully the above links will be a good starting point to further investigation. I’ve not delved far into any of them yet, but given time (more elusive than the Scarlet Pimpernel that commodity!) I may. I’ve just got to get sound working on my system first, I’m afraid I’ve never seen it as a high priority and I’m not a boxed Linux user, so its not thrown on by default – my systems are mainly CLI based only or a somewhat customised Debian desktop!