Here is another dose of what I have read online in the last week or so.

Fun and Freedom

So since last time, we have had software freedom day. Here in Birmingham, the gallant and courageous Ciarán Moony, Esquire, stood out in Birmingham New Street chatting to the general public about Free Software and offering them the Open CD and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. I was really keen to join him but sadly I had a clash that day that I failed to get out of. Luckily, Ciarán has posted some some fab photos and further details here.

More bravery is displayed as Andrew Loughran attempts to wrestle the Python. In the process he wisely uses revision control, in his case, he uses bzr (as I am also currently using). I had one project once that I wrote painfully in C and I really wish I had tracked revisions as I later tried to fix some segmentation faults that proved really hard and boring to pin-down. Nowadays, I have learned my lesson and if it moves then I track it.

Recently, we looked at PyGame and PyWeek and played some PyGame games. Richard Jones reports on PyWeek 5 which has just happened. Number 5 was bigger than ever as 220 people worked on 111 entries resulting in 50 completed games. When I get a bit of free time I will trawl through and see what is cool.

"The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum" - David Ogilvy

Darren Kirby argues that the 'Chasm between Gentoo Devs and Users widens. I'm not sure 'chasm' is the right word as it implies a line of sight!

The problem is more that Gentoo is like an ancient temple, and worshippers are separated into separate courts by sheets of material, not really enough to stop the noise being heard from the other side but enough to give people feelings of separation and exclusivity; of course these feelings can be interpreted as good or bad depending on where you are sitting.

Ditching the strange analogies, Darren is right that the structure of Gentoo is somewhat all or nothing. You are a dev or you are a user, and without being willing to commit all of your waking hours to Gentoo (i.e. being a dev), it is pretty hard to pop in to contribute or offer your ideas in any meaningful way, not impossible if you are made of human steel but not as easy as some other open source communities; effectively leaving 120+ people on the inside of the curtain, and 200,000+ people on the outside. For me that is not the end of the world as there are plenty of other things to fill my time with, but I accept that Darren and the many other users who express similar sentiments have a right to feel that way.

Such a gap also does not bode well for long-term sustainability, but everyone just needs to be very patient, we'll all get there in the end. I have talked about this a lot before, so I try to stop being boring, but the cause is the self-appointed genetically engineered supergeeks being in sole charge of the bridge. Whether that is great or terrible is another discussion entirely but there are certain consequences that stem from such a unique structure, some bad and some fantastic.

The Fellowship vs Mordor

Mylsotol asks whether Microsoft Will Die in the next 10 Years?.

For me, I think Open Source is the natural conclusion of the commoditisation trend that Microsoft itself started in the late 1970s. DOS was an operating system that could run on computers from any manufacturers. IBM, Microsoft and the PC-clones of the late 70s and 1980s started commoditisation in hardware, while open source is the same trend, but now in software. In the same way that you can get a PC from any manufacturer that chooses to compete in the market, now you can get the same software stack from any company that chooses to compete in the market.

So maybe Microsoft won't die in the next ten years, but many other companies and products will. All the other very large software companies will either join us in the open source camp or run the risk of being eaten alive by Microsoft. The large proprietary products cannot really handle the combination of commoditisation with Microsoft's bundling, and it will be a losing battle to try to out-gun Microsoft in the proprietary camp.

For Doctor Who fans, there is the Cybermen who seek to upgrade everyone to Cybermen, and the Daleks who seek to kill everyone and make more room for the Dalek Empire. The space between gets thinner and thinner.

An article this week on eweek said: "At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010, according to Mark Driver, vice president of research at Gartner".

So all software that has a wide enough application for numerous users will become (and is already becoming) increasingly commoditised, either by becoming open source or by being sold by Microsoft.

Educational computing in Russia

As headmaster of the small Russian village of Sepych, Aleksandr Ponosov authorised the purchasing of 20 new computers for his school, these came with pre-installed Microsoft software. Ponosov was not a computer user himself.

An inspection found that 12 computers had unauthorised copies of Microsoft software. So last spring, computer illiterate Ponosov was hauled in front of a court and charged with unauthorised use of the software and ordered to pay damages to Microsoft.

This case created a counter-reaction in the Russian public, this spiralled all the way up to President Putin himself who said: If the legislation which, as I see, is not very adequate, needs to be amended, then we will reflect on this. But to grab someone for buying a computer somewhere and start threatening him with prison, is complete nonsense, simply ridiculous. (Translation thanks to Wikipedia.)

Past president Mikhail Gorbachev, also sent a very interesting open letter to Bill Gates, asking Microsoft to withdraw from the case and not to press charges.

In many not-so-rich countries, unauthorised Windows is the default and dominant operating system, having at least 83% of the Russian market. Unauthorised sharing is the solution that the free and unregulated market has chosen.

However, now countries like Russia want to join the WTO, so they have to sort the situation out, as the wider economic needs dictate access to Western markets. How can the Russian state provide software for its schools without angering the WTO?

Plan 1 - they can try to crack down and get people to buy Windows. However, Russian schools do not have a lot of money. For example, if the salary for a Moscow teacher is £100 - £200 per month, It will be the lower end of the range in some remote village, so lets say £100 per month. The 12 Windows licences with Office were valued by the court at $10,000 (how the heck did they come to that?), so let's say £5000.

So to pay for the licences, the rural school would have to pay the equivalent of sacking four and a bit teachers. Even the most optimistic proponent of information technology is not going to claim that 12 PCs have the same educational value to the children as four full-time professional teachers. So buying Windows licences is never going to work for Russia, not for decades. It just does not make economic sense.

So what now? Plan 2 - provide locally supported open source software to the state schools. Nothing stops rich private schools from installing Windows if it wants, but at least the state is not using unauthorised software. It also boosts the local IT industry and stems the flow of cash going from the poor to the rich world.

So there was an article published about Russia's latest plan for school computing. Now Russian Slashdot readers have argued that there are several translation errors in the English version, it can be hard after all to find technically savvy translators who can get open source terminology correct, but I think we get the idea.

The Russian government has tasked the 'Ministry of Communication' to create a technology platform for schools based on open-source software. They have put the development out to tender and one of the key bidders seems to be a Russian Linux distro called ALTLinux. This would have to be ready by the end of the year, piloted in some regions in 2008, and then rolled out throughout Russia in 2009.

The pilot regions are Tomsk region, Perm Regions and Republic of Tatarstan. I know very little about Russian geography but one interesting fact is that the village of Sepych (with the 12 dodgy Windows PCs above) is within the Perm Regions.

Russia contains 143 million people, and several other Eastern states follow it's example in many areas. If Russian Schools and the government as a whole moves away from Windows and adopts Linux, then the private sector has little choice but to follow.

IT deployments, of any kind, are always hard, there are always more variables than you can plan for, not least because a large part of any IT system depends on human beings. So pilot programmes are always a good idea. Find all the problems, make all the mistakes, and then get it working first, then roll it out to everyone.

However, the key point to watch is between the pilot stage and the national roll out. It is at this point that Microsoft will probably buckle and will try to offer large numbers of free, or virtually free, Windows licences. It will certainly be very interesting to watch.

Discuss this post - Leave a comment.