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Welcome
to Issue 4 of the IT Leaders' Open Source Newsletter. This month
we focus on support. How do you you support open source, is it
supportable and where do I go for support? There's been a great deal of
FUD around supporting open source from the usual suspects. Look on this
months newsletter as another attempt to explain just how straight
forward this is.
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In this months newsletter
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So what's the support checklist in engaging open source?
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Have you got your head around this yet? Web 2.0 is a term coined by O'Reilly media and is in a sense a response to the bursting of the dot com bubble. It's the manner in which we use the web now as a platform for applications, collaboration and networking. Think social networking, but also wikis, blogs, folksonomies (free tagging or the results of rather than a fixed taxonomy) etc Ok so does this make things clearer and should you care anyway? Well if you're interested in innovation it's important, likewise if you interested in how communities hang together or how your customers may spread the word about your services the read on. Could you potentially better enable team, groups and communities within your organisation with better simpler tools? Do you need the highly structured formal toolsets you currently use? How can you capture water cooler type discussions within the organisation and see them develop? How can your internal thought leaders communicate with the masses and inspire innovation in the business? It's an approach involving tools and thinking. Enable people to create with simple technologies rather than verbose documents and documentation standards. Not only through Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and aggregation, but also technologies like Ajax. Web 2.0 thinks is the collaborative networked mindset that we see in much of open source technology. In fact open source communities have been thriving in very simple networked tools for some time. Web 2.0 is the proliferation of this approach into consumer and business thinking. How will your business tap into to the opportunity and approach? Just having a wiki isn't web 2.0 job done any more than installing a business application like ERP or CRM is technology delivered. Expect a degree of business change and a degree of culture shift to really maximise this environment. The point is, where will your next innovation come from and could it potentially cost you much less to deliver? |
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Are we the only ones tired of hearing this. You'd have thought that the SCO v IBM battle resulting in IBM emerging entirely unscathed would have brought an end to this. It seems it was just the warm up for Microsoft to officially pitch in. Respected director of the software Freedom Law Center, Eben Moglen refers to it as the 'summer of fear'. For anyone that has half an interest in this issue, you must view the youtube link below with Moglen speaking on the subject. It really is an inspiring and humerous address. Eben speaks The issue here is a couple of notable Linux vendors helping to muddy waters by doing patent deals with Microsoft to protect their customers. The issue with this as Moglen puts it is: "so the only people left quaking when you do your 'Be Very Afraid' tour were the developers themselves." "Enterprises may think they have made a separate peace", he continued. "Please don't try to make a separate piece at the community's expense," he pleaded. "Please don't try to make your customers safe if that's going to result in the destruction of the upstream rain forest where your goods come from" "We're an ecological system. If you undermine community defenses you're undermining the whole ecology, and doing that for the benefit of your customers at the expense of your suppliers is not a good way to stay in business." Whilst none of this is news, it's important to keep it in the spotlight. We have a responsibility as users to support the ecosystem of open source. It will pay dividends for us time and time again. Until patent threats become stated realities and specific enough for everyone to respond, why should we allow the threat to disrupt our progress?. There are some rather large organisations out there with significant investment in Linux (which is where this is findamentally focussed). The reality of the Linux community and the players involved is that they can and will fix anything that threatens their existence and in timeframe that'll leave no doubt as to how powerful the open source model is. IBM and HP have a significant vested interest in Linux from a hardware perspective. No doubt IBM ships more servers on Linux than any other OS. Couple that with the millions of broadband routers and network devices running Linux and we're confident that if necessity arises........open source will invent. |
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So Novell have bagged another 100,000 seats in schools in San Diego and Japan is looking at options for 400,000 ageing machines in schools. So when will you consider moving your piffling 10,000? It's obviously all about investment in desktop applications, but also about extending the life of your hardware. What if your could get 4-5 years out of hardware instead of 2-3? Is that worth a look at what you could do with those troublesome applications to avoid a blanket hardware refresh. The Linux desktop is only getting slicker with each release, we remember well early 'so what now' installs that just weren't practical within the corporate environment. Linux is a different animal now and the major players have been focussing heavily on the management tools. You may not need to go the whole hog to see some real benefit. Think user profiles and particularly those users that don't have complex roles. Why do call centre staff so often get such fully functional machines. Is it to while away the time between calls? Certainly from our experience using a Linux desktop there is a pivotal point at which it starts to feel like home anmd Windows starts to feel like an alien environment. The major interface changes in Vista may be an ideal opportunity for you to introduce a different kind of change. Start working out where the issues might lie and who those issues realistically impact. If there are large pockets of users unaffected then squeezing another year or two out of that hardware may enable you to focus budget elsewhere. |
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SpikeSource have recently added this leading open source systems monitoring solution to their solution portfolio. Hyperic enables IT managers to expand past classical monitoring activities to drive availability and improve the overall health of their IT infrastructure. Purpose-built for web infrastructure, and architected to consider all layers of infrastructure including hardware, middleware, virtualization and applications. Drop us a note if you'd like some more information on any of the SpikeSource solution stack. |
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..is valuable to us. If there are any topics you'd like us to focus on within these newsletters or you have suggestions to improve the content then please let us know. Drop us an email at newsletters@hubstone.co.uk. You can also provide anonymous feedback online using our new form here. Please forward on the following link to any colleagues you think may want to subscribe to our newsletter.
Until our next instalment The Hubstone Team |
Business Solutions
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