Information Systems and Services and Open Source

There is talk about the 2008 Olympic Games using only open source software to save on licence fees:

He said: "For open source we have a plan to propose this for Beijing. It will save money on the licences."

If you're comparing open source with propriety software you need to look at the entire package, not just licence fees. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that the Olympics shouldn't use open source software, I'm suggesting that if they select software solely on the cost of the licence fees while ignoring the customisation, install, support and training costs, they're going to make some bad decisions.

Blackboard and WebCT are to merge. From an econimic point of view, this makes little sense unless they no longer see each other as key rivals. Do they now both see Moodle as their key rival? Or Bodington?

As featured on /.

The new Open Document Fellowship has been launched to give momentum to the increasing use of the Open Document format. You may already be using this format if you are using OpenOffice StarOffice KOffice or IBM Workplace: it is the OASIS open standard for office file formats.

This is part of the on-going struggle to move user-created documents to a standards-compliant format which enables them to avoid vendor lockin. What differentiates the Fellowship from other groups is that individuals rather than companies are members.

A cautionary tale about a developer, a university and some software that became a VLE.

The message seems to hold valuable cautions on several levels.

The tale

tags: opensource vle elearning virtual learning environment

Further to my previous post, I've just recieved this email from Alistair Young:

From: Alistair Young
Subject: Re: free gift in your pigeon holes
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:47:40 +0100

Hi folks,

The Guanxi IdP is written in Java, as is the Shibboleth one. The only C++ implementation is the Shibboleth SP.

The Guanx IdP makes life a little easier for a user to deploy in that it creates it's own self-signed certificate and puts it in it's own keystore. It also creates a Shibboleth compatible X509 for you to drop into your SP. The Gx IdP also doesn't use DOM3 as there's no requirement to sign SAML Attribute Assertions in the Shibboleth profile (which isn't really a standard, it's just an unofficial SAML Profile). The UNICODE problem is a DOM3 issue, rather than a Shibboleth one. It came up when testing the original Shibboleth IdP in Bodington. You need DOM3 to sign Shibboleth assertions due to the non-standard ID attribute involved but as I said, it's not required.

The Gx IdP It can be run in two modes - standalone or embedded. It runs embedded in the Bodington VLE and takes advantage of the bod environment to turn it into an IdP with no modification to Bodington.

The Guanxi SP, which is due soon, is a Java SP that differs from the Shibboleth one in that the Gx SP is distributed. It's based on web services and uses WS-CallBack to allow the core SAML Engine to be deployed/clustered anywhere on the net, with an army of Guards deployed to protect resources. It uses SAML2 metadata to form trust relationships between the Engine(s) and Guard(s). This lets you deploy a Guanxi Engine farm that takes care of the heavy duty SAML/ Shibboleth traffic, while the Guards just initiate the process and are notified when the attributes are ready.

Lastly, Guanxi also includes SAMUEL - a lightweight SAML1.1 Java toolkit. The Gx IdP and SP both use this. SAMUEL differs from openSAML in that SAMUEL has no Shibboleth functionality. It's a pure SAML1.1 toolkit.

I'll wiki this at some point!

Alistair

The BBC is saying that 10% of UK websites fail to work properly with Firefox.

It's all about standards, folks.

Coverage and more coverage.

Great to see that Auricle, the University of Bath's e-learning weblog, has a new piece on "Skype Recordings as Learning Resources." It provides a neat compendium of different ways to record Skype calls: Skype's own voicemail service, sound recording/editing software (including the nifty open source Audacity), Skypecasting... and all have been tested by the author, Derek Morrison.

The really interesting bit is Derek's own solution, which uses Alex Rosenbaum's SAM (Skype Answering Machine). It works like this: A SAM-linked Skype account is included as a participant in a Skype conference call. As a new conference is started, the SAM account "intercepts" and records the call. Neat! The only trick is that you need two computers: one to create the Skype account, and the other to initiate the conference call.

Derek goes on, quite rightly, to ask how this technology could actually be used for teaching and learning (he offers some nice suggestions, too). Then he asks the big one: how might schools and institutions use the potential of VoIP?

For example, how many HEIs have yet bothered to install VoIP gateways in their exchanges? Such gateways don't appear to be particularly expensive and would enable calls to be routed to non-telephone devices, e.g. computers, thus opening up the possibility of some interesting work.

I've thought about this, too. VoIP services could be a boon to online collaboration, as more teachers and students start to use CMS/VLEs (I suspect Skype et al. are already well-established among science researchers). If introduced more broadly, VoIP telephony has the further, non-negligible, potential to deliver significant cost savings for university managers.

There are significant issues to be addressed, though, before this could happen in practice. Political and technical issues, like whether (and how) commercial VoIP deals with quality of service, the availability of specialist hardware, and the demands of regulatory bodies like Ofcom, should get settled fairly quickly. But cultural and managerial issues will take longer. For example, in my own institution (and, I suspect, in others), Internet/Web/IT provision falls under the administrative category of "academic resources", whereas telephony is managed as "critical infrastructure." IT departments may not have the power to introduce VoIP telephony at anything beyond the local, small-scale level. A bit of grass-roots campaigning and awareness-raising by academics and learning technologists might start the ball rolling, but it's all going to take time.

The Incubator Club appears to be a group of publicity shy government sector organisations who have got together to integrate a Linux desktop solution specifically tailored for their needs. As they say on their website:

"A condition of subscription to the Incubator Club is confidentiality. Organisations that are migrating to Open Source Software are targeted by the proprietary vendors and also by the press. These vendors are used to selling solutions, that are not in the best interests of your organisation, to senior management."

Confidentiality is completely contrary to the normal practise in Open Source, of course, but in the past a number of large Open Source roll-outs have been reversed in the face of intense publicity and pressure from proprietary vendors, so maybe such a club is needed to bootstrap the use of Open Source in this sector.

ZDNET coverage

The DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) has recently announced funding to the group:

ZDNET coverage

Such a group possibly sorts those organisations who are genuinely interested in migrating to Open Source from those who are primarily interested in using Open Source to beat down their fees for using proprietary software.