At OSS Watch we've been focusing on community development recently, that is getting people up to speed on how to build a community around a project (usually a software project, standardisation effort or similar).



We've started a Community Development mailing list, the discussions have mainly focused, so far, on RSS and on the use of Google Analytics in education.



I've also written an extensive piece on how to improve a page on Wikipedia.

I've been blogging on the connect.educause.edu site for almost two years and three hundred posts. I'm now shifting my efforts to the new JISC site and the OSS Watch blog within that.

I'll leave my archives up on the educause site, but won't be updating it or fixing links.

cheers stuart

M. Tim Jones has written an excellent article on virtualisation for IBM.

If you've ever wondered what VMware was, how it worked and why some people rave about it, this is you chance to get to grips with it.

cheers stuart

In the New Year the UK Government (alongside other British Commonwealth governments) issues a list of honours, giving official recognition of work in the public sphere. The guardian has two articles, on the teachers and scientists honoured this year.

cheers

stuart

BECTA (the body responsible for IT in compulsory education in the UK) has come under attack over their approach to open source on two fronts.

An early day motion in the commons, supported by 1 in 5 backbench MPs said:

That this House [...] expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source software and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.

A report by Sirius found that:

Becta cannot account for over £200m of taxpayer's money spent on software for schools

Sirius is hardly an independent third party in this, but their figures are based on FOI act requests and seem to add up. What Sirius want is a change in the way IT money is allocated so that more open source gets used.

Coverage at: itnews and ITWales.

cheers, stuart

A whole range of geek websites have run christmas lists, and if get it quick there's a chance they'll be delivered before christmas: linux.com, red hat, make and even MSN

A lecture on Kant by award-winner lecturer Susan Stuart has hit the top of the download charts. It probably helps that who research areas (and thus presumably her spin on Kant) are on the boundary of philosophy, cognition and computing—geeks have always loved that kind of thing.

cheers, stuart

While at a small IT trade show I was surprised to come across an open source CMS: squiz.net. Under the slogan "Open Source. Own It. Squiz.net" They were very big on open source, one of their case studies saying:

...the use of open source software means that 100% of the resulting system is owned by [the client] including the valuable intellectual property that's been build whilst creating it—such as documentation, processes and the resulting web site code itself

All excellent sounding stuff. Unfortunately, further investigation of their licence shows that:

2.1 You agree that Squiz.Net controls all intellectual property rights (including copyright) in every aspect of the Software, including source code and related documentation.

Which hardly gels with the client owning 100% of the "web site code." Even worse:

2.8 You must Notify Squiz.Net within 30 days of making any Modifications even if You do not intend to distribute those Modifications. Notify is defined in Clause 4.2 below. If Your Modifications are incomplete, You must still Notify Squiz of the status of your progress not less frequently than once every 30 days. If You do not Notify Squiz.Net of Modifications You have made (complete or not) within 30 days, Squiz.Net may deem that you have opted to limit your obligations in accordance with Clause 3 and as such Squiz.Net may reasonably charge You the consideration indicated in Clause 3.

This clause is in conflict with Clause 3 of the open source definition which says:

3. Derived Works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

So the the Squiz.net CMS is not open source in the way that everyone else uses the term.

A little looking around the net shows that other people have seen through this in the past.

cheers, stuart

After far too long, it looks like Telecom New Zealand, the incumbent monopoly telecommunications provider in New Zealand, is being forced into local loop unbundling.

Part of the reason it's taken so long is that Telecom is New Zealand's biggest public company and holds a great deal of implicit leverage. Personally I think that splitting the company into three means they'll do far better in the medium term, simply by growing the market, something which local loop unbundling has shown to be very effective at elsewhere.

The dynamic is pretty simple: when companies compete to offer broadband and similar services to consumers, those services become cheaper, easier and better supported, leading to greater take-up. As the numbers of broadband-connected homes and businesses rises, more of those businesses start connecting with more of those homes, and before you know it, e-commerce is really taking off. Most of those businesses don't know one end of an internet from the other, so third parties spring up to help them and before you know there's an entire industry. Entry into that industry is entirely predicated on what Telecom has to sell: high quality Internet connections.