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The Legislative Council 6th December 2006
The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD: Thank you, Mr Acting President. Last week it was reported that the French parliament was dumping Microsoft products in place of open source software. The move came after successful transmission by their Ministry of Agriculture and Police. Starting in June next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux software instead of Microsoft Windows; Mozilla's Firefox web browser in place of Internet Explorer; and Open Office, a free open source alternative to Microsoft's Office software. Documents will be saved in a non-proprietary open document format. As an aside, I note that on 31 March 2006 the National Archives of Australia also settled on the open document format to ensure long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers.
A detailed study concluded that the move will result in substantial savings, despite the associated migration and training costs. Free and open source software is being produced as I speak by developers all over the world and, indeed, many of them are operating in South Australia. The majority of these developers are volunteers, donating their time and energy to improve and give away free software. And it is free in every sense of the word, free from any licensing costs, but also free in the sense that it can be used, copied, studied, modified, improved and redistributed with little or no restriction. With developers all over the world freely and constantly improving the software, it is little wonder that many open source solutions are now outpacing Microsoft solutions.
I want to focus primarily on the Linux Open Source Operating System, a free competitor to Microsoft Windows. There are various `flavours', if I can put it that way, of Linux, including Red Hat, Novell Suse, Mandriva, amongst others. One of the most popular at the current time is called Ubuntu, which is Linux as well. Ubuntu in the African Zulu and Xhosa languages loosely means `humanity towards others'. First released in 2004, this software collection is backed by Canonical, a non-profit company founded by Mark Shuttleworth. Mark Shuttleworth made his fortune as a software developer in the dot com era, with a company which was built on free and open software, supplying digital encryption services internationally, primarily to banks. Mr Shuttleworth (who was also the second space tourist, in fact) decided to contribute back to the free and open source software community and Ubuntu was born.
Ubuntu distribution has topped the ranks of Linux distribution down loaded from the internet since its release and is developed by a worldwide community specifically with the ordinary computer user in mind. Indeed, I note that the business card of Mr Paul Schultz says `Linux for human beings'. On behalf of the South Australian Ubuntu users group, I suggest two concepts to promote free and open source software as a way forward. First, that we should open the IT funding criteria. Funding for IT in schools is often focused on acquiring and maintaining software licences. The use of free and open source software allows the spending to be refocussed on education and training.
I note that it has been reported that Indiana is moving 22 000 of its students from Windows to Linux platforms. Secondly, South Australian schools and libraries need somewhere to try out Open Source software. A publicly accessible facility is required where businesses and community groups can test these technologies to learn about whether they are suitable for their purposes. Western Australia, with the Open Source WA Demonstration Centre, and Victoria have both undertaken projects to boot strap their free software sector. It will be great to see something like this in South Australia. I encourage members to try the CDs I have distributed to all their offices today and encourage a further uptake of Open Source software for South Australia, as it represents a real alternative to very expensive systems that Microsoft produces.
Taken from: http://www2.parliament.sa.gov.au/hansard_data/2006/LC/WH061206.lc.htm
The Government spends a fortune and ignores its own research
The DfES and Becta ignore their own research that Open Source Software can save schools between 24% and 44% on ICT and advise schools to buy through eLearning Credits and procurement frameworks that offer virtually no Open Source Software.
Our schools aren't getting value for money; we ask the DfES to at least take a serious look at how Open Source Software is being successfully used in schools, colleges, universities and businesses across the UK and the world.
Open Source Software is widely used in industry
[...]
A 2005 Optaros survey of 500 US companies, government agencies and others found 87% were using Open Source.
Respected research company IDC says that Open Source development is the biggest change taking place in the global software industry since the 1980s, yet there is no strategy to exploit this in our schools.
For more information, visit www.openschoolsalliance.orgThe basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.
We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.
Open Source Initiative exists to make this case to the commercial world.
Open source software is an idea whose time has finally come. For twenty years it has been building momentum in the technical cultures that built the Internet and the World Wide Web. Now it's breaking out into the commercial world, and that's changing all the rules. Are you ready?
http://www.opensource.org/
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software freely provided and shared, and for which the source code is freely available. Source code is the list of human-readable instructions the programmer writes. Those instructions are passed to an electronic interpreter and compiler to convert human to computer language, which makes the program usable but impossible for a human to decipher. It is in this closed form that commercial software is provided.
Obviously, all you can do with commercial software is "as you are told" - you cannot alter anything, or see where a problem you have encountered might be solved, or a security hole might be plugged. You must accept the software "as is" without any guarantee whatsoever.
Open Source is very different. Look at the Debian Social Contract and the Open Source Initiative to see just how different the approach to you the user, and information technology generally, is in the FOSS world.
Some background. Unix originated at the Berkeley campus of the University of California as a way to allow many people to use the one large computer without interfering with each other or each other's files. In other words it was designed from inception as a secure multi-user, networking operating system. Clearly, any Unix-based systems such as the BSD and Linux families, are far too substantial to operate in the confined space of a Commodore 64 or any of the early desktop computers. It was not until the advent of the "386" Intel chip and gigabyte-sized hard drives that the possibility arose.
By which time, thanks to an extraordinary marketing coup obtained through the arrogant acquiescence of IBM, who thought all PCs would be no more than toys, Microsoft was very well established. The MSDOS which had to be supplied with every Intel-based PC produced was a simple system designed for one user on one machine. Security was obtained by switching off the computer and hiding the keyboard. Any attempt to weld networking level security onto such a slender base is difficult and doomed to failure. You can offer eye candy copied from Apple and you can out-market or if necessary purchase any competition, of course. Fortunately, the Unix world is not owned by any one individual or corporation and is not therefore available for purchase.
However, the real issues are first, why should our government spend a fortune acquiring licences to use software manufactured overseas when free software of comparable quality is available, and second why should the children in our schools be introduced to no other system than the expensive government choice. It makes no sense - except to Microsoft.