On Thursday, I visited the OSOSS
symposium Open Doen in Nieuwegein in the Netherlands. It was targeted at
(semi-)governmental organisation, informing about deployment of Open Source and open standards. A
couple of migration pilots were discussed, amongst others. What really stroke me was the way they
handled those. Let’s say you have a Windows environment, servers running NT4 still, maybe already
Win2k, desktops mainly win2000, that means mail is done with Exchange, authentication via Active
Directory. You want to use more Open Source software in your organisation. One of the approaches to
migrating to an “Open Source desktop” had as a requirements “No changes to the backend, we’re doing
only desktops”. This requirement is quite a strange one. The first thing you should do is migrating
your email to Open Source technology, then deploying LDAP and switching all those funny backend
solutions. Your users won’t really notice, and the switching of those services will have little
affect on the productivity of your organisation. In fact, it will probably be quite easy.
But
no, let’s try to use Open Source software but authenticate with AD, connect your email client to
Exchange – causes you headache for sure. I was under the impression that those migration pilots are
not quite whole-hearted, which is a pity, since evaluating the Open Source desktop is not something
you will do every year. Once you get a bad impression (which is actually caused by protocols not
being open) OSS won’t get another chance for some years. If you do it, do it right at first.
First convert your communication protocols to something open to create equal chances, then have a
look at what does perform well and what doesn’t, then choose the best solution.
Harvard’s Jeffrey A. Kaplan presented the “Roadmap for Open ICT ecosystems” which
put the whole thing in a much broader context. A good read for decisionmakers.
Third interesting thing is that Maturity Models seem to be gaining more supporters, the term
could’ve been heard in about half of the presentations I attended. I’m interested in those maturity
models since I’m doing research on quality metrics for Open Source software (solutions).
Yesterday night, I found the time to finally fix a usability bug on my website, a far too
long “photo” menu which just dropped out of the bottom of everybody’s browser window. Hint: Do not
create menu entries automatically. Well, now I have categories of photo galleries, which should be reasonably easy to
handle for the next time. Also my wallpaper section
has gotten a major cleanup, now listing wallpapers in a nicer way than just Apache’s standard
directory listing.