Innovation in Software

Last Sunday I trundled up to the local Apple store with company debit card in hand to grab a copy of OS X Leopard. I installed it that afternoon and have spent the last week on the road and at home living with it. I’ve now come to a conclusion:

Leopard is an excellent advertisement for switching to Ubuntu.

Seriously, it sucks. I’m not talking suckiness on a Windows Vista level, but compared to Tiger, it’s awful. Here’s some reasons.

Firstly, perhaps reasonably for a dot-zero release (but still annoyingly), it crashes and/or locks up quite often. In several years of using Panther and then Tiger, I don’t think I had to power-cycle my machine more than twice. I’ve done it five times this week. Sometimes when using an external keyboard on my Macbook Pro, the system “just forgets” it’s there and I’ll have to unplug the keyboard from USB and plug it in again, but sometimes nothing happens even then: Finder stops responding, the mouse stops moving, and then it’s time to hold down the power button for a few seconds and bring it back up.

Whilst we’re talking about peripherals, I grabbed myself a replacement Mighty Mouse whilst buying Leopard (note: the scroll ball clogs and breaks within months, you’ll be buying a lot of replacements for the improved productivity I accept it provides), this time a wireless version. This helped me discover that bluetooth support for mice in Leopard is rubbish. Whether’s it blued taking up 50%-60% of CPU for long stretches of time, to not being able to see the mouse at all on resume, it’s so bad it’s basically useless. I don’t think it’s reasonable load average should be > 0.7 just because I am moving my mouse around.

Then there’s the RAM issue. Sure, with each release of an OS you expect to see more RAM being gobbled up, but I swear, I’ve never seen an OS have a problem with 2Gb of RAM and six applications open, not even Windows. With Tiger I used to be able to do a lot more and have a lot more free space to move around in. Leopard swaps so hard in the same usage scenario that it reminds me of when I was using an iBook G4 with half a gig of RAM.

Let’s now move to the extra features Apple provide in Leopard.

I don’t care what people say, Safari 3.0 is not faster than Firefox – anybody who is saying so just isn’t doing any meaningful measurement. What’s more, Safari still doesn’t “get” the plugin thing, and on my system at least rendered pages like it was spitting out HTML in vomit-like chunks.

The other big upgrade, Mail, is more of a mixed bag. Whilst Mail.app version 3.0 fixes several bugs I had learned to “work around” in 2.0, it introduces a few more niggles. That’s not the big problem though. Quite frankly Mail.app 3.0 needs a stake driving through it’s cold dead heart for producing HTML e-mail that cruddy, insisting all “notes” have yellow ruled-line backgrounds and integrating with iCal as more of an after-thought than as a reasonable feature.

Spaces is worse than 3rd-party solutions I used wth Tiger in my opinion, and gobbles even more RAM – a scarce commodity as it is in Leopard-land.

I’ve not actually tried the new integrated back-up system, because I’ve heard that Time Machine breaks Leopard even more than Leopard does on its own time and you end up fighting reboot screens constantly. I’ll stick with SuperDuper and the odd s3sync

Meanwhile they’ve managed to make sure the Dock is harder to make sense of thanks to little, tiny, blue-ish orbs on a reflective background indicating app state instead of clear arrows. Whilst we’re down there, can somebody please tell me what good are Stacks given that they’re slow, only make sense in ‘grid mode’ and don’t help you find anything you don’t already roughly know the location of.

At least though, that’s a relatively sane way of finding files. Cover-flow in Finder is just slow and silly, although Finder in general is much better. I daren’t even go near Spotlight, fearing that I might accidentally send share prices in CPU fan and RAM manufacturers soaring.

Whilst we’re at it, can I just mention the integrated firewall isn’t a firewall apparently, so unless you’re comfortable with ipfw, you’re about as open as it’s possible to be.

I am not however a typical OS X user. I am a developer who approaches OS X as a Unix with a better GUI than X + your choice of window manager. Some people will be happy with Leopard, and won’t want the stability or flexibility I need. Many switching from Windows will find the random, sporadic instability perfectly normal behaviour. I do not.

For all my problems with Unix as a desktop in the past, after nearly 3 years away from that flock, Leopard has convinced me to start moving back to Open Source. This weekend I’m going to Bootcamp up and put a “proper” Unix on like FreeBSD or a GNU/Linux distro like Ubuntu. That will allow me to slowly transition my data and working environment over and keep OS X (and Windows w/parallels) available for development and testing work.

I’m sorry Apple, this time you blew it, and you blew it hard. I hoped Leopard was meant to be more than an eye-candy release, but ultimately it’s just worse than any other version of OS X. I’d recommend Panther over Leopard right now, never mind Tiger.

OK, so I’m having some fun with the title. This is Part III (the final part, you’ll be pleased to hear) of my write-up about the Open Schools Alliance even last week. Part I and Part II are worth a look if you just got here.

First up straight after the break was Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh. This particular Honourable Member is well-known to those of us on the open source side of the digital divide: he has a habit of asking what must be for the mandarins on the receiving end really annoying questions of the government about their IT procurement policies. He has a particular interest in IT in schools as he himself started out as a teacher, but in recent years has found an ally in Private Eye for his questioning in the House around the tax credits fiasco and other IT blunders.

He made the argument that the government is progressively getting worse at procurement in that it’s not learning from its mistakes. He argued that many within government departments are unaware of what open source is, are unaware of what it can do, or what it can save. The quote for me from this session was “whilst the government have a road building programme, they don’t argue roads must be built so that they may only accomodate Fords”.

It seemed to me though, that his real bugbear was open standards more than open source – it is the fact we’re producing systems that lock us into a vendor for a lifetime that is causing us problems.

We then moved into a panel discussion featuring John, Ian Lynch, Mark Taylor, Mike Partridge and our strawman for the day, Dr. Stephen Lucy of BECTA.

This discussion ultimately came down to panellists and the audience expressing dismay at BECTA’s attitude towards OSS, and how they were allowing for the propping up of what can be described as state aid of Microsoft. I was quite impressed by how Dr Lucy handled the situation, but was informed by another attendee later that this was characteristic of how he worked – he would attend these events and “play a dead bat” to the air of hostility. I can’t blame him, but BECTA are going to have to realise that it’s going to get worse unless they start looking at how to bring open source into the mix.

There are huge issues around OSS and IT procurement in general – probably more urgent in education than anywhere else – and it’ll be interesting to see the direction the Open Schools Alliance.

There needs to be a shift from centralised procurement to bottom-up organisation, but even with centralised projects like CLEO it has been shown OSS can provide amazing value for money. If BECTA were willing to play ball a little, who knows how much more great software we could see in classrooms over the next few years? As it is, it feels to me like a few senior players in BECTA are positioning themselves for consultancy positions in Microsoft and WebCT.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be interesting to watch, and I only hope that eventually parents and teachers see sense, and give the OSA all the support they need.

This is the second part of my write-up from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Part I is here

The second session was Deborah Murrell from CLEO who talked about trying to deploy Moodle to every school in Cumbria & Lancashire. Some schools have used Moodle as their primary web-site CMS, particularly primary schools. It’s an unintended consequence of giving them something to work with, I think.

In terms of success, whilst the pedagogical case for VLEs has yet to be proved (i.e., nobody knows if they really do help learning), this experiment looks as though it’s helping kids get access to resources even when at home. The areas they need help with are mostly around MIS integration, but part of that problem is that the most dominant provider of school management software is a commercial developer who considers open source a bizarre anachronism.

CLEO is planning on working around e-Portfolios and identity management in the future, so it looks like it could be an interesting experiment for a whole range of VLE-related areas, all possible thanks to the very open nature of Moodle.

Ian Lynch of INGOTs was up next, trying to get us all interested in his new qualifications. One of my bugbears around ECDL and similar qualifications right now is that they think the World revolves around Microsoft. Ian’s work is quite intriguing, but there is still a way to go before he can really underpin the notion of “lifelong learning” around open source in my opinion – the material he has available is still aimed very much at the schools market. Still, every journey starts with a step and I’m sure this is going to go places in time.

Mike Partridge of Stockport LEA stepped up to the plate next and made us ask questions about the nature of technology in the education system. He talked about how since the 1980s technology has led and education has had to play catch-up – he’s now interested in looking at ways that pedagogical frameworks can be embodied in the technology. He talked about social learning, individual learning styles, and independent discovery of skills.

In fact, if he wasn’t from the LEA, I could have easily assumed he was basically advocating Democratic Schooling. He is from the LEA though, so I think it’s more a case of trying to find a way to let teachers and students better understand each other.

GeekUp-regular Richard Smedley from M6-IT then talked about deploying open source systems into schools to the level of one per two children.

Some of the techniques he’s using are pretty innovative, such as recycling old hardware into thin clients to reduce financial needs. The figures he cited were pretty amazing as well – a fit-out that might have needed £100,000 using commercial software and brand new hardware, he was able to complete for £6,000 leaving enough cash lying in the school’s coffers for a building extension and a new part-time teacher.

It’s figures like that which are going to have a real political impact on open source in schools, and it was the politics of the situation we turned to after lunch, which we’ll get to in Part III.

I’m still catching up, but as promised, here are my notes from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Due to the length of my notes, I’m splitting this up into several parts to be posted over the next couple of days.

The Open Schools Alliance have a tricky balancing act to pull off. There appears to be a natural inclination towards giving what is effectively a monopoly to Microsoft in the education market, they have to lobby hard and loud. By doing so, they risk being labelled “religious zealots”, as indeed some have labelled them in the past. This event though was positioned as a way of making educationalists aware of the landscape of open source in schools and aimed to educate and inform rather than proselytise.

Well, that was until some people got stuck in during the afternoon panel session, but we’ll get to that in Part III.

Martin Douglamas, the founder of Moodle – the most developed and widely deployed of the open-source VLEs – was present and gave a run-down on the history and possible future of Moodle and its partners. The open-source business model they’ve adopted is pretty interesting: the code is owned by a trust that is sustained by donations and contract services, but partner organisations can get official recognition as long as they drop 10% of their profit around projects back into the trust. It’s like an open-source, anarchist (in the political sense) multi-national that works. It’s possible this is one future of open source economics.

Martin talked about the scalability of an open source model: 200+ developers which even commercial VLE providers would struggle to match with their exorbitant pricing models, and the relatively flat structure.

What really interested me though was the plans to introduce “community hubs” into Moodle. Teachers in schools in a given geography are likely to be teaching the same curriculum material in a similar style, yet they are all independently creating the same content. How best could you organise it so that once a module was in the system, it could be shared by all teachers teaching that module? The answer will be a hub where courses can be shared (or charged for) amongst a group of people with the ability to connect to that hub. Bottom-up hierarchies: you’ve got to love it.

So, I’m evaluating Wiki software, but figure I may as well look at what else is out there. I’m rather shocked to find that there are almost as many superfluous wiki codebases out there as there are CMS systems built in PHP and MySQL.

All that development effort to provide what is essentially the same tool, over and over again.

This is why open source struggles – duplication of effort actually wastes developer time AND user time – it leaves users struggling to decide which application is the right one. Not one of those wiki choices is so significantly different from the others that, on being given the source code, you couldn’t get it to have the features of all the others eventually.

If all we do is reinvent the wheel over and over again, we’re never going to get around to inventing the light-bulb. The whole purpose of a mature civilisation is that we don’t all need to learn how to do everything from the basic building blocks up over and over again. Open source is in need of getting some civilisation in place, I think.

This is one of the motivators behind the new Vagueware site – I want us to talk about what comes next, whereas most sites that help teams collaborate on software deal with what just happened or what is going on right now. I want to think about stuff that might be 2-3 years away, and start working out how to make it happen, what risks and rewards there might be, do we need it, are there ethical or legal considerations, is it even a good idea, etc., etc.

Or am I missing something? Is the abundance of choice and the lack of monoculture within OSS a strength that needs to be embraced and not admonished? Is treading water just the safe thing to do in a shark-filled pool?

In the last few weeks, as I’ve been firming up ideas for cashflow around Vagueware, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not entirely right to suggest this is about “Open Source Software” (OSS for short) and how it is delivered. Specifically, I need to drop that middle word.

Open Software is more than just source code. It’s about the design, documentation, support, and improvement of the product. It’s about saying “we own this” instead of saying “I own this, but you can use it”. I’m trying to work out ways of being able to make that mean something real, and for there to still be a cash-flow at the end of it all.

The services model is definitely one way forward, but I’ve also been thinking about an idea mentioned a few months ago where I allow sponsorship of features, documentation or other parts of projects at a small level.

It may be that the feature set I come up with for a project is all well and good for 99% of people, but if there was something missing for the other 1%, that group (or individual, even) could put some money in the pot to encourage its development. It might only be $10, but it’s $10 in the pot. Six months later somebody else comes along and decides they really need that feature too, and they add $50. We now have $60 in the pot, and if the feature is something that can be bitten off in less than an hour, it makes economic sense to just get it done. Of course other features might need thousands to make them economic, but allowing for lots of small donation, it’s more likely those features will get funded.

The idea of a code bounty is not new or original, but I’m wondering how best to structure it from day one and whether the bounties should be claimable by Vagueware alone, or whether to open it up to other developers and if by doing so I would be changing what my company is fundamentally about.

I really get a gut feeling that where I’m heading with this is new territory in some way, but that I’ve seen all the components elsewhere. Whenever I think about whether this is going to work – if I’m going to be able to make a living from this – I start getting a sick feeling in my stomach, and that’s how I know it’s worth trying.