Thoughts on maps, clean energy & docs, sometimes with an Australian accent.
Focus on this next release will be on improved Quality and Translating documentation.
Could each project please tell us which version is intended to be included. Status is maintained here. Understanding what will, or will not change helps us coordinate reviewers and testers. We will be building from the Xubuntu 10.04 base, which is the same as last release.
If you have a established, stable project which you would like included on OSGeo-Live, then please talk to us about it.
In order to ensure consistency and reduce disk space used, we ask that, where appropriate, examples use the common Natural Earth dataset, as explained here.
We expect to have main pages, Project Overviews and possibly OGC Standard Overviews translated into multiple languages for this next release. People have already translated much of the documentation into German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Greek.
Could all projects please update your English Project Overviews as soon as you can to give translators enough time to translate.
Please contact us if you are able to help with translation, or would like to translate a new language. The process is described here.
Half the packaged projects had Quick Starts written for the last release (4.0) and we'd like to see Quick Starts for all projects for the next release. One of our users has volunteered to review Quick Starts for usability and help projects capture screen grabs. This is a big job and we'd like to hear from anyone else who'd can help out.
Again, could projects please update Quick Starts early to allow time for review and screen grabs.
With ~ 50 applications to be packaged on the next OSGeo-Live, our core OSGeo-Live team have not had time to run all the Quickstart applications. We would really like some help. If you have very little experience with OSGeo software, then all the better, as you would be like a typical first time user of OSGeo-Live.
Running this user testing is one of the best ways to become familiar with the breath of OSGeo Software available. If interested, please join the OSGeo List, and start running Quick Starts as soon as they have been completed by projects.
The OGC have already written one page overviews for half the OGC standards and have committed to writing up the remaining standards for then next release. We will be calling on the standards community to help review these standards to ensure they are accurate, clear and understandable.
... full schedule
OSGeo-live is an XUbuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and soon to be released USB. You can use OSGeo-Live to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.
Website: http://live.osgeo.org
Mailing List: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo
or contact Cameron Shorter directly at: cameronD O TshorterATlisasoftD O Tcom.
Public sector consumers of software have an obligation to support interoperability, transparency and flexibility, as well as economical use of public funds. When it comes to public procurement, the principles applied to the public sector require them to support (and certainly not to harm) competition through their procurement practices.
Studies have shown that in practice, much software procurement discriminates between individual vendors, typically in favour of specific proprietary software companies. E.g. OpenForum Europe, 2008. "OFE Monitoring Report: Discrimination in Public Procurement Procedures for Computer Software in the EU Member States", December. Ghosh, R. A. 2005. "An Economic Basis for Open Standards". FLOSSPOLS project, European Commission.
While precise figures for the European public sector are not available, it is worth noting that the share of proprietary packaged software in European software spending is only 19%. Much more is spent on custom built software (52%) and internal software development (29%).
Note that compatibility with previously purchased IT solutions may seem like a very valid technical requirement, but can also be a way of perpetuating the consequences of previous purchasing decisions, perpetuating vendor lock-in and preventing an unbiased procurement based on real organisational needs. Requirements for compatibility with open standards and no proprietary elements, i.e. full compatibility across multiple vendors and producers, increases the freedom of future procurement choices.
Freed from the obligation of the short term financial cycles of the private sector, public organisations are also obliged to maximise costs effectiveness over the very long term. However, with limited, short-term budget cycles, they need to find a good balance between limiting the initial investments and limiting the overall, long term cost.
The exit cost is also an important consideration: the cost incurred in migrating to another IT system, which should properly be accounted for as a cost not of the new system being migrated to, but the old system being migrated from. After all, if the old system were based on open standards, migration would not be as expensive, thus the cost of migration is imposed by the current, old system.
Software is used to create documents, databases and customised applications that, in the public sector, have a life-time that may be well beyond the originally announced life-time of the procurement procedure for the software. If the software originally purchased makes it difficult to use the documents, databanks and customised applications with similar software from other producers, then there is a high cost in terms of changing from the original software to another software - the exit cost.
Buying new software because it is compatible with previously purchased software may seem to save on migration and training costs. But when this software is proprietary, and is not fully based on protocols and standards that are fully and freely supported by other independent vendors, exit costs and associated costs may greatly increase over the long term. The agency's dependence on the proprietary vendor is increased. Thus the apparent short term benefit of compatibility is much reduced when considered over the longer term.
Total Costs of Ownership (TCO) is a term often cited in relation to software purchases. However, there are several different methodologies, and few include all the long-term costs involved in software purchases, such as the costs of required regular upgrades, or the exit cost of Guideline on Public Procurement of Open Source Software P. 31 migrating to another software. It is therefore difficult to use TCO studies, or even compare them. Furthermore, such studies rarely evaluate anything other than quantifiable costs; the benefits of flexibility, independence and transparency while essential to a public organisation, may be qualitative and hard to quantify. Thus, it is advisable to analyse costs and benefits for the needs of the public organisation concerned, over the long term, rather than relying on TCO studies.
A number of EU funded research projects are examining open source quality metrics, such as QUALOSS and SQO-OSS (www.qualoss.org; www.sqo-oss.eu)
The main justification for financial sustainability criteria for software is to ensure that the supplier will be able to provide support as long as the software is being used. With open source, the availability of the source code assures interoperability, and there is no dependence on the original supplier. If the original supplier goes out of business, the software can still be maintained by others; if others are not maintaining the software, the public agency can hire a third party maintainer. This increased sustainability of open source is justification for lowering the financial sustainability requirements, or lowering their weight in the selection process for tenders for open source software.
Public agencies can also provide indirect support for the development community, by asking tenderers for open source software or services to demonstrate their level of contribution to the appropriate developer community - as part of the selection process, and/or as part of the execution of the contract. In any case, this may be a useful way of determining level of knowledge of the open source software and its community available with the tenderer.
At the recent Open Source Asia/Pacific conference, I presented on the tricky subject of "How to sell Open Source Software to Government", which can equally be read as "What logic can I use to convince my boss that installing Open Source is a good idea?".
The presentation is recorded on this 25 minute video and the script is copied below.
"Selling Open Source to Government"
In 2005 the Australian Government published guidelines describing how to buy Open Source Software.
Despite the potential benefits, however, government uptake of open source is surprisingly low.
Why is that? Well that is what I'll be speaking about today.
Hi, my name is Cameron Shorter, and I'm the GeoSpatial Business Development Manager at LISAsoft.
At LISAsoft we have carved a niche for ourself by being experts in all things GeoSpatial,
and we do all this locally, here in Australia and New Zealand, and it is worth noting that being local is an advantage for us Open Source companies.
Like many of our staff at LISAsoft, I've been involved in a number of Open Source projects, and led few of them. Most recently, we have been involved in the collaborative development of a LiveDVD containing 42 preconfigured GeoSpatial Open Source Applications along with associated marketing material, and we have been using this DVD at conferences around the world to promote our Open Source applications.
Now, before we can define a formula for success, we need to understand the challenges we face convincing Governments to buy Open Source.
We need to be clear about the value of Open Source, and how to effectively measure that value. Once we know how to communicate the value we can then help government purchasers include selection criteria which foster the growth of these collaborative technologies.
And of course, I'm talk about what we as an industry can do to make our Open Source offerings more attractive to government.
Lets start with what governments look for:
At the root of government accountability is the need to address the Triple bottom line.
This translates down to project selection criteria based around:
So now lets ask what is so great about Open Source.
So far, I probably haven't told you much that you don't already know.
What we need to do now, is explain these strengths of Open Source in government purchasing terms, and introduce practical steps to promote Open Source Software.
Lets start by looking at one of the dark sides of proprietary selling. Namely Vendor dependence, or vendor lock in.
If an agency moulds its business processes around one product, and integrates key applications around the proprietary interfaces to this same product, then the agency becomes dependant upon this product.
This is called vendor lock in, and any government purchaser who has any grey will be able to cite examples of how they have been burnt by vendors who have forced them to pay increased licence fees, or have had forced upgrade cycles, are who have been left hanging with an unsupported product which the vendor has deemed to have reached end-of-life.
The key solution to avoiding vendor lock-in is to build applications upon Open Standards and this is an easy sell to government. Most agencies will support the use of Open Standards, as they see standards as key to reducing medium to long term risk of their projects.
Different sectors have reached different levels of maturity for standards. Our GeoSpatial sector have developed some very mature and widely adopted standards and this has been valuable for creating opportunities for Open Source.
Because once you break the proprietary silos, it then makes economic sense to replace components of the silo, bit by bit, with Open Source equivalents.
So lesson number 1:
Promote the value of Open Standards for reducing vendor lock-in, and hence for reducing long term project risk.
Also, ensure that your Open Source applications are standards compliant.
Now lets talk about some the standard gripes that people have with Open Source.
I'm sure that many of you have heard comments like:
"I like the idea of Open Source, but what other government agencies are actually using these same applications you're recommending to me?"
or
"We've thought about Open Source, but who do we call, who can we blame, when things go wrong?"
You see, only alpha-geeks purchase software, everyone else purchases products.
And in particular, governments purchase products. Because in order for software to be valuable, it need to address all the implementation and risk requirements that purchasers are looking for:
These include:
And that brings us to lesson number 2:
We in the Open Source industry need to sell products not software.
If you want government to deploy your favourite Open Source application, make sure there is an established company providing commercial support and training for the software. Presenting at this conference are many of the vendors who provide Open Source products, and also something that we at LISAsoft are launching for the GeoSpatial sector.
Now so far, I've been talking about Open Source applications as if you can take them out of the box and they will work straight away. Sort of like Microsoft Word, or the Open Office suite. And while some applications do fit into that category, most large government purchases require require non trivial customisation in order get new applications to integrate with existing systems. And that is what us Systems Integrators get involved in.
In this systems integration market, emerging Open Source applications are typically pitted against established proprietary applications. Usually both Open Source and Proprietary proposals need to develop new functionality to meet project requirements.
And this is where we it is very important for governments to get project selection criteria right, if they wish to give Open Source a fair chance during selection.
As mentioned earlier, Open Source is free once developed, so Open Source developers need to cover development costs up front. Proprietary vendors can charge less up front, then charge an expensive maintenance fee afterwards.
So lesson 3 is:
Ensure that purchasers evaluate the cost of the project over 5 or more years.
Next, we have already discussed the risk associated with a project being dependant upon an application. Purchasers should consider the full lifecycle of the project, including end-of-life. What will happen if the vendor stops supporting this application, or decides to apply unacceptable licence costs?
Of course, Open Source has an excellent story for these questions. Firstly, licence costs are free, so a stable old application can keep on working in the background without any licence fees required.
Second, governments can change their support company without changing their software. And this keeps the support companies honest.
Third, if my support company goes out of business, there is no licence restrictions to stop me going and hiring another company.
Fourth, your Open Source application is probably standards compliant, so you should be able to replace it with another standards compliant product.
So this brings us to Lesson 4:
Encourage purchasers to consider exit costs when they purchase software.
The next huge benefit of free software, is that once written, it can be used by, and benefit, many more communities than just the sponsoring agency. This is particularly pertinent to government which has thousands of government departments.
An Open Source application developed by one government department, will likely be of benefit to many other government departments. And the application will also likely be valuable to community groups that the government represents.
So Lesson 5 is that governments should assess the value of their purchases against the needs of the whole community, not just against the needs of the particular agency. If this one criteria were widely adopted by government, I predict that the majority of applications purchased by government would be Open Source.
And this is probably where we in the industry can help the most. You see, the Open Source industry is excellent at collaboration. Collaboration, and sharing your workload with external developers is exactly what makes Open Source so successful.
So Lesson 6 is to help governments find like minded agencies who would all benefit from the Open Source solution. At LISAsoft, we have been quite successful with this approach, partly because government agencies are already quite familiar with collaborating with each other to share development of proprietary solutions.
But if we limit our collaboration to just working with organisations that we can engage before we start a project, then we miss the core success factor of Open Source. Namely, if you have useful software, and you give it away as Open Source, then others will use and improve the software, and you, original sponsor, will benefit from these enhancements.
This core principle has been well understood for 20 years or so, and is basis for almost all successful Open Source projects, so why is it that Governments don't use it?
Basically, it comes down to the fact governments do not have the tools to assess the potential value of collaborative opportunities.
Governments need to make use of "Opportunity Management" to assess the value of collaboration.
"Opportunity Management" is the same as "Risk Management" but with the numbers reversed. Instead of identifying what could possibly go wrong, and then applying mitigation strategies to reduce the chance of the things going wrong, with "Opportunity Management", you identify what could possibly go right, and then deploy enablement strategies to give the Opportunity every chance of success.
For instance, I've about to build a super-duper widget which will be useful for governments and communities around world. I expect that if I spend an extra $20,000 Open Sourcing this application, then there is a 90% chance that some of these potential users will join my development team, and extend the application, adding another $300,000 worth of valuable.
So this brings us through to Lesson number 7:
When proposing a Collaborative Opportunity like Open Source, be sure to spell out the value in financial terms using "Opportunity Management".
Of course, Open Source is just one of the uses of collaboration in successful web based businesses.
Tim O'Reilly defined the key design patterns for a successful web business and called it web 2.0. Tim's Web 2.0 defines such things things as crowd sourcing information from your users in order to significantly reduce the cost of collecting and maintaining data.
Now the Australian government has actually been absorbing the lessons of Web 2.0 into government thinking, which they have coined Gov 2.0, and I understand that we will be hearing more about this from Pia this afternoon.
This Gov 2.0 has a focus on taking the collaborative and participatory practices into government in order to make governments more effective at engaging the community.
And this is good news for us in Open Source, because it is legitimising the value of collaborative technologies like Open Source, which makes it easier for us to sell Open Source right across Government.
As discussed earlier, Open Source changes the monetisation points in the sales cycle. Instead of paying a large company for software licences, which is then used to support an overseas software development team, you instead pay local developers and systems integrators to provide support and customisation.
And this takes us to lesson 8. Governments usually wish to promote local industry, and by promoting Open Source, they will also be advantaging the local software industry.
Even Leybourn explained another variant on this message in an earlier presentation, noting that in the business intelligence domain, it is more important to invest in people than in technology, which is one of the reasons why he prefers to use Open Source Software, and use the saved licence fees to invest in a better quality team.
So in Summary,
Version 4.0 of the OSGeo Live GIS software collection has been released, along with a "teaser" 25 minute video describing the 42 contributing GeoSpatial Open Source applications.
Jody Garnett will be providing a much better, more detailed, 90 minute presentation at the start of FOSS4G next week. Don't miss it!
OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux that is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software. The applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from the DVD or USB drive.
“We are happy to work with OSGeo to meet the needs of open source developers,” explained Steven Ramage, Executive Director, Marketing and Communications, OGC, “because wider use of OGC standards increases interoperability, innovation and market growth, and this benefits developers and users of both open source and proprietary software.”
“OGC standards underpin our GeoSpatial Open Source applications, and hence OGC documentation will greatly enhance the Open Source documentation being developed.”
So please ensure that all install scripts are pointing at the latest stable software, and if you wish to see your favorite stable OSGeo application on OSGeo-Live, then contact us right now.
This year, OSGeo-Live will be even sexier, more useful and professional by including:
We want to hear from:
..more
This article was published in the June 2010 edition of Position Magazine.
The two key organisations leading the development of geospatial standards internationally—the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee on Geographic information/Geomatics (ISO/TC211)—will be holding their Technical Meetings in Australia in November and December 2010.
This is the first time for over 10 years these two organisations are meeting in the same location, and it is also the first time that OGC Technical Committee has met in Australia. This is in recognition of Australia’s role in contributing to International Standard’s development and the leadership shown in promoting the adoption of these standards.
ISO/TC211 and OGC have developed a range of standards to advance geospatial interoperability, enabling spatial data and information to interact with relevant services and also to interact with other business processes in a seamless and integrated manner. In Australia, the application of these standards is essential in developing such capabilities as national water accounting, the Australian and New Zealand Spatial Marketplace and numerous other government and commercial capabilities.
Any user of spatial capability benefits from the ISO and OGC standards in numerous ways and as an early adopter of many of these standards, Australian organisations have developed considerable knowledge of these standards. Australia has played a role in developing these standards and can continue to play a significant role in their ongoing development. Australia’s influence in this area is acknowledged by both ISO and OGC through their holding of their critical technical meetings in Australia this year.
LISAsoft are proud to be one of Australia's key supporters of OGC standards development through our participation in OGC testbeds and standards writing projects, and welcome the International community to join us in Australia.
“Standards are the foundation of the spatial capabilities we use across government, commercial, research and education sectors. The concept of sharing spatial resources which is undertaken through standards-based interoperability technologies would not be possible without the efforts of ISO and OGC. Standards are usually well hidden from most users of spatial technologies, but it is essential that we understand the role they play and also that the Australian spatial community continues to actively support both their ongoing development and the adoption in our evolving systems. Australia is fortunate to be the location for these significant meetings and will hopefully take full advantage of having this body of knowledge in the country.”
Ben Searle General Manager
Australian Government Office of Spatial Data Management
OGC Technical Meeting
Sydney, 29 November – 3 December 2010
Contact: Dr David Lemon
ISO/TC211 Meeting
Canberra, 6–10 December 2010
Contact: Chris Body
From the Arramagong LiveDVD, you can try the best of GeoSpatial Open Source Software(OSS) without installing any applications on your computer. As a royalty free, reference release with fully tested and configured OSS stack, the LiveDVD is ideal for training, demonstration and public outreach.
The LiveDVD is based on XUbuntu 9.10 so it can be run on most computers simply by rebooting the computer with the DVD inserted. The Arramagong LiveDVD also comes with Windows and Macintosh installers for many of the GeoSpatial applications too.
Highlights from this 3.0 release include:
http://download.osgeo.org/livedvd
You can find more details about the project on our wiki at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc
Us packagers are keen to help projects make use of the next release of the Live DVD at this year's OSGeo FOSS4G conference, http://2010.foss4g.org. Can you use the Live DVD in your presentations, tutorials or workshops? Talk to us about it.
From the Live DVD, you can trial the best GeoSpatial Open Source Software without installing any applications on your computer. It is ideal for use in training courses and handing out to people wanting to try GeoSpatial Open Source for the first time.
We are looking for keen developers to help us improve our cross project infrastructure, in particular focusing on quality through the development of systematic testing processes. This will be a great opportunity for students who would like to gain a breath of knowledge across the GeoSpaital Open Source development stack.
More details at:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc_GSoC_2010
We are starting to build the 4.5 OSGeo-Live DVD and want to hear from all included projects, translators, packagers, users, testers or others who wish to help improve OSGeo-Live. OSGeo-Live 4.5 will be released mid March 2011, ready for a number of big GeoSpatial conferences soon after. 
