A Ridge Between

Open Source: Why it is good for your business and our government

2012-01-18T07:32:00.000-08:00

I just saw an article on the Business Daily which prompted me to put this article on my blog.

Open Source: Why it is good for your business and our government

When looking at software purchases, one might ask questions like: How much does it cost? How many clients can legally be connected simultaneously? Can I use it on my server, desktop and laptop systems without paying extra? Those questions will become a thing of the past, as Open Source permeates the global computing arenas making licenses irrelevant.

The “open-source” process describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials--typically, their source code. Open source software, is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or license fees. This means that when your IT guy gives you a copy of the organization's open source software or installs it for you on your home personal computer, your company or your employee has not contravened any copyright law. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies such as IBM, HP, Novell, Oracle and Sun.

The advantages of open source relate to cost and not locking your company into proprietary systems from which there is no easy escape, even if the company should require an escape due to support issues.

But open source doesn't take away commercial aspects of software. Indeed, open source software is quite consistent with capitalism; it increases wealth without violating principles of property ownership or free will. I too believe in strong intellectual-property rights. I believe any programmer has the same fundamental right as any other producer to `hoard' and sell the fruits of his/her labor on whatever terms the market will bear. While I choose to advocate for open-source software, I would never condemn others for choosing differently.

Before you commit to the adoption of open source, Critical Thinking 101 mandates that you ask the question, "Why?" Open source has impact not just for developers and in-house IT managers, but also potentially for every person throughout the value chain of an organization from management to knowledge workers to suppliers, customers, and partners.

By and large, the effects of open source are advantageous with benefits ranging from lower costs to simplified management to superior software.

Open source solutions incur lower software costs as they generally require no licensing fees. The logical extension is no maintenance fees. The only expenditures are for media, documentation, and support. As such, simplified license management. Obtain the software once and install it as many times and in as many locations as you need with no need to count, track, or monitor for license compliance.

Also, in general, Linux and open source solutions are elegantly compact and portable, and as a result require less hardware power to accomplish the same tasks as on conventional servers (Windows, Solaris) or workstations. The result is you can get by with less expensive or older hardware and this provides for lower hardware costs.

The solutions too exhibit enormous scaling and consolidation potential. Multiple options for load balancing, clustering, and open source applications, such as database and email, give organizations the ability to scale up for new growth or consolidate to do more with less. A software investment for an organization with 100 stations will serve one with 10,000 stations satisfactorily. There is not such things as per-user, per-machine, per-CPU (for multiprocessor systems), per-concurrent-user, or site licensing within the open source context.

Ample support is available for open source and is often superior to proprietary solutions. First, open source support is freely available and accessible through the online community via the Internet. And second, many tech companies are supporting open source with multiple levels of traditional paid support.

Training is also available. For example, certification courses and integrated training programs are coming from every major training vendor such as Redhat and Novell.

If your fear is that open source is not secure as the code is available, so anyone can figure out how to break it, then sample this. There are over 60,000 viruses known for Windows, 40 or so for the Macintosh, about 5 for commercial Unix versions, and perhaps 40 for Linux. Most of the Windows viruses are not important, but many hundreds have caused widespread damage. Two or three of the Macintosh viruses were widespread enough to be of importance. None of the Unix or Linux viruses became widespread - most were confined to the laboratory.

Because Linux and many open source tools are under constant peer review by a community of contributers, any weaknesses can be addressed and dealt with. That's the beauty of Open Source - fresh minds are in abundance to deal with any issues. The peer review process and community standards, plus the fact that source code is out there for the world to see, tend to drive excellence in design and efficiency in coding. Also, the modularity required for distributed development of Linux and open source also contributes to security with tight, function-specific, and isolated code segments. The reality is that with Windows, the problem isn't the skill of hackers, it's the slopping coding that opens the their supposedly closed doors to the Trojan Horse. Its all about the power of openness.

Because of openness, open source initiatives often lead to the establishment of industry standards. The lesson of the Web is that standardization is better than differentiation. As the past decade has shown, standardization with a proprietary flavor has its drawbacks: bloatware, security loopholes, eye-popping license fees and an unsettling reliance upon a single vendor.

Today, many of the leading global software tech companies will tell you how much they benefited from open source software and for this reason, they support continous development and growth of open source. Think Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Intel and many others. See a list on http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and advances Linux by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community to ensure Linux remains free and technically advanced.

Across the globe, governments are turning to open-source software which, unlike proprietary software, allows users to inspect, modify and freely redistribute its underlying programming instructions. Scores of national and state governments have drafted legislation calling for open-source software to be given preferential treatment in procurement. Brazil, for instance, has recommended that all its government agencies and state enterprises use open source. China has been working on a local version of Linux for years, on the grounds of national self-sufficiency, security and to avoid being too dependent on a single foreign supplier. Politicians in India have called on its vast army of programmers to develop open-source products for the same reasons. See it for yourself on the Internet, open source is big!

Why all the fuss? Modern private and public institutions generate a vast number of digital files. From client accounts, emails, birth certificates, tax returns to criminal DNA records, the documents must be retrievable in perpetuity. So governments are reluctant to store official records in the proprietary formats of commercial-software vendors. This concern will only increase as e-government services, such as filing a tax return or applying for a driving licence online, gain momentum. In Microsoft's case, security flaws in its software, such as those exploited by the LoveLetter, Blaster and SoBig viruses, are also a cause of increasing concern.

Software's transparency increases security because “backdoors” used by hackers can be exposed and programmers can root out bugs from the code. The open-source model of openness and collaboration has produced some excellent software that is every bit the equal of commercial, closed-source products. And, of course, there is no risk of being locked in to a single vendor.

When a government opts for a particular technology, the citizens and businesses that deal with it often have to fall into line. If our government opts for open-source software, three groups stand to benefit: consultancy firms and systems integrators, who will be called in to devise and install alternative products; firms which sell Linux-based products and services; and numerous small, local technology firms that can tailor open-source products for government and businesses.

The computer industry has certainly had shifts. Companies switched from mainframes to networked PCs when they become more cost effective. They switched from DOS to Windows applications when they discovered advantages in the Windows platform. When the Internet became widespread, many processes changed. These shifts involved changing the software people used and the way they thought about their needs.

The future is going open source especially on the cloud!

Dorcas Muthoni, muthoni@openworld.co.ke

Founder and CEO, OPENWORLD LTD

Women and Burdens, The Day Turkish Women Beat Gîkûyû Women

2007-11-09T06:45:00.001-08:00

Oh come on!!! I just had to bring this to my blog. I found this picture of Turkish women struggling with burdens on their backs and i said to myself, atumia! (women in Gîkûyû), we have been beaten here.

Turkish women struggle with heavy burdens as they walk to their homes in Sirnak province near the border with Iraq. >>

A while back i came across this page; Freeloading African Women, read Gîkûyû women and i thought we were on top of things when it came to burdens.

¨The burden might be wood, corn kernels, corn meal, vegetables, live animals, water, or cooking oil, but it is bound to be heavy, and it is usually suspended behind their backs, supported by a strap which runs across their foreheads The Gîkûyû females are known to carry up to 70% of body mass with their head bindings: if this does not impress you, feel free to place a barbell or large stone equal to 70% of your weight on top of your head - and then attempt to walk in a relaxed and carefree manner for 10 kilometres or so, as the Gîkûyû women often do!
¨
Away from localization, i found this pic and thought, Waooooh, you mean we have stronger backs out there!

Considering desert margins occupy about 54.4% of the land area of Turkey, the women must be quite ¨freeloading¨

Gîkûyû Locale

2007-11-08T01:49:00.000-08:00

I want to start a small project on a Gîkûyû locale. Would be glad to here if anyone has created this before or can refer me to one.

A Locale is a set of parameters that defines the user's language, country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface.

Related links:

We Are Loosing Our Local Languages

2007-11-02T06:16:00.000-07:00

You will agree with me that most youth have dilute versions of their mother tongue languages. Our local languages are even more threatened today with digitization as almost all information gets recorded or stored in English. Further, while i was taught Gîkûyû at home, i have not taught anyone this language and i am not very confident that i can do this very well.

Of course languages keep developing and this is carried on from generation to generation. So what is happening is that we are loosing our local languages because instead of enriching them, the languages are getting diluted. Its is very common today to find young children learning French through the parent´s efforts than it is to find them learning Gîkûyû for that matter. I associate oneś mother tongue with identity and thats one reason i would like to support my language.

I was searching for a comprehensive Gîkûyû dictionary through the net but i did not come across any. For this i am almost certain that i cannot find a English-Gîkûyû dictionary, Gîkûyû-English dictonary or a Gîkûyû technology glossary.

I just read that i can find a English-Gîkûyû dictionary in local book stores, i will endeavor to check. I hope to start a small project towards ensuring that the rich Gîkûyû is not lost as generations pass. I urge others to support all other local languages.

Keep checking..

Innovation

2007-10-25T01:39:00.000-07:00

Innovation stirs me. Innovation can take many forms, review this page.

This morning i woke up to some interesting news. I love technology business news. M$ buys 1.6% stake in Facebook

The stake price of $240 million, should be more than enough to pay for Facebook's ambitious expansion plans until the privately held company goes public.

Facebook is an innovative online social networking site born in a university dorm room by Mark Zuckerberg.

I grapple with many ideas and i think its the high time i analyzed the success stories of some of these technological concepts of innovation. Its only fair to learn from those who have succeeded. One point though is that there are lots of chances for this in Africa.

I personally feel that this will best happen with respect to the widespread use of mobile devices especially the phone. Anyone thinking about services on the mobile platform should probably pay keen attention to the OpenMoko GNU / Linux based open software development platform.

Innovations round the web and mobile platforms are a sure bet for success. Of course two questions that any innovation will need to answer is relevance and adaptability and you are sure to win. That is where great challenges will emanate at the same time great success stories depending.

Lets explore and see how our ideas qualify... happy innovation

As I Started Out

2007-10-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

Today is 10th October 2007 and in Kenya this is a public holiday. I was just going through my mails and i get this email that said ´Using Blogs To Attract Attention (Without Having Your Own)´.

I was recently chatting with my lawyer and he said to me, come on, ¨get yourself a blog¨. I gave it a thought and concluded there was no good reason not to start one.

Now these two incidents led me to blogspot.com and immediately started creating one. I spend at least 15 hours daily on the Internet and kept postponing this action but i guess i will have a great way to remember this public holiday.

Getting a name for my blog was not easy. I tried a few English names that i liked but were not available. Then i rushed to one of my shelves and retrieved a title ¨1000 Kikuyu Proverbs¨, got a few ideas but only Google could sort me out. I looked up for a Gîkûyû glossary and found one that worked.

So what is rugongo, rugongo is a Gîkûyû term meaning ¨A ridge lying between two rivers in Gîkûyû country. Ridges were often formally recognized territorial units sharing similar social obligations.¨

I feel a bit odd at this point, i am a Gîkûyû/Kikuyu and had lots of trouble getting an id for my blog in my mother tongue. Now i hope to use this blog to discuss my thoughts and promote this language which is extremely rich. Only through this can i better my now very diluted Gîkûyû..

Time to break now as i find out over the days how well i can keep up on this journey.. I have heard

¨Having your own blog is hard work. Not only do you have to create it, but you also have to market it. People won't read it otherwise. And that's partially why 60% of bloggers have not updated their blogs in the last 60 days. They often don't properly market their blog and they end up talking to themselves. T.... BY: Elge Premeau¨