Future proof your organisation with free software
A few days ago I was hoping to be able to listen to a Bermuda Parliament debate via the Hansard site.
I was actually unable to find a stream for the debates. Further enquiries revealed it does exist, but the streaming uses Microsoft's Silverlight.
This creates a problem, since Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight and it is no longer supported and does not work in many modern browsers.
This is a scenario that gets repeated over and over. In what follows, I will be using government as an example, but you could substitute organisation for government and the story is the same.
So here is a typical scenario:
- Government has a problem to solve, in this case streaming recordings of parliamentary debates.
- Government hires a consultant [1] to implement a solution:
- the consultant chooses the technology stack
- government workers lack time, resources and skills to understand the choices the consultant is making. This problem is exacerbated by outsourcing.
- The Consultant provides a solution with proprietary technologies. In many cases the consultant, not the government owns the software created for the project. The result is the government is locked into that consultant for support and dependent on proprietary software companies for support.
- Proprietary vendor drops support for the tech that was used. Result is unmaintainable websites that eventually have to be replaced. Everything is thrown out and the process is repeated.
In the free software world you get a different story:
- Government has a problem to solve, in this case streaming recordings of parliamentary debates.
- Government IT staff research free software solutions that will solve
the problem
- they look to see what others are using;
- they work with those in other government departments with similar problems;
- they pick some free software projects that solve the problem and that appear to be active and vibrant projects;
- the solution is implemented;
- any software written is released as a free software project.
In this scenario, the end result is something that can be supported not just by the government workers involved in the project, but actually anyone with access to the code, which is in fact everyone.
This includes enthusiasts in the local community, but also people worldwide that are working with the technology that is being used.
Instead of being tied to a single supplier, there is choice and hence a competitive market.
The software will generally be both free as in freedom and free as in cost. The money saved can be invested in developing local talent to support it.
Further money will be saved in the future due to not having to replace the system due to proprietary vendors stopping support. Sure the system will need maintenance and future development, but the government workers will have all the tools they need to do this.
The system will likely require lower cost hardware resource too.
Silverlight and Moonlight
The Silverlight story is an excellent example of this sort of problem.
Microsoft launched Silverlight with a great fanfare, whilst ignoring web standards such as HTML5 that provided very similar capabilities.
It integrated nicely with their .NET platform and they provided some good tools to help with development.
However, Silverlight failed to gain traction and by 2013 Microsoft announced they were discontinuing development, just six years after introducing the technology.
Security and proprietary frameworks
This never ending stream of proprietary technologies, each supposedly better than the previous technology, that is no longer supported, creates serious computer security issues.
Many government websites here in Bermuda use Adobe Flash or Silverlight. The latter is no longer supported, the former has very patchy support.
In any case, government sites using Flash depend on ancient versions that are likely riddled with security holes, yet impossible to support. Further, they simply do not work in modern browsers.
Free software greatly reduces this problem: since the software comes with freedom, those using it have everything they need to support it.
Upgrades are done only as and when significant improvements are made, not on some corporation's timetable, designed to generate revenue for that corporation.
Mono
Silverlight is built on top of Microsoft's .NET framework. .NET is interesting technology, but in many ways not fundamentally different to Java.
The free software community has always been wary of .NET. There is a project called "mono" that is a free implementation of .NET. There were concerns that mono infringes some Microsoft, might use those patents to attack mono.
In fact, this has not happened and recently Microsoft has released a number of .NET related tools as open source, but there is still some wariness about mono. I believe it does have a significant role to play in helping Microsoft shops migrate to free software.
When Silverlight was announced the Mono team started the Moonlight project, a free implementation of silverlight.
The project was abandonned in 2012 after poor adoption of Silverlight and very few sites that use Silverlight work under Moonlight.
The result is that people who used Silverlight are left with an expensive mess.
It is also interesting to read the criticisms of Silverlight in the wikipedia article. Note that many of these criticisms come from companies like Adobe, who were probably more motivated by protecting their ancient Flash technology.
Footnotes
| [1] |
I say consultant but it could be any vendor offering a solution. I don't mean to bash consultants, there are some excellent ones out there, I am planning to be one myself. Consultant's work pattern should be to come to an organisation, empower them to solve their own problem and leave them with all the resources they need to continue to maintain and develop that solution. In short, "get in, solve the problem, empower the organisation, get out". Too often the "empower the organisation" bit is skipped since by not doing that the consultant creates future opportunities for themselves. |