'Til All Are One

I’ll be at linux​.conf​.au fly­ing the OLPC Aus­tralia flag. In addi­tion to giv­ing a talk, I have plans for a whole range of other things, includ­ing:

• run­ning a Birds of a Feather session
• host­ing a stand at Open Day
• con­trib­ut­ing XO-1.5s to win as door prizes

Any assist­ance you can offer is more than welcome!

That’s not all. On Fri­day we made our most sig­ni­fic­ant soft­ware release, XO-​​AU 10.1.3-au1.

This is an import­ant mile­stone for OLPC Aus­tralia. It is the first XO OS build inten­ded to be installed onto all XO-1.5s in Aus­tralia, includ­ing those in the field. XO-1.5s ordered from the fact­ory will have at least this build installed by default. Many improve­ments have been made to make the soft­ware more appro­pri­ate for Aus­tralian children.

If you want to be kept updated and take part in OLPC Aus­tralia tech­nical devel­op­ment, see our par­ti­cip­a­tion page.

We at OLPC Aus­tralia cel­eb­rated our first birth­day with a massive bang — a black-​​tie gala event held at the Museum of Con­tem­por­ary Art on Sydney Har­bour. It was a won­der­ful night of cel­eb­rat­ing Aus­tralian Indi­gen­ous art, music, cul­ture and food. Cor­por­ate spon­sors gen­er­ously donated to the cause.

Of spe­cial note was our key­note speaker. Prime Min­is­ter Kevin Rudd voiced his sup­port for our mis­sion, extend­ing deduct­ible gift recip­i­ent status to all dona­tions made to us. Also in attend­ance was the Assist­ant Treas­urer and other rep­res­ent­at­ives of state and fed­eral government.

Myself and other mem­bers of the OLPC Aus­tralia team were for­tu­nate enough to meet with Kevin before the offi­cial pro­ceed­ings com­menced. He took the time to con­verse indi­vidu­ally with each of us. I related my exper­i­ences in Dhal­inybuy, where every child has their own com­puter on the Inter­net. This ratio of 1:1 access is almost unheard of even in city schools. I was pleased to see one of our anec­dotes make it into his address, not very long after our conversation.

It’s an indes­crib­able feel­ing know­ing that you’re on the radar of the highest polit­ical office in the land. We are a small team and have a long way to go, but I firmly believe that we are on track to empower remote com­munit­ies across Australia.

I am writ­ing this from Dhal­inybuy School in remote Aus­tralia. What’s even more impress­ive is that I am typ­ing this on a production-​​model OLPC XO-1.5!

For those who don’t know yet, in March I star­ted full-​​time as the Tech­nical Co-​​ordinator at One Laptop per Child Aus­tralia. This basic­ally means that I man­age the tech­no­logy sur­round­ing the XO laptops, XS server and so on.

We are in East Arnhem Land, North­ern Ter­rit­ory, this week for OLPC deploy­ments, as well as train­ing in Yir­rkala School and the Yir­rkala Home­lands Learn­ing Centres (HLCs).

There are eight HLCs in all, spread over a wide area. The closest one is close to two hour’s drive away from Yir­rkala, almost entirely on dirt road. Yir­rkala itself is quite remote — about 13 hours drive (again, almost entirely on dirt) from Dar­win. It’s gen­er­ally easier to fly to these loc­a­tions (which takes at least four hops if you’re com­ing from Sydney), espe­cially right now as a trop­ical cyc­lone (which barely missed us a month ago when we were out this way) des­troyed many of the roads.

In col­lab­or­a­tion with the Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Sydney (UWS), and with some assist­ance from the North­ern Ter­rit­ory Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion and Train­ing (NTDET), we have formed teams and spread out over the eight HLCs to work with chil­dren, teach­ers, schools and communities.

I’ll have to go into my work at Yir­rkala School at a later time, but here at the HLCs we have man­aged some impress­ive feats, if I do say so myself! For instance:

• this is to the best of my know­ledge the world’s first deploy­ment of the new XO-1.5 devices, and we’re doing it across all eight HLCs at once
• chil­dren can write in their own lan­guage, as we installed Yolngu Matha fonts
• we have taught teach­ers and stu­dents to cre­ate their own e-​​books using Scratch, using pic­tures they take with the cam­era and con­tent we loaded onto the XOs beforehand

In addi­tion, I worked with Ian Cun­ning­ham from NTDET to pro­duce an inex­pens­ive and simple means to deploy wire­less access points to these remote com­munit­ies. These are Link­sys WRT-​​54GL devices flashed with DD-​​WRT. We con­figured each such that they will just work when plugged in. The HLCs that have satel­lite Inter­net can have their access points man­aged from any­where on the NT Schools network.

I left our setup to the UWS stu­dents (none of whom are tech­nical) on my team, and they were able to suc­cess­fully set up the access point and cre­ate a work­able area for the XOs to be charged.

Most of the HLCs have their elec­tri­city sup­plied entirely by local gen­er­at­ors, which are nor­mally rationed to run at night. Dhal­inybuy school has its own smal­ler gen­er­ator. This is enough for the basics, but insuf­fi­cient for the four desktop PCs that they have. Con­sequently, these com­puters are rarely used, and the teach­ers tell me that they are too dif­fi­cult to man­age any­way. Being bat­tery powered and far more power effi­cient, XOs are far more suitable.

We have suc­cess­fully deployed XOs to every school-​​age child in Dhal­inybuy. I’m still out here, so I don’t yet know the status of the other HLCs. I am, how­ever, con­fid­ent that they are oper­a­tional, given the ease at which we got things going here.

Through the access point, every XO (and hence every child) can col­lab­or­ate and share their activ­it­ies in Sugar. This also facil­it­ates an Inter­net con­nec­tion for all the XOs, through the NT Schools net­work. They are now open to a wider world of inform­a­tion and communication.

Yes, this is quite belated. I’ll explain why in a sub­sequent post.

linux​.conf​.au this year was in Wel­ling­ton, New Zea­l­and. It just keeps get­ting bet­ter! It’s always great meet­ing people you oth­er­wise only know online. I was espe­cially impressed by the OLPC NZ team.

Imme­di­ately fol­low­ing linux​.conf​.au, I jumped on a plane to Christ­ch­urch to embark on a week-​​long tour of the South Island. Long story short, it was the time of my life! I made some amaz­ing friends. I also saw and did incred­ible things, including:

• awe-​​inspiring views of gla­ciers, glacially-​​formed land­scapes, turquoise-​​coloured rivers and lakes, beau­ti­ful skies and more
• heli­hike: a heli­copter trip onto a gla­cier, then hik­ing on it
• a night on a boat on Mil­ford Sound, prob­ably the most beau­ti­ful place on Earth
• every extreme activ­ity I could get my hands on, including:
  • three bungy jumps (thril­logy combo): Kawa­rau Bridge (43 metres), Nevis (134m) and Ledge (47m)
  • two swings: two of the scar­i­est jump styles — Back­wards and Gimp Boy Goes to Hollywood
  • a 15,000ft sky­dive
  • the Triple Chal­lenge: a Shotover jet boat ride, fol­lowed by a heli­copter trans­fer to raft­ing on the Shotover river
    
  • a wil­der­ness safari along the Dart River, includ­ing walks through forests and a scenic jet boat ride

I have most of my pho­tos online now:

• 2010-​​01-​​24 New Zea­l­and hol­i­day, Day 1, pt 1
• 2010-​​01-​​24 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 1, pt 2
• 2010-​​01-​​25 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 2, pt 1
• 2010-​​01-​​25 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 2, pt 2
• 2010-​​01-​​26 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 3, pt 1
• 2010-​​01-​​26 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 3, pt 2
• 2010-​​01-​​26 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 3, pt 3
• 2010-​​01-​​27 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 4, pt 1
• 2010-​​01-​​27 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 4, pt 2
• 2010-​​01-​​27 New Zea­l­and Hol­i­day, Day 4, pt 3

I think what sur­prised me most was how adven­tur­ous I can be when I’m not in my ‘nat­ural hab­itat’. I’m not nor­mally a thrill­seeker at all, but in NZ I made the decision to take a hol­i­day from myself as well as from work and home. I even made a con­cer­ted effort to not touch com­puters at all. My phone was off­line for most of the trip (I was using it as a cam­era). I never thought that being cut-​​off could feel so liberating.

This is a follow-​​on from my last post, where I announced my can­did­acy for Linux Aus­tralia Coun­cil. I’ve pos­ted this to the linux-​​aus mail­ing list, but thought it wouldn’t hurt going here as it raises issues that I feel are fun­da­mental to Linux Australia’s existence.

I’m a can­did­ate for Ordin­ary Com­mit­tee Mem­ber (shouldn’t that be Ordin­ary Coun­cil Mem­ber now?). Before I repeat the spiel I made on the Elec­tions page, I’d like to talk about what I feel LA rep­res­ents in out com­munity. There’s the obvi­ous linux​.conf​.au, which proves year-​​after-​​year to be a world-​​class con­fer­ence. Linux Aus­tralia rep­res­ents the FOSS com­munity through­out Aus­tralia (and going by LCA2006, per­haps also New Zea­l­and in a way). It brings together the dis­par­ate groups through­out the country/​region and gives them one voice. The com­munity is thus able to be more influ­en­tial as whole.

This leads into my ori­ginal spiel, where I extoled the val­ues of scalab­il­ity in our com­munity. Through enhanced sup­port of grass-​​roots groups, Linux Aus­tralia will be able to grow the com­munity in a more sus­tain­able manner..

One pat­tern I dis­covered when examin­ing pre­vi­ous LA elec­tions is the low voter turnout. On most years the total num­ber (not per­cent­age) of votes was around 65–70. Why is this the case? Do we need to be doing more to engage the com­munity? Are we not well-​​known enough? Are we not trans­par­ent enough? These are issues that we should be addressing.

The Linux Aus­tralia Coun­cil elec­tions are in full swing, and I thought it only fair to abuse my blog to pimp my can­did­acy for an Ordin­ary Com­mit­tee Mem­ber pos­i­tion. You’re an LA mem­ber (it’s free!), drop in and exer­cise your demo­cratic right (i.e. vote for me :p ).

My offi­cial plat­form is as follows:

I have been par­ti­cip­at­ing in the FOSS com­munity for over ten years. I have man­aged Linux Australia’s pres­ences at CeBIT and the Edu­ca­tion Expo. I have also rep­res­en­ted LA at other events such as the Moodle Con­fer­ence in 2006, and was the lead video encoder at the A/​V Team at linux​.conf​.au 2007.

For the past two years I have been serving on the SLUG Com­mit­tee (includ­ing one term as Pres­id­ent), organ­ising most of its meet­ings in that time and run­ning events like Soft­ware Free­dom Day.

A key focus of my efforts in the com­munity over the past few years has been to foster co-​​operation between groups and con­trib­ut­ors. As an Linux Aus­tralia Coun­cil mem­ber, I feel that I would be even more effect­ive in this endeavour.

The won­der­ful thing about free soft­ware code devel­op­ment is that it can scale so well. I would like to see a sim­ilar level of scalab­il­ity with the wider com­munity out­side of the cod­ing realm. LA is uniquely posi­tioned to provide the resources and sup­port to enable com­munity mem­bers and groups to achieve great things. The bene­fits of this are many-​​fold:

• it makes it easier to engage, hence break­ing down sep­ar­a­tions between con­trib­ut­ors and users;
• it grows the com­munity of contributors;
• it allows us to do more and bet­ter things on the whole; and
• it aids to reduce depend­ence on a small group of act­ors, thereby address­ing the ever-​​present danger of burn-​​out amongst contributors.

We must remem­ber, how­ever, that the ‘com­munity’ is much lar­ger than the mem­ber­ship of LA and LUGs. I have come across many people who are inter­ested in some aspect of ‘Linux’ or ‘open source’ but know very little about LA or their local LUG. In many cases, their interests are more dir­ectly served by other groups, such as:

• industry asso­ci­ations (e.g. OSIA)
• lan­guage groups (Java, Python, etc.)
• other oper­at­ing sys­tems groups (OpenSol­aris, Mac OS, etc.)
• stand­ards bod­ies (IEEE, W3C, etc.)
• com­puter clubs
• groups devoted to a field (edu­ca­tion, embed­ded, etc.)

LA has a fant­astic com­munity, but in the grand scheme of things it is but one of many. I hope — in an offi­cial Linux Aus­tralia capa­city — to improve net­work­ing with these other organ­isa­tions to grow the over­all com­munity and extend the reach of free and open source soft­ware to more sec­tors of society.

Donna Ben­jamin roun­ded a small group of us together to write a let­ter to Julia Gil­lard, Deputy Prime Min­is­ter and Min­is­ter for Edu­ca­tion. The res­ult was widely syn­dic­ated, hope­fully build­ing some mind­share in the pro­cess. The Edu­ca­tion Expo proved to me more than any­thing else that FOSS is quickly becom­ing accept­able to the gen­eral pub­lic — the trick is in how you pro­mote it.

So where to from here? How can we cap­it­al­ise upon the gains we have made?

Per­haps our greatest single weak­ness is the per­ceived lack of pro­fes­sional sup­port. I think OSIA should be doing more to address this (note: I’m not imply­ing that OSIA isn’t tak­ing this ser­i­ously). Here’s an e-​​mail I wrote to the osia-​​discuss mail­ing list (which is unfor­tu­nately subscriber-​​only):

The best thing OSIA can do is fight the pop­u­lar notion that there’s no
pro­fes­sional sup­port avail­able for FOSS. We can beat the TCO and Free­dom
drums as hard as we want, but few organ­isa­tions are will­ing to entrust their
com­put­ing to ‘com­munity’ support.

I man­aged the Linux Aus­tralia stand at the Edu­ca­tion Expo a few weeks ago, and
my impres­sion is that FOSS is on the cusp of main­stream acceptance:

http://​www​.dhanap​a​lan​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​6​/​2​9​/​e​d​u​c​a​t​i​o​n​-​e​x​p​o​-​r​e​p​o​rt/

Schools are cry­ing out for ways to get bet­ter value for their dol­lar, but they
aren’t going to even think about FOSS if they can’t get pro­fes­sional support.

If I run the stand again next year, I’d like to see some involve­ment from
OSIA. At the very least, we should have avail­able some leaf­lets show­ing that
yes indeed there is qual­ity, paid sup­port for FOSS.

Also note that FOSS isn’t Linux. We got the most interest in the
OpenE­duca­tionDisc, a com­pil­a­tion of FOSS for Windows.

On the com­munity side, we can con­tinue to make FOSS more accept­able to school admin­is­tra­tions, bur­eau­crats and politi­cians. Here’s my idea:

My sug­ges­tion is for us to build a Web site focused on open edu­ca­tion in
Aus­tralia. We already have the per­fect vehicle: http://​opene​duca​tion​.org​.au.
How­ever, at present it’s just a messy wiki more suit­able for our own
brain­storm­ing than for being a public-​​facing resource.

The wiki should of course remain, but I pro­pose that we build a proper,
present­able Web site that is dir­ectly access­ible via the
http://​opene​duca​tion​.org​.au address.

Why do this when we already have http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion? Open Edu­ca­tion
is much big­ger than Linux, and cer­tainly should not be anchored to it. Here’s
a short list of what it can include:

• FOSS
• (GNU/)Linux OS — on servers
• (GNU/)Linux OS — on clients/​desktops
• open stand­ards
• open languages/​libraries/​APIs
• free content/​culture
• open learn­ing
• open cur­riculum

To be hon­est, I fear that we might be only hurt­ing ourselves by tying open
edu­ca­tion to a com­pletely Free com­put­ing envir­on­ment. That might be a worthy
aim, but few insti­tu­tions are going to switch over all in one go. By offer­ing
a migra­tion path (or paths), a school can migrate more com­fort­ably at its own
pace. We ought to be provid­ing real choice, not just a bin­ary ‘with us or
with the terrists’.

FOSS (Fire­fox, Open​Of​fice​.org, Scribus, etc.) can run on oper­at­ing sys­tems
other than Linux. To use the recent Edu­ca­tion Expo as an example, we got a
lot of buy-​​in through the OpenE­duca­tionDisc, a com­pil­a­tion of FOSS for
Windows.

Also note how I split Linux cli­ents from serv­ers. Linux’s place in the server
realm is very solid, but con­vin­cing an insti­tu­tion to accept a Linux cli­ent
solu­tion is tougher. And by ‘cli­ent’, I mean either tra­di­tional desktops or
thin cli­ents. The lat­ter are often cost-​​effective and rep­res­ent a real
strength of Linux, but are often over­looked or even have reg­u­la­tions work­ing
against their adop­tion. On the server side, we have some great edu­ca­tional
tools such as Moodle and LAMS.

Open stand­ards obvi­ously include things like file formats and pro­to­cols, which
will become even more rel­ev­ant as we see more applic­a­tions (pro­pri­et­ary or
oth­er­wise) pick up stand­ard­ised meth­ods of inform­a­tion exchange such as ODF
and PDF. This should also ease the integ­ra­tion of FOSS into pre-​​existing
envir­on­ments. It also can include lan­guages and all things related. Why are
schools still teach­ing Visual Basic when they could be teach­ing Python?

The final three points all link together. Most not­ably, they are not depend­ent
upon tech­no­logy at all. Your aver­age teacher isn’t a tech­no­lo­gist, and
shouldn’t have to be. Know­ledge can be shared and organ­ised openly just like
code. Wiki­pe­dia has proven that great things can be built if ordin­ary people
are given easy to use tools.

Where to from this point? I sug­gest that we work towards get­ting a CMS run­ning
at opene​duca​tion​.org​.au. We’ll have to agree upon a design and the mes­sage
that we want to pur­vey. Con­tent cre­ation should be sep­ar­ate from tech­nical
abil­ity, so the CMS should be simple enough for any­body to contribute.

Here is some inspir­a­tion from the UK:

• http://​www​.openschoolsal​li​ance​.org/
• http://​schoolforge​.org​.uk/

The UK edu­ca­tion sec­tor appears to be much fur­ther ahead of us in terms of
embra­cing open­ness, and I think we can take some les­sons from their efforts.

To cla­rify one thing in the above, I wrote the text for http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion, but I never felt com­fort­able with it being there. So much of open edu­ca­tion has noth­ing to do with Linux and Linux Aus­tralia shouldn’t be divert­ing its focus to dwell on it dir­ectly. With a more inde­pend­ent Web pres­ence (in col­lab­or­a­tion with Linux Aus­tralia), I feel that we can be much more effective.

LotD:   Open sourcing Aus­tralia: OpenAus​tralia​.org goes live

Two weeks ago, we had the Edu­ca­tion Expo.

Here’s my report, as co-​​ordinator of the Linux Aus­tralia stand:

Edu­ca­tion Expo
Sat 14 to Sun 15 June
Rose­hill Race­course, Sydney

The Edu­ca­tion Expo is an annual trades show tar­geted towards the K-​​12 edu­ca­tional space. Vis­it­ors con­sist of fam­il­ies and edu­cat­ors. Linux Aus­tralia once again had a stand, with volun­teers spread­ing the word about free and open source software.

As always, we were very suc­cess­ful. With each passing year, the level of aware­ness of FOSS notice­ably improves. Whereas at pre­vi­ous shows we would spend much energy expound­ing the basic con­cepts of FOSS/​Linux, this year most people had either heard of it or were already using FOSS products such as Fire­fox and Open​Of​fice​.org.

One thing we did dif­fer­ently this year was place more focus on FOSS run­ning on Win­dows. Our past efforts have been meet with some res­ist­ance, as installing a dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tem posed a bar­rier to entry that many would not sur­mount. We had plenty of cop­ies of the OpenE­duca­tionDisc to dis­trib­ute, in addi­tion to Fedora, Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Mandriva.

The fact that the NSW Dept of Edu­ca­tion is migrat­ing over 40,000 PCs across the state to Open​Of​fice​.org was a use­ful selling point as well.

Our mar­ket­ing efforts have been improv­ing with each event. Our mes­sage is becom­ing more refined, and our leaf­lets are becom­ing more rel­ev­ant. On the tech­nical side, FOSS is becom­ing easier and more access­ible, with pro­jects such the afore­men­tioned OpenE­duca­tionDisc and Wubi lead­ing the way.

Our Web pres­ence is improv­ing, too. It’s far easier to point a new­bie to just one easy-​​to-​​remember URL instead of con­fus­ing them with a list. In addi­tion, I built an edu­ca­tion portal for Linux Aus­tralia just in time for the expo.

There were at least two other stands that were FOSS-​​friendly. In fact, one of the largest stands were demon­strat­ing their Web-​​based soft­ware product on about ten com­puters, all of which were run­ning Ubuntu. Other stands expressed real interest when approached.

Other high­lights of our pres­ence included:

• OLPC XO laptops (from OLPC Aus­tralia)
• Intel Class­mate PCs (from Man­driva Australia)
• ASUS Eee PCs
• laptops show­ing Edubuntu

Rodger Dean has some pho­tos of the event.

A big thanks to every­one who helped at the stand:

• Ash­ley Lynn
• Ash­ley Maher
• Brendan Puck­eridge
• David Andresen
• Gloria Arnold
• Har­rison Conlin
• John Arnold
• Megha Kanth
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Vicki Burke

A spe­cial thank you goes to Melissa Draper, who was instru­mental in ensur­ing the suc­cess of the stand in more ways than one.

LotD: Insur­ance com­pany bets health on open source — I’m quite heav­ily involved in this pro­ject, so need­less to say I’m proud of what we’ve achieved

The Edu­ca­tion Expo is on this week­end. I’ve sent a couple of missives to our help­ers. The second one con­tains some advice that would work well in many situ­ations regard­ing FOSS (espe­cially where mar­ket­ing is con­cerned), so I’ll repro­duce it (slightly edited) here:

Sub­ject: Edu­ca­tion Expo, this week­end!
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:29
From: Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan <sridhar@​dhanapalan.​com>
To: SLUG Activ­it­ies <activities@​slug.​org.​au>

Thanks again to every­one who has volun­teered to help with the Linux Aus­tralia stand at the Edu­ca­tion Expo.

The expo itself runs from 9am to 4pm on Sat­urday and Sunday. Entry is free. It’s a fun day for fam­il­ies with chil­dren in the K-​​12 space, so feel free to bring along your kids and make a day (or two!) out of it.

This year, the expo will be held in Rose­hill Racecourse’s brand new Events Centre, and our stand is in a prime pos­i­tion right in front of the door. If you haven’t already, take a look at the ori­ginal announce­ment and the Edu­ca­tion Expo Web site.

I asked in my pre­vi­ous mes­sage if people could tell me when they would be avail­able to help out. If you haven’t already, please let me know. If you’re unsure, that’s fine too: just show up and grab me at the stand.

I’ll be there at 8am on Sat­urday (an hour before it starts) to set up the stand, and prob­ably at 8:30 on Sunday. I might need some assist­ance to set up, and also to pack up afterwards.

Some tips:

• Wear com­fort­able cas­ual cloth­ing. It might get hot in the exhib­i­tion hall.
• If you’ve got any Linux or FOSS themed cloth­ing, wear that
• Wear com­fort­able shoes. You’ll be stand­ing most of the time.
• Keep some water handy.
• Talk­ing to stand vis­it­ors can strain your throat. Some mints can help.

Make it clear to vis­it­ors that there is a vibrant FOSS com­munity in Aus­tralia, and espe­cially in Sydney. Invite them to SLUG, which meets in the city on the last Fri­day of every month (next meet­ing on 27 June). SLUG has a seg­ment known as ‘SLUG­lets’, which is inten­ded for newbies.

Famil­i­ar­ise your­self with the leaf­lets that we will distribute:

• http://​link​pot​.net/​r​a​v​i​n​es/
• http://​link​pot​.net/​d​e​t​h​r​o​ne/
• http://​link​pot​.net/​t​r​e​m​o​l​os/

Have a read of Linux Australia’s guides to Free and Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS) and FOSS in edu­ca­tion. Remem­ber to pro­mote these to stand vis­it­ors as the best place to start with Linux and FOSS:

• http://​linux​.org​.au/​l​i​nux
• http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion

One import­ant point to remem­ber is that Linux is not FOSS. We will be hand­ing out cop­ies of the OpenE­duca­tionDisc, which is a CD full of education-​​oriented FOSS for Win­dows. Not every­one is able to switch over to Linux cold-​​turkey, but we can get them star­ted with FOSS on Win­dows first.

Sim­il­arly, open stand­ards are not FOSS, but they are a good start. Inform people about the dangers of pro­pri­et­ary file formats, as seen with Microsoft Office, and pro­mote in their stead open altern­at­ives such as Open­Doc­u­ment and PDF.

Show people that Linux isn’t strange and new. Many don’t real­ise it, but they are already using FOSS. For example:

• Fire­fox and Open­Of­fice are becom­ing increas­ingly pop­u­lar. The NSW Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion is in the pro­cess of switch­ing over >40,000 school com­puters to OpenOffice.
• Wiki­pe­dia is built around the idea of open know­ledge, inspired dir­ectly from the FOSS move­ment (and it’s built on FOSS too!).
• Even Mac OS X has many import­ant com­pon­ents based on FOSS, such as the ker­nel, file shar­ing, print­ing and the Web browser.
• About two-​​thirds of Web sites are served by the FOSS Web server, Apache.
• Most of the large Web com­pan­ies (like Google, Face­book and Yahoo) are built with FOSS.
• It is nor­mal for Hol­ly­wood films to be cre­ated using Linux.
• Linux is pre­val­ent in a range of con­sumer devices.
• The pop­u­lar ASUS Eee PC, and many of its com­pet­it­ors, come with Linux pre-​​installed.

Show people that Linux is easy to install and use. Ubuntu has an installer called Wubi, which is a Win­dows applic­a­tion that installs Ubuntu as a file without par­ti­tion­ing the hard drive. It behaves like a nor­mal dual-​​boot sys­tem, but it can be unin­stalled from ‘Add/​Remove Pro­grams’ just like any Win­dows applic­a­tion. We’ll also have cop­ies of Edubuntu. Remem­ber that this is an add-​​on com­pan­ion, not a stand-​​alone liveCD as in the past. Give a copy of Ubuntu with every Edubuntu disc you distribute.

Linux is more secure. While noth­ing can claim to be 100% secure and virus proof, Linux has an excel­lent track record. It doesn’t need ‘band-​​aid’ solu­tions like anti-​​virus and anti-​​spyware soft­ware because the soft­ware was built sanely to begin with. The Inter­net was built for UNIX, not for Windows.

Linux and FOSS is great for fam­il­ies. It’s afford­able and reli­able. It won’t get infec­ted and show unso­li­cited porn adverts to your chil­dren. There are heaps of great edu­ca­tional soft­ware install­able with just a few mouse clicks.

Some caveats:

• As a com­munity stand, we are not selling anything.
• Avoid unne­ces­sary Microsoft-​​bashing. We’re run­ning the stand because we love FOSS, not because we hate Microsoft.

The second Open CeBIT in Sydney ended last week. Form­ing a sec­tion of the much lar­ger CeBIT expo, Open CeBIT focused on open source tech­no­lo­gies and solu­tions. I was involved in three stands: BizCubed (my employer), Linux Aus­tralia and Open Source Industry Aus­tralia.

In the mar­ket, FOSS is clearly matur­ing and becom­ing more main­stream. At a CeBIT a couple of years ago, I’d be answer­ing basic ques­tions like, “what is open source?”, “what is Linux?” and “how do you make money?” This year, I didn’t get any ques­tions like that at all. Most people knew some­thing about Linux and FOSS, and just needed some dir­ec­tion to get started.

We had much interest in com­munity and gen­eral usage at the Linux Aus­tralia stand. Our Fedora, Ubuntu and Edubuntu discs were pop­u­lar. Of immense pop­ular­ity were our OLPC XOs, thanks to OLPC Aus­tralia. Vis­it­ors were genu­inely inter­ested in the units, and I didn’t hear any neg­at­ive feed­back at all. I do believe that a lot of people did under­stand that this is an edu­ca­tion pro­ject for chil­dren in the devel­op­ing world and not just a laptop project.

At the Open Source Industry Aus­tralia stand, I spoke to many people who were inter­ested in deploy­ing FOSS solu­tions to solve spe­cific prob­lems. Many of these people would not have con­sidered FOSS in the past, so clearly our mes­sage is resonating.

Com­ing up in a couple of weeks (June 14–15) is the Edu­ca­tion Expo. We’ve always been suc­cess­ful there, and all signs point to us repeat­ing that.

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