OSS Watch :
Three talks in this morning's plenary sessions. One delivered without slides or notes, which is always nice to see but it wasn't much we haven't talked about already. The second is from Aingaran Pillai of Camden city council talking about a system they've developed on Open ACS... The final talk is from Bill Oliver of JISC
Lecture Notes follow
Lecture Notes : APLAWS
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APLAWS is a CMS, based on the latest version of red hat's content management system. (which is open ACS reimplemented in Java?). Made extensive use of open standards including WAI AA for accessibility. 30 local authorities and around 10 international organisations using the software.
Things they've found they need are : Documentation, open standards, structured development, interoperate with other open source software, release framework, single official release, code submission criteria, single public repository and a published release schedule.
User communities are involved in the sustainability of software. There is a lot of benefit to getting people into the same room to collaborate and work together. In descending order of size you have...
Broad community > User Group > Technical steering committee (with write access to code repository), User steering committee
The user groups for APLAWS meet every three months.
Supplier communities were built through a process of open tenders. The suppliers who provide support are required to QA upgrades provided by the developers and then support the whole system. This beats asking developers to support their own code indefinately. (Also makes it easier to work with overseas / unproven suppliers). Provide the suppliers with access to the user group as it makes them happy.
OS license - chose the GPL, now under the lesser GNU Public LIcense. The problem with the GPL was that suppliers weren't interested in assigning copyright back to RedHat, (too much work).
Importance of having a single website to publicise a project and provide a definitive source of information.
Lecture Notes : JISC
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JISC want us to tell them about what they do. This is probably really useful for the Higher Education lot, but of limited use to Greenpeace. Pretty good that this is the first session we have little interest in from the Greenpeace side, which isn't bad since it's only 20 minutes.
Comments
Sounds like APLAWS is based on ACS, not OpenACS. "ACS4/Java" was one of the last thing ArsDigita did before going belly up (and later being bought by Redhat).
Posted by: Nis Jorgensen | April 13, 2006 2:01 PM