Learning Software Development the Open Source way: A student guide

A book I co-authored with Professor Allen Tucker and Professor Ralph Morelli targeted mainly as a semester course for students was recently published by Chapman and Hall/CRC as part of their innovations in software engineering series and is available on Amazon titled "Software Development: An Open Source Approach"

Background to book and value to students interested in a career in IT
Participating in Open Source is a fantastic way for computer science students to get some hands on experience in a live Software Engineering project, especially before they start a professional career in Information Technology. Participating in an Open Source provides invaluable experiences that closely emulates what they have to face in the real world of professional software engineering, which a pure academic project or simulated mock project cannot offer. Additionally internships with software engineering firms often does not sometimes provide the full range of experiences needed as students are rarely permitted to participate in the critical parts of a billable client project thus their access and exposure is often restricted. Open Source projects however welcome contribution and the sky's the limit in terms of what you can contribute. You are valued more for the quality of what you can do, rather than how many years of experience you have under your belt. Participating in a global Open Source project also is not just about coding, but also about getting exposure to some of the invaluable soft skills needed to becoming a well rounded professional software engineer or architect. This includes interacting with diverse people from developers to users, documenting for those different audiences, understanding software usability, software intellectual property boundaries and learning how to promote your product and yourself. And if the student does well, it also gives them valuable credentials, referenceable experience and a global recognition that could serve to rapidly develop their career. Invaluable not just for students but even professionals who have still not got into Open Source. The book is a hands-on guide for you to get involved and becoming a valuable part of a Open Source community. Hope you enjoy it and do send us feedback for our next edition.

Proprietary can learn from open source licensing world, especially for the cloud

Proprietary licenses have evolved greatly since it was initially forged by IBM and Microsoft many years back. Every proprietary vendor has their own unique license and the royalty model can come in many different forms. Revenue for the proprietary vendor can be licensed proportional to the number of users, nodes, processors, bandwidth consumed or an annual subscription model. Furthermore each vendor has their diverse models of discounting that can result the licensee in a complete state of confusion if he does not seek proper legal advice.  

Unfortunately software licenses lives in the nexus between a legal document and technical jargon, which often renders either profession incapable of deciphering the actual right of the licensee. There have been times when I have found that even the sales team of the vendor is somewhat unclear. Standardising the licensing models is certainly something the proprietary world can learn from the Open Source and Open Content world. Over 50% of the Open Source projects fall under one license, the GPL and the other common one Open Source ones LGPL, Apache, BSD are used across at least thousands of Open Source projects. With such pervasive use, this greatly simplifies the problem of understanding licenses. Compound with that is the most Open Source licenses are kept extremely simple. The BSD license is but one paragraph that would hardly take a quarter of a document. 

Unfortunately, if the proprietary world does not move into standardising their license models, they are soon going to be left behind as more applications get deployed in the cloud, with providers like Amazon and Rackspace.  This is because the cloud model is on-demand model. You pay as you use and the cloud decides how many resources are needed to serve you need. This might mean it needs more processors, nodes and users per node and this need to happen flexibly and dynamically for it to work. As there is so much diversity in the proprietary licenses this becomes very complex as applications are often build from multiple components. If each component has a different revenue model, it becomes very hard to meter the total usage to charge the client in turn. Open Source licenses do not suffer this fate as such limitations are against Open Source principles of freedom and thus you have any number of users, processors, bandwidth usage, nodes all at the same base cost for software, zero.

So my recommendation to the proprietary world is simply to standardise and reduce the complexity of licensing such that more focus can be given to the value of the product or risk being left behind in the cloud world.

Published In:

• http://www.ft.lk/2010/11/17/proprietary-can-learn-from-open-source-licensing-world-especially-for-the-cloud/
• http://www.itpro.lk/node/7825

OSI Days, India and Article on the Open Source License Compatibility for the cloud

Recently wrote an article based on my comments at a panel discussion at the OSIDays conference in India. It was also published in the Financial Times. I welcome comments (next blog post)

OSI Days was held in Chennai, India and is an evolution of Linux Asia, re-branded.
Picture is of a panel discussion I participated in on programming languages

The conference schedule was done based on input and it seems that PHP is still the most popular language of choice especially in Chennai. 

 Panel Discussion on Open Source for the Cloud with some of the Open Source Business leaders in India

This picture is with the two project leaders of the two most popular PHP frameworks, Zend Framework and Symphony

Picture with leading Drupal developers and the author of Adminer and PHPMyAdmin alternative.

Emergency Information Systems Interop Workshop for better preparedness @ ISCRAM 2011

I would like to announce that we are organizing an emergency/disaster information systems interop workshop for the next ISCRAM 2011. The interop workshop will be an environment where software vendors and information systems solution providers can bring in their systems for testing against popular information exchange standards such as PFIF, CAP, GeoRSS, EDXL Standards, GIS Standards, etc. The structure will be based on the Apache interop workshops. More importantly we will want to test, improve and validate information exchange between systems for certain popular pre-defined use-cases utilizing these standards. Thereby the results of this workshop will serve better preparedness by assuring that the systems that participate are able to exchange data effectively and work more efficiently in partnership at the time of disaster response.

The interop workshop will be part of the information systems interop standards track, where you can also submit research papers, work in progress papers, practitioner presentations covering best practices and demos for inclusion in ISCRAM. We are also welcoming presentations on new, existing and emerging interop standards for educational purposes to help improve awareness, facilitate feedback and adoption.

Participants interested in participating for the interop workshop can submit their solutions/products/demos/

functional prototypes as a demo for this track.

Further submission details can be found at:
  http://iscram2011.lnec.pt/pdf/tracks/information_systems_interop_standards.pdf

For information of the ISCRAM 2011 conference the main website is:
  http://iscram2011.lnec.pt/

We look forward to your participation to this much needed exercise. If you have any suggestion on this track please do not hesitate to contact myself, Renato Iannella or Tom de Groeve. We also want to form a steering committee for the interop workshop, so do let us know if you would like to join that.

Why Virtusa supports QA teams volunteering on OLPC?

Virtusa has been applying and contributing to Open Source R&D for quite a long time now, from Apache contributions on Web Services, to the Sahana Disaster Management project in the wake of the Tsunami and most recently to OLPC. In the case of OLPC through with our experience with Open Source, we realized that there is much opportunity to contribute to Quality Assurance (QA) as most often Open Source volunteers are motivated rather by the research and development side of the project and there often is not enough focus on QA. Yet projects like OLPC and Sahana have a global impact and in the latter case needs to be mission critical, thus the quality and stability of the system should be a very important part of the project.

Why OLPC? Well despite the challenges OLPC foundation has had based on their policy for deployment (e.g arrangements only with Govs and not with the private sector for deployment), their mission to empower children is certainly very honorable and something that should be supported by all of us to help bridge the digital divide. It also has to be noted that some people have mis-understood the OLPC. It is supposed to be a tool that will supplement (and not replace) existing education systems and empower especially children in rural communities, who otherwise would not have access to IT or IT teachers for learning, enabling them to learn for themselves. OLPC also has had a much broader indirect impact, as it has been a flagship product that greatly helped bring about the netbook revolution and simply the existence of the OLPC and it’s $100 target has certainly helped drive down costs and have got people thinking about other low-cost solutions for educating children in rural communities. This competition is healthy and it will certainly progress further with the upcoming releases of the OLPC 1.5 and OLPC 2.0 (touch based, iPad like laptop), embodying a lot of lessons from the deployment of the first OLPC 1.0s.

Overall Virtusans volunteers have spent about 40 man months on the project so far delivering about 800 test cases. A good deal of time was spent learning how the system is supposed to work, especially as Open Source projects typically do not have well defined requirement specifications and Use Cases, which are normally used by our teams to derive test cases in client projects. But now we do have sufficient knowledge to quickly nurture new contributors and we presently have volunteers in India and Sri Lanka contributing off our spare QA capacity on the project. One area we are specifically looking at now is test automation on the Redhat based sugar operating system as a mechanism for providing more efficiency for testing new builds.

Virtusa and Virtusans will continue to help OLPC achieve their goals by supporting the team with QA contributions as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility in a initiative we call Tech Reach.

Related Articles:

CSR Wire
 http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/30163--Virtusa-supports-One-Laptop-per-Child-Program
Andhra Business
http://andhrabusiness.com/NewsDesc.aspx?NewsId=Virtusa-to-back-one-laptop-per-child-programme.html
ITVarNews
http://www.itvarnews.net/news/11238/Virtusa-Supports-One-Laptop-per-Child-Program.html
ITPro
http://www.itpro.lk/node/2058

Idea: Building in mobile phone beacon technology to help search and rescue operations

Telcoms infrastructure is often down or saturated during a disaster, however even if a mobile device cannot be used to dial a call or send an SMS, they inherently have another capability. Mobile devices are effectively radio transmitters that with very little modification should be able to act as locating beacons to locate trapped people in the locality of say about  within a 200-500m radius.

Mobile phones are quite pervasive now with high penetration even in developing nations . These days most people carry a mobile phone wherever they go.  During my visit to Taiwan, I got an opportunity to speak to a leading OEM chip chip manufacturer, who’s chip functionally ends up in a great amount of phones today and they informed that this very doable. 

Please do not confuse this with locating mobile phone using cell towner triangulation techniques as that lacks the granularity to locate people in for example a trapped building block. With this you should be able to say the number of phone in for example a collapsed building and make a guess at the amount of people trapped. The natural attenuation of the signal also should help build a suitable “metal detector” like tool to direct a search and rescue operation to the mobile phone and the trapped people or bodies with them.

You might also counter saying that GPS technology can be a better locator, however GPS technology requires a clear line of sight and even to SMS their location it all requires active input by a potentially unconscious person and a level of literacy on mobile functionality beyond the basics.  If anything the only input required would be to say someone is OK, so that their signal no longer contributes to the noise of multitudes of signals of the number of people with mobile phone in say a 500m radius. Or they might annotate their signal with a request for urgent help or with other information if they so wish, but that would be optional. One issue is battery consumption as most of the time mobile phones are not transmitting, but are passive receivers which require consumes far less battery power. Transmitting a beacon will have to be done in very energy efficiently way. Like a periodic beep and powered for say a maximum range of 500m.

Yes you might worry about privacy or abuse in non-disaster times, in people being able to locate you, and there should be a way for the user to turn it off when needed or it is something that is turned on only on a cell broadcast by a tower. Detectors, which would be specialist directional devices that can locate people with such granularity has to be restricted to emergency use though legislation.

Additionally in more advanced phones you might be able to use it as simple short range walkie talkie to permit those that are trapped to communicate with the rescuers and broadcast a help message.

I am going to follow up on this possibility, which I thing will have a significant impact for search and rescue. Thoughts?

UN APCICT/ESCAP Publication on ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction includes Sahana

The recent UN APCICT/ESCAP Case Studies on ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction includes the Sahana project focusing on the experiences deploying Sahana for the Haiti Response. It includes a lot of other case studies and best practices in different countries in the Asia Pacific Region and is a worthwhile read. You can find the publication on the UNAPCICT website at http://www.unapcict.org/ecohub/ict-for-disaster-risk-reduction-1. I co-authored this case study with Mark Prutsalis. Thank you to APDIP for continuing to recognize Sahana contributions in this sector.

What makes a truly Open Standard?

As far as I am concerned, for a standard to be truly open it should have the following going for it in order of priority.

1. A liberally licensed specification - Not all standards are free and some require royalties to obtain. Licenses should be aligned to the Free and Open Source principles.
2. An Open Community Process - Not all standards are defined and refined in an open community process. Some require expensive exclusive memberships before you can participate, which limits the participation by organizations / individuals in poorer developing nations.
3. An Open Source implementation - This is not a must, but it certainly helps assure that the standard has been implemented transparently. It also help propagate the standard as any one can adopt these libraries into their products. TCP/IP, is a good example of the success of a standard through this model.

However we need to work with the reality of the proprietary nature of most standards and give priority to the ones that have greater adoption or we would not be serving the critical need for having a standard in the first place.

Virtusa donates to Rehabilitation Efforts

I have been involved in a Virtusa CSR initiative to support the rehabilitation efforts in Sri Lanka for the Commissioner General Rehabilitation's Office. There are a lot of rehabilitates who are interested in a vocation in ITES/BPO and thus Virtusa was invited to help guide a program that would help meet those aspirations. Virtusa decided to make a significant donation at this critical post-civil war period to help the rehabilitation efforts. The donation included a computer lab with 30 computers (running Ubuntu) in Vavuniya, support for defining a program for those interested in a vocation in ITES/BPO and the development of a software solution to help better manage the training and rehabilitation efforts. The lab was opened on the 1st week of April by the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapakse and it was a great honor to be part of that ceremony.

A further1300+ ex-combatants were released that day to their families and it was a heartwarming sight to see those who have suffered so much due to the civil war being reunited with their families with a fresh outlook for a peaceful future. Some of these kids are so talented and it is sad to see that they wasted so much of their lives being trained instead as lethal weapons. We hope they will have a better future in peaceful Sri Lanka.

The event also gave me another opportunity to observe the President quite close and I continue to be impressed with his charisma and down-to-earth nature with people, especially in this environment, where he was surrounded by ex-combatants, who not too long ago would have taken every opportunity to do him harm (as mandated by their previous commanders).

I was also very proud of our Virtusa team and leadership that gave their full backing for this initiative, given it's relevance to peace building post-civil war. I also had to opportunity to work with the Sri Lanka Army these past few months (from end of last year) on this initiative and I consistently found that everyone I met was very professional, ethical in their approach and disciplined on delivery. It was a pleasure and a honor to work with them and  we would not have been able to contribute on our CSR goals without their vision for rehabilitation and encouraging support of our contributions.

There is still a lot of work to do and you still find remnants of the war scattered around, yet you can see the progress being made on the ground. We hope and pray for a peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka of the future.