One pet peeve of mine is when I hear local input that for various reasons business, research grants etc. is difficult for open source.

There are plenty of examples, where local people have done very well for themselves at the local and international level. They're working for open source MNCs (not sales), wrote a key database library for PHP, developing on Linux/FreeBSD kernels, released popular open source e-HRM systems.. the list goes on. Most of the people I know in this group, don't get any form of grants, support or incentives from local sources. And yes.. they're getting nice income from it, invited to speak at international conferences etc.

The same goes for research, Andrew Tridgell who wrote rsync for this Phd. thesis and during his studies also wrote Samba So if he can do this at the ANU as a side project, why not locally?

For his master thesis, Linus Torvalds wrote Linux. What are the submissions that failed to get grants locally? Are they at a similar level?

Have a read also of Michael Tiemann's startup of Cygnus Solutions They started up with USD6,000. RedHat started in an apartment, Google in a garage.

Did you know that a local IT SME can get up to 5 years tax free profit without even getting MSC status?

A lot of innovation can happen if you main incentive is the will to succeed and not handouts.

Something is screwed up when there is constant overtime and you have to work on weekends to catch up. It is never normal working practice. Spikes do happen in any industry such as end of financial year, the release date of a software project or unforeseen emergencies. Not being in constant overtime, allows us this spare capacity to deal with them. If you're constantly working overtime, it means there is no capacity left to deal with spikes.

What happens then?

People start to get sick. Mistakes start to creep in due to lack of sleep or fatigue and procedures are worked around ending up in an organizational mess.

Capacity and efficiency issues such as this require a bit more thought and planning, as it's a difficult problem to find solutions for.

An opinion was given to me, that for an IT related project, where you don't have capacity, the solution was simple, just hire a bunch of contractors. Sounds simple? This is a packer statement. It assumes that in an IT project, you can just slot in blocks and stuff will be churned out. When one of these contractors quit, you simply replace them and new hires will continue churning out stuff. Doesn't work that way, as it assumes that individual capacity such as subject matter knowledge is the same, and application for this knowledge is the same.

So a 3 year experienced person = 3 year experienced person, but both are worth more than a fresh grad. Never works that way in my experience. This same line of thinking also gives small value to the training that a fresh grad or intern gets. Oh, the value of a trainee lost is not that much, since their pay scale is still that of a fresh grad or trainee.

I hope this kind of thinking continues to be pervasive throughout the IT industry, as then I know that Inigo will continue to have a competitive advantage.

It's also why I've been slow to take up new interns or hires. I believe that adding 1 doesn't mean capacity goes up by one. In fact the team should jell so that:

capacity = y^x. 

Where y is the number of employees, and x is the jell factor and ability of the team to automate and innovate by working together. Capacity is roughly equal to the output of one IT staff at a local IT company. Currently Inigo is I believe where x=2.5 and I'd like to keep it this way. In a small team, adding the wrong person can cause a reduction in this x factor, which can be painful.

When kenw spoke at MyOSS Meetup, he mentioned that Exoweb focuses on fast turnaround time and getting things done for the clients with high quality. This is through a bunch of best practices that I've seen to be common amongst various large successful FOSS projects.

I've been working on that idea for Inigo as the base competitive advantage and business model for some time. Now it's starting to come together, albeit a few months too early with a potential client already deciding on the Plone platform we support. Warranty replacement time for gambit's memory is going way to slow (2 weeks more). Going to have to get another two additional replacement (expensive) 1GB DDR1 sticks this weekend to hold until the planned upgrade to a proper 4 core opteron with plenty of ECC memory from a vendor that can provide next day replacement on parts. Those upgrades are not planned until July though.

Another interesting point from kenw's talk is the fact that their company is basically an outsourced IT department and paid by time for resources. angch was actually discussing the exact same thing with me several years ago. The problem was that at the time, the company we worked for, the main clients was .gov.my and it doesn't fit with their contract model. This model however does work with with clients which gives out consultant contracts.

Just moved apdip.net from servers in Bangkok to Inigo's server in Kuala Lumpur, remotely of course.

These kind of tasks are quite easy with standard unix tools such as ssh and tar. Assuming of course you're familiar with them (hint LPI Level 1 objectives are important). Setting it up was made even easier thought the use of FreeBSD jails, which allows me to host it on a virtual server which shares some of the host directories, but has it's own ip, own configuration and own third party (ports) software installed. This method shares kernel also, so it's very efficient.  This allows me to make very efficient use of my resources. As an SME it's very important to keep costs low, and if servers are able to do more, then it's better for the bottom line.

Unlike proprietary software, there are no silly things like registration keys, shared registry tied to physical server and other mechanisms that make it difficult to copy and move things. Every single software I need to duplicate it is available for free without any feature restrictions. Furthermore software versions are also not usually tied to specific OS releases. Meaning that I can run python 2.3 and zope 2.7 on FreeBSD 6.2 while the older server was on FreeBSD 5.3. I could replicate it on different Linux distributions too. All these kind of freedoms for the user, end up making things look amazingly easy to do compared to doing it on a platform such as Microsoft. Latest Plone 3.0 will run on FreeBSD 5,6 and upcoming 7, Fedora, Centos, Suse and even Windows.  Contrast this to Sharepoint 2007 which requires Windows 2003. Running Windows 2000? Tough.. pay for more licenses. Already have a Linux server? Tough, pay up for more licensing fees.

Eventually apdip.net will be moved to IOSN servers. Either way over 7 years worth of ICT4D material will continue be available with the same urls.

Through built in portal_tranforms for pdf, all you need to do is install pdftohtml package, and your uploaded PDFs are automatically full text indexed.

ODF support requires separate Product - AROfficeTranforms and ARFilePreview, once this and binary dependencies are installed, all uploaded ODF text documents and old OpenOffice documents are full text indexed. In addition you can get html previews.

One of the issues with managing workflows in documents is that it is difficult to do it in document formats without passing files around, or merging it and then tracking history changes. It's much easier to implement if using Plone's built in text/html online document content. You can track history/changes and everybody can lock/collaborate and see diffs. It also uses Plone's built in workflows. Usually though after it's done, you probably still want to polish it up for formatting and publishing, and want to export it to a standard document format or PDF.

That's where another Plone product comes into play, SmartPrintNG. This product then converts Plone content into different office formats. You can also customise the look and feel of the output. Thanks to purserj for pointing this product out to me.

What's great about all of this is that they're using Plone's simple UI which users seem to love. It follows familiar metaphor of files, folders and sharing them. The workflows and categorisation are also there, but don't get in the way.

Most of the info is due to the great work of Kagesenshi, and it's only his third week. It's been quite fun, to see a lot of interesting tech tasks being worked on that I couldn't get to due to lack of time. Even better, being a FOSS contributer to the Fedora Project, he knows all the stuff already and how things work including documentation setup, issue tracking and svn. He knows how to debug stuff and so on, with minimal guidance. He nows how to Google. Gasp!

It's made me set the bar higher now on possible interns and new hires for projects.

If you're an SME shop, look for FOSS contributers. If you're a student start getting involved in an upstream project now. You'll have the skills which took me a few months to teach already. You may even have a leg up over developers with a few years of working experience who are not involved with large FOSS projects.