Training of Trainers: FOSS Toolkit for SMEs – Day 1

November 12, 2008 at 10:49 am · Filed under 1

The idea of FOSS toolkit for SME is to help SME companies to choose the appropriate softwares for their business and how to help them moving from the old softwares to open source softwares.

There are 3 aspects of Open Source Software which can come together or not, they are:

1. Legality

2. Development

3. Source code

Activities in FOSS things are mostly about:

1. Development

2. Localization

3. Ancillary. It deals with the marketing activities.

Development activities take the smallest percent from overall activities.

Ten Myths about FLOSS:

  1. It’s a Linux vs Windows thing

    think about the open source and markets, but u should not think about Linux desktop/servers

  2. FLOSS is not reliable and supported

    the side effect of saying that FLOSS is not reliable is that it will not be supported.

    • The volunteer perception

    • paid programmers are better

    • there is no support

    • FLOSS is inherently unreliable

  1. Big companies don’t use FLOSS

  2. FLOSS is hostile to intellectual property

  3. FLOSS is all bout licenses

  4. If I give away my software to the FLOSS community, thousands of developers will suddenly start working for me for nothing

  5. FLOSS only matters to programmers, since most users never look under the hood way

  6. There is no money to be made on FLOSS

  7. The FLOSS movement is not sustainable, since people will stop developing free software once they see others making lots of money from their efforts

  8. FLOSS is playing catch-up to Microsoft and the commercial world

This software has appropriate price for its functions, and you can get much more without having to pay too much more.

Several approach:

  1. Trial approach

  2. Virtualization

Maturity

Software forking happens when you have companies or group of companies and they come up with the same source code, until someday they decided to modify the source code depend on their need.

Generic Section

Independence of Development

100%: owned by a single company, if that company is collapse, then the software will not being to another company, unless it sells the software.

60%: owned by a single company, but other company has some parts of it. If the owner is collapse, then another company will handle it.

20%:It is not belong to a single company.

Gentle Migration

Server Migration → Office migration, if necessary → Desktop Migration

Server migration:

  • DBMS server

  • Web server

  • Directory server

  • Mail and calendar server

  • File and print server; DNS and DHCP server

Office Migration:

  • parts of File and print server; DNS and DHCP server and OpenOffice.org

Desktop Migration:

  • OpenOffice.org

Phases in Gentle Migration:

Phase 1 :Decision

Phase 2: Project planning → User information → Stock Taking → Detailed concept

Phase 3:Implementation → Tests → System Integration → Introduction for users and administrators → Administrators Training introduction and → User Training Introduction

Phrase 4:Operation → Service → Support → Training

A significant advantage of OSS is the availability of online free resources, in the form of knowledge bases, mailing lists, wikis (collaborative sites) that may provide a substantial support in many cases comparable to commercial offerings. The biggest problem is the identification of such knowledge sources; in this sense assigning a resources to find, categorize and interact with such sources is a way to reduce the cost of support; a common way to provide a unified source of information is by setting up a small Intranet web page with links to online resources.

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