 Right. Well, thank you very much, everybody, for coming and staying towards the end of the day. I'm going to talk about using free software in commercial environments, so businesses, that sort of thing. I am a free software consultant and we work a lot with free software in commercial organisations, government departments and so on. So I'm going to be talking, actually, having a look at why in the UK Linux adoption isn't as far ahead as it is in other countries in Europe. And have a look at some places where Linux already is and example of some of the things that we've been doing with Linux and about reasons to present to your boss or whoever makes the decisions that actually they ought to be considering Linux a lot more seriously than most people are and get ahead of the competition. So just a little bit about myself. I am a free software developer. I have been using Linux for quite a while and I'm a Debian developer. Anyone heard of Debian here? And another small programme called Open Office and a few other projects like that. My commercial background is I started off as a software developer. And now with Creditive we basically provide services to people who are wanting to use free software and help them to make the most use of free software, not by selling some product or other that's built on free software. We like to relabel or something. We are independent and will actually help people find the best way to make use of free software. So Creditive itself, we provide support and services. The support is the main thing that we do. We run the open source support centre. We've got guys who are sitting round the clock on the end of the phone able to help organisations who've put free software in mission critical places and there are an awful lot of them. And we have offices in the UK which I run and Germany as well. We have quite a lot of Debian developers as a few around here and we're involved in a lot of open source projects as well. There's just a few, Postgres, GNOME, KGE, Open Office and a whole load more. So we are really into not just taking open source software and using it with our customers. We are also into giving it back, giving the work that we have done and the improvements that we've made back into the community. So we're active in a lot of places. We're also a member of the open source consortium. I just wanted to mention that since we're in the UK. This is a group of open source companies who work together in promoting free software and also in being a larger consortium where we have a larger voice than just the individual companies. So the consortium also does campaigning as well. So adding the commercial view to free software debate where for example the BBC recently in England has said well we're going to provide you video streaming but to start with it's only going to be available on Windows and it will take us, we'll commit to providing free formats but not in the first couple of years and we're actually in a position with the consortium to say from a commercial point of view hey our businesses will be losing money if you do this because by people only being able to use Windows to view video from the BBC if they're thinking well I'm going to buy a new computer but I want to be able to view video then they're going to be thinking twice about free software if there's no streaming available. So the open source consortium is able to provide a commercial argument as well which in certain political circles is useful, it's not just single free software developers which people might see as being individuals sitting in their bedroom at night we're actually a commercial business and we are being affected by these sorts of decisions. We also remember the Linux for Bank which is a similar sort of organisation in Germany. So Linux in the UK, now I'm in the position of talking to companies about Linux and saying hey how about using Linux in your server room and so on and a lot of people that I talk to are just like Linux now I think I've heard of it not really aware of what it can do, what it can do for their companies. One of the things that seems to be significant is the lack of the support in the public sector. Now our next speaker Patrick will be talking more about that but it does seem to be, lost my thread, does seem to be important in terms of if large areas of government are using a particular technology then that will filter through to commercial organisations as well. Now Linux is being used in dark corners in organisations a lot. It's just at the moment the people further up the management chain aren't really aware of it so much. Another thing is the purchasing methods. I'm seeing a lot for example about certification and so on for schools as well. There are bodies saying to be eligible for software to be used in schools they must pass a series of tests and certification where this is fine for companies that are actually targeting the UK market and that's just another thing that they have to do is to make sure that all of the right boxes are checked but that doesn't help you if you're trying to adopt an open source project which has maybe got thousands and thousands of users around the world but it doesn't tick the right boxes. So these sorts of things, they may be not deliberately put in the way to stop open source adoption but it does make it a lot harder in the UK. Other countries for example Germany and Spain are a lot further where the government has actually taken a lead as well and in Germany in particular we saw Linux adoption and become much more widespread earlier than in the UK so if you compare the two countries it's as if the UK is a few years behind. So the cycle would start with organisations secretly saying we can use it in a particular area of our server room or whatever or maybe just the IT guys installed a Linux server without anybody else knowing and then the managers are realising this is becoming a part of our critical infrastructure we better make sure that it's supported and so on which is where they go in contact with companies like Creditive and then later on Linux becomes more and more popular they'll eventually say we're using Linux here so we've got quite a few companies that are not willing to say that they are using Linux but they are actually using it in their data in their data servers and running mission critical software on it. So in Germany there is a lot of use of Linux in the public sector the German Parliament for example was quite a well-known project and the foreign office for example we've recently migrated a load of desktops in the central foreign office to Debian desktops so we're even getting adoption in the desktop area as well City of Munich is another very high profile project as well So where can you find Linux in the UK already? One of the places where you're likely to find it is in the server infrastructure of companies so web servers, databases, files and mail server Now the web server is interesting in that quite often companies are outsourcing their websites to companies running Linux without even realising it so Apache has been around since 1995 and it's got a very large market segment as well so chances are that your organisation is actually using Apache and using free software so even though people might not know a great deal about it they're actually using it all over the place Database is another one We do a lot of database consulting helping people make the best use of Postgres Postgres is fine in a huge number of cases unless you're running absolutely massive databases you're unlikely to be running into limitations of the Postgres database itself So most people who are running databases could consider it and there are huge cost savings to be gained from it We talked to somebody who needed five oracle instances just to be able to run one of their databases and it was costing them over £100,000 per year and you can go to Postgres and the actual purchasing cost and licensing cost go to zero all you have to worry about is support Postgres is very high performance and is able to run very demanding applications in terms of making sure that you have transactional integrity as well Here are some examples of e-mail services that you might find running in server rooms Semmail is very popular In fact between Semmail and Postpix those are the most popular mail servers on the internet They don't have quite such a big market share as Apache but it's still larger than the individual commercial service Anti-spam, antivirus filters are very important as well and of course when you're running them on a Linux machine you don't have to worry about your server being affected by viruses Now the actual mail scanning, this is one thing that we as a company have done is to put together a system that is made up of virus scanning, spam scanning and a firewall and this is one of the things that you can do with free software You can take individual components, put them together to make something a lot more powerful and you could get just with the individual components something that will also scale to large systems as well The security filter that we are using a lot of different technologies the mail server and then we are using high availability to make sure that the actual outside SNTP server is always available and then we are actually doing the scanning on separate machines as well and also doing blacklist as well So this is scalable from a large number of machines and it's also not limited just to Linux it will run on any operating system where the software is available and it's all based around free software and that means that we are using it and also contributing back to those projects where we are finding scalability issues and so on in the software So going from that system of several components we've also added another layer which is to create a complete cluster as well Now these two projects as well everyone will have heard of and even though Linux on the desktop isn't so widespread yet certainly these two projects have pushed free software into millions of installed systems So these two are names which people have heard of and are using on their desktops so we're definitely getting there and it's fairly easy to point out to somebody actually you are using free software and maybe you should think about using it more and more in the commercial environment as well So why might people want to adopt Linux and free software in a commercial enterprise You have financial savings Now this will depend a lot on your particular needs and requirements There's been a lot of debate about total cost of ownership You can skew the figures anyway you want really depending on what particular configuration you decide to pick But certainly with the database example I gave you there are a lot of cases where you are clearly saving a lot of money Stability as well is pretty important if you're running things like banking software or you are dealing with high transaction volumes and also if you care about being able to use your software the whole time and not have to suddenly find that your IT department says well everything's gone down for an hour, go for lunch Security as well is important, it's a lot harder to get into Linux FreeBSD and other free operating systems built on Unix Because they are actually built to be secure from the ground up and of course flexibility, this is that you are able to either pick and choose individual components from those that are available or if there's something that you want to do that nobody else has done you can take something that exists and extend it or you can start your own as well Now not everyone is able to start their own project but there are plenty of people who talk to the open source consortium who are able to do that for you So we're here at the Debian conference but I just wanted to talk about Debian from a point of view if you are a commercial organisation how should you be thinking of Debian These are reasons to adopt Debian in your organisation It's a project that's run by volunteers that means that anyone can get involved and so if you are making use of a lot of Debian for example then there's nothing to stop you from actually taking somebody on to become a part of the Debian community and to extend Debian and to add both to package the extra software that you need but also to introduce changes that affect not just your organisation but Debian as a whole You'll find that it runs on a lot more architectures than windows or most other commercial software and that makes it easy to deploy the same operating system across a wide range of hardware It's not just big in the UK it's big all over the world and that means that it's been tested by a lot more people than just those maybe testing a particular UK offering It's one of the most popular distributions and main thing is that it's built on the same principles as the free software projects that make it up so that means that there's no commercial company behind it deciding to take it in a particular direction it goes in the direction in which the whole project is happy with So if they're still not convinced what benefits do you get by installing Debian free software in your enterprise you get software which is high quality which is built to standards which are open so I was talking about the BBC case earlier There is certainly software for streaming audio and video and for viewing it It's built around standards which haven't been put together in a closed room but are open, things like the OGG standard for audio and video which we're streaming our video on at the moment Portability is where you are not so dependent on a particular hardware configuration which you have because Debian will run on such a wide range of hardware By investing in free software you get to take part in the direction that the software is taking On the simplest level that's just by submitting bug reports and giving feedback to the project If you are able to invest more into a project then you can actually implement new features yourselves to meet your business needs and by doing that you can actually get software which works a lot better with your organisation than you would have to buy off the shelf and you're independent of your suppliers so that means that you're not actually dependent on one particular company If that company decides to take the software in a direction that you don't want to go or they decide to stop supporting it you have the opportunity to go somewhere else and carry on with the system that you have and that in itself is very important Unfortunately a lot of people don't see it until it's too late, until they've been burnt and they actually want to carry on with a piece of software that's been obsolete already I hope that's given you an idea of the reasons why you might want to look at free software in more detail Do you have any questions? Yes, I was just going to ask Would you be able to give us an idea of is it a complete range of size of companies you deal with or is it meaning large or small or what have you? It's medium to large really The support that we offer is third level support Normally we would expect companies to have system administrators on site to do the general sort of stuff The support that we do is the more detailed problems where for example I had an open office not able to do digital signing stuff where we've actually got to go into the software and find out what's wrong and fix it Over at the back In the last two talks we heard a lot of free software and open source software is used in industry but I think a very important point which wasn't mentioned is actually that it generates labour in the area where it's enforced to use or where people are using it So do you have any figure, do you have a number you can say how many positions or how many labour was generated because of the use of open software in the area here? No, I don't have any figures We're in contact with a lot of open source companies who are working with open source software and certainly that would be several hundred people I would imagine in the UK Now I'm seeing a lot more positions in countries like Germany for example in Spain as well where the government is adopting Linux on a much wider scale Here in the UK people are using free software but it's not really caught on to the same extent in the economy yet Would you say that the number of available positions in the IT market is growing significantly in the last couple of years because of the use of open software? Probably not because there's already a big market for jobs for people fixing problems in proprietary software Windows and so on Linux is actually less labour intensive to administer So I don't see it as being a massive increase What I do see is a change in where the money is going So instead of software licences being paid to countries outside of the UK we're seeing people being employed with that money instead I was talking about flexibility which was emphasised in the last two talks Open Software is offering people and because of the flexibility you are able to adapt software but for adopting software you need people who do that actually So is this particular feature of Open Software increasing the number of jobs? Well in that sense yes it's increasing the number of jobs in the country in the place where people are working on the software as opposed to the jobs being belonging to companies that are writing one piece of software and then selling it to a lot of places all over the world So yes, certainly in Open Source there are jobs being created for this sort of work Yes, I've been told that there is a vast market of new applications that are coming online because of free software Can you give us any figures on how many different kinds of extra not the software development not the software maintenance but the jobs that are available because of the software being available I didn't get you Some factory might start turning out some kind of widget because there is free software available but they would have not done so had there not been the computer power to do it Right, and are there people doing that? Yes, certainly companies like Creditive exist because we are making use of free software Now I don't have figures on that exactly but it's more a case of in countries like the UK there's not a great deal of software being produced in comparison to the states or whatever that you're seeing the jobs being created for people to write the software instead of having to administer software So I see it more as a transition from where people are otherwise employed just to run software but to become a part of the software creation as well I can give a quick comment about job creation and entrepreneurship and businesses starting is the free software that people overlook such as the web The web is a product of free software open standards and there wouldn't be a .com startup anything without these tools that are provided here and .com stuff is pretty healthy right now this is where all the innovation is happening so we can really attribute job creation to that and these tools You got the numbers now you know how much it is 20% of all software services in Europe is free software it will probably be 30% in 2006 now 2010 is the EU report showing us from UN university merit in Netherlands so you should go to the net look that up 68% of new software when made by the industry all over is using free software so kind of the biggest users of free software is in-house because most businesses don't make of the shelf software that's just 7% most of the free software developers or the software developers in general working as consultants or in-house to the business system banking we saw the telecom industry here presented today but these companies that don't sell their software they sell something else they sell services so the tide has turned already what I'm telling these students when I'm travelling around is that when disregarding free software you say no to 68% of the industry are you stupid? so the problem now is basically it's not enough people knowing free software from the universities and colleges if they disregard and a lot of teachers have done that they will actually jeopardise your job opportunities because of the growth of free software great, thanks sir has there been any interest in desktop roll-ups in Britain or is it just not in the cards for anybody really? yes there is interest in desktop in the UK itself we are seeing some usage there was a project where quite a large number of desktops in the Scottish police were converted recently now that didn't actually take off and it's gone back again I think what I mentioned about how the adoption seems to be a few years behind some of the other countries now there are other countries which have had large desktop installations already and I think that we will certainly get to that stage at some point but at the moment in the UK the main area where it is growing I think on the commercial side is in the server room but as the software gets better and better people are going to take more note of the desktop as well I mean I said about Firefox and OpenOffice those are big on the windows desktop that makes it a lot easier to move if everyone is already using free software and also creative in Germany is a reseller for Zandros I believe does that mean that they support the or have a position on the recent agreement with Microsoft no we weren't party to that but have you queered it with them at all? I haven't myself I'm not the time aware of this stage ok well thank you very much