Open Source
December 9, 2006 | By Joel Dehlin | 12 Comments
A number of you mentioned that you were interested in how/if the Church uses or contributes to the open source community.
The promise of open source, I guess, is free software which is more stable because the world is helping to find and fix your bugs. What’s not to love? We’d love it to work out that way more often. We’ve had some success using open source stuff, but we’ve also had some problems. Following are a few random places we’ve dabbled.
1) Java Stack. We use several open source components for our java stack (including Hibernate, Spring and others). It has been painful for us to integrate these all into a common stack, and we’ve done most of that work ourselves. Now that it’s done, our developers are extremely productive in it. You have to ask if the money we’ve spent developing and the money we will spend keeping it up-to-date is worth the “vendor independence” we gain from not buying some commercial offering. To date we think we’re still on the right path, but we’ll be watching carefully as tools mature.
2) Linux. Linux is free! Or we wish it were. We pay for libraries we need, we pay for integration services and we pay for support. We hope we won’t end up paying for using the IP in Linux, but one never knows. ”Free” just doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
3) Nagios. We use Nagios for monitoring in our data center. This has been a pretty good experience for us so far. Some of our developers have contributed back to this project (see next point).
4) Contribution. I’m conflicted on having developers contribute to open source projects. On one hand, it’s the polite thing to do. You take from the community–you should give back. In addition developers think it’s cool to contribute to open source projects. It’s a badge of honor, in a way. On the other hand, there are some downsides. First, you risk legal & intellectual property issues if people aren’t careful. Second, it can be a massive productivity drain. If you have developers on staff (or if you’re a developer interested in getting involved) be cautious. You’d be shocked out how much time can whir by as a developer gets involved in both downloading and contributing to open source projects. It’s one thing to download and use the binaries. It’s another thing altogether to download the source, modify it, build it, test it and then check your changes back into the sky.
5) Feature Sets. I’ve found the feature sets wanting in some of the open source software I’ve played with. OpenOffice is getting much better, but still misses some of those key little features I’m used to in MS Office. I’m hoping it catches up. I’ve yet to find an email/calendaring systems that comes close to Exchange & Outlook. Open source ERP? Don’t we wish? It seems like almost all of the Open Source we might care about is “getting close” or “almost there.”
To be clear, I love the idea of Open Source. However it’s not the panacea that many would claim. There are hidden costs and feature/service tradeoffs to be made. We carefully weigh each option (both the proprietary and the open source alternatives) and try to make decisions on the merits.
There is an interesting place we’d like to use the open source concepts, however. If you’re like me, you’ve developed a number of spreadsheets, databases and simple apps to help with various callings you’ve had. We’d like to make that easier for developers to do and to share what they’ve done. Stay tuned. I’ll be talking more on the blog about how we’re going about making that happen…
James Lee Vann said...
It is very interesting reading your blog, thank you. Your comments on Open Source seem to be level headed and well thought out, as would be expected from a man of your experience. I would like to pont out that no one (at least no one that knows anything about it) ever said Linux (or free software in general) is free as in cost- only free as in speech!
The other challenge for programs like OpenOffice.org is that as soon as they start to catch up, Microsoft releases something better (like Office 2007). Well, its good to have competition!
I look forward to hearing more from you- and one more thing- Why not use an open source license for Church produced software- namely Personal Ancestial File?
December 21, 2006 9:20 pm #
Mariano MARINI said...
First of all sorry for my bad english (I’m italian). Thougth that we are speaking about IT from Church point of view, I wonder why we (as Saint) are so cold about Open Source. I think that the spirit of Open Source is more close to Zion’s spirit than the proprietary one.
Open Source help poeple working together; looking for community growing in knowledge and goods. Being payed for its work (namely support or customisations) not for a copy of CD. If you want I can tell you how Open Source helped many of my friends using IT going out from illegality of non authorized copies. Not speaking of whose that have a more stable Pc.
I Think that Church sould promote Open Source IT as well as English class.
December 22, 2006 5:00 am #
Norman Jarvis said...
For an Open Source “email/calendaring systems that comes close to Exchange & Outlook” try either Scalix 11 (http://www.scalix.com/) or the latest Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com/). We use Scalix 11 as the backend and Outlook/Evolution as the clients on Windows/Linux. Scalix is a very nice collaboration/groupware server.
As far as an Open Source ERP that is enterprise worthy and very stable try out Compiere (http://www.compiere.org/).
Embracing Open Source has more to do with desire than with whether the solution is “getting close” or “almost there”. Embracing Open Source requires a change of heart.
December 22, 2006 10:36 am #
Mariano MARINI said...
When I speak about Open Source and its lacks I feel like when I speak about Tithing. My non member friends think that I loose 10% of my income. I try to explain to them that, in revenge, I gain much more in spiruality.
Now, could be that with Open Source I loose 10% of actual IT possibilities, but I gain much more in feeling good with my spiritual point of view. (We are here on the earth to grow and serving not to make bussiness).
More of all I beleive that each new discovery is a gift from God and we need to share it not to sell it. I’m an Open Source in heart because I’ve shared my sources with others, and my customers too, well before knowing the Open Source Community.
December 22, 2006 12:22 pm #
Mary Jurgaitis said...
You menitoned spread sheet/databases for callings. I have used LOTUS 123 Approach as my database and really like the way it works. Do you have any thoughts on it? Does the church use a database that really works with all the information they have to keep?
Comment on OpenOffice – my husband downloaded it and uses it in place of Micorsoft (whatever). I agree with it missing some things. I do a lot with my computer and when my husband asks me to help him out with something he is trying to do, I become very frustrated because of those missing things. I know some people like the idea of Open Source, BUT it has it’s drawbacks. What does the Church use for producing it’s literature (pamphlets, magazines, etc.)?
One other comment about all of this that you are doing, Joel — WOW!!
December 22, 2006 12:30 pm #
Terrance Nemodan said...
The promise of open source is not “free software which is more stable because the world is helping to find and fix your bugs.” That is merely one of the potential advantages.
The promise of open source is found in his paragraph on Java: “It has been painful for us to integrate these all into a common stack, and we’ve done most of that work ourselves.” The fact that you *can* integrate it into a common stack at all is the promise of open source. You *can* do it yourself. “Free as in freedom” as they say.
Open source is not about giving warm fuzzies with expensive support contracts. You *can* pay for Linux support, or you *can* hire the technical expertise to do it yourself. The cost is probably similar in the end. The difference is, “who do you want to blame?” With proprietary software, you are forced to buy the service contract, and you cannot fix it yourself.
December 22, 2006 1:24 pm #
Mariano MARINI said...
I will you consider an italian point of view.
PAF, UDEWIN and for some features The Scriptures are LDS software unusable for those who don’t know English.
I translated PAF in italian and then I asked the permission to share my italian version with others. The reply was affermative and so in my branch we use the italian version.
This involve a lot of work (changing program’s resource file) and still is not complete because there are message that are embedded into the program source and these are not easly changeable. So we have a 90% italian version.
Few mounths ago I started to translate NetBeans IDE. Easy and quickly. Only text files. I do in some hours what I did (for PAF) in some days.
This is a consequence of sharing vs keeping.
December 23, 2006 7:55 am #
Arthur Smith said...
I’m quite impressed – I manage a software development group for a relatively small organization (about 150 employees directly using our software, several tens of thousands of external “users”), and we’ve been wrestling with many of the same issues. We also adopted Java with hibernate/Spring (tomcat server with web applications and web services), working with our Oracle database, which definitely had a learning curve but we seem to be doing well now. One problem lately has been finding new people to hire who won’t require months of training to get up to speed with the rest of our group – I’d be interested to hear how you go about finding good employees with the right sort of experience (and keeping them)!
December 24, 2006 9:35 pm #
Ryan G. said...
I use OpenOffice 2.1 all the time in everyday life (I can’t afford Office 2007). I detest Microsoft’s file formats. I recently ran across a project or two that allows Microsoft Office to write and read the OpenDocument file format (the default file format of OpenOffice 2.0). I hope this is of some help to anyone out there.
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
This is a Microsoft supported project.
December 31, 2006 1:54 pm #
Mariano MARINI said...
Thank you Ryan. I’m using OpenOffice since version 1.0. I install last version (2.0) in my laptop with Suse OOS and into family desktop with Win XP. Now I’ll update to 2.1
Do you know if there’s a converter for .PUB files? I’ve many MSPublisher files that I want convert to open format.
January 2, 2007 4:56 am #
Carl Worth said...
> The promise of open source, I guess, is free software which is more stable
> because the world is helping to find and fix your bugs.
From reading the rest of your post, you seem to be using “free” in the sense
of no financial commitment necessary to obtain the software. A more
significant sense of “free” as it applies to this software is the freedom that
one gets to modify the software as desired. This advantage is quite independent
from any advantage of extra stability due to more people helping with the
code.
I would hope that the church would think more about Free Software in terms
of the freedom it provides to users of the software, and the important
Christian/humanitarian aspects of sharing software. The difference between
Free Software and proprietary software isn’t a question of price, but one of
the freedoms granted to the users of the software. I think that providing Free
Software, (rather than proprietary software), to the members of the church
could form an important part of the church’s mission to perfect the saints.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
> 1) Java Stack. We use several open source components for our java stack
> (including Hibernate, Spring and others). It has been painful for us to integrate
> these all into a common stack, and we’ve done most of that work ourselves.
> Now that it’s done, our developers are extremely productive in it.
The fact that you’ve been able to do that integration work is in large part enabled
by access to the source code and the freedom to modify it, correct?
> You have to
> ask if the money we’ve spent developing and the money we will spend keeping
> it up-to-date is worth the “vendor independence” we gain from not buying some > commercial offering. To date we think we’re still on the right path, but we’ll be
> watching carefully as tools mature.
Does a single provider proprietary software offering even exist that does
everything your customized stack does? If not, would the separate pieces
available from separate vendors be customizable enough to allow them to
be integrated just as well? Would the church be willing to spend the amounts
required to get the same level of customization (access to all source code)
as currently available through the open source stack?
I don’t know all the answers to those questions. But I will say that I’m happy
to see the church taking advantage of open source offerings where it makes
sense. And here are a couple of further questions:
1. As for the money already spent doing integration work: Wouldn’t many other
individuals/organizations be able to benefit from what the church has done
here? Wouldn’t it fit squarely into the church’s charitable mission to share
that work with everyone?
2. As for money to be spent keeping all of this up-to-date: With open source
projects being the pieces integrated, there’s no doubt that the best way to
keep those costs down is to push the changes upstream to the open source
projects themselves. As you discussed below, contributing does have costs,
but when you’ve done this work already, you can save a lot by letting the
upstream maintainers take over your improvements where applicable, so that
they’re already there in the next upstream release, and you’re not stuck having
to re-implement changes or port them forward from the old release.
> 2) Linux. Linux is free! Or we wish it were. We pay for libraries we need, we
> pay for integration services and we pay for support. We hope we won’t end up
> paying for using the IP in Linux, but one never knows. ”Free” just doesn’t mean
> what it used to mean.
The important way in which Linux is “free” is the freedom it provides you to use
and modify it in any way you want. This is the same freedom you’ve been
taking advantage of in so many open source components of your Java
software stack. As for fear of having to pay for “using the IP in Linux” that’s a
groundless fear. What evidence do you have that using Linux carries any more
risk here than any other software (whether Free Software or proprietary)? And if
you are concerned about risks, your provider of support for Linux is likely already
providing assurance in the form of indemnification anyway.
> There is an interesting place we’d like to use the open source concepts,
> however. If you’re like me, you’ve developed a number of spreadsheets,
> databases and simple apps to help with various callings you’ve had. We’d like
> to make that easier for developers to do and to share what they’ve done. Stay
> tuned. I’ll be talking more on the blog about how we’re going about making that
> happen…
It would be interesting to see more cooperative development happening among
technical church members along those lines.
Even more significantly, I would love to see the technical departments of the
church adopt a stance that no software should ever be distributed by the
church under a proprietary software license. In your original blog posting you
referred to the church having “an extended work force of millions of members
who are willing to contribute their time, talents and money to the Church.”
What better way to start taking advantage of that enormous pool of talent and
motivation than distributing software that would allow church members
themselves to offer improvements.
For example, you’ve indicated that you’re making an effort to improve
internationalization and localization in church software projects. At the same
time, I’ve seen many responses to your blog indicating that there are technically capable church members in many parts of the world that want to help, but currently cannot be considered for employment by the church. Wouldn’t it be
great if members such as these could voluntary make contributions to things
such as localization? Who better to improve things like language support
in church software than the native-speaking church members themselves
who use the software all over the world?
-Carl
January 5, 2007 3:23 pm #
Mariano MARINI said...
I wonder if we can develop an UDEnix as Free Software.
I started to translate UDEwin in italian but I’m considering to make it in Java.
Can someone give me the format of data file where to store extracted data?
What about web based software for storing genealogic data (insteed of PAF)?
January 7, 2007 10:50 am #