Up next in the open source presentation at the Pennsylvania Library Association conference was Joe Lucia. Earlier this year I got to hear Joe talk at VALE and he had much more time then to get his points across - so check out that summary. Joe started his talk by saying that he was going to change his focus from nuts and bolts to deeper view of open source. He said that open source is not about saving money - while that can often be the case, that’s not the argument for it in the long run.

His first claim is that to understand open source you have to understand the concept of the commons - which is a legal concept that goes back to English common law. He pointed us to the writings of Lawrence Lessig who he thinks is a good thinker about what’s happening with ideas and intellectual property in the digital age.

In addition to Lessig’s writing, he recommended that we look at The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler and The Success of Open Source by Steve Weber (which I’m reading right now).

Joe says that we need to take our infrastructure and move it to open source because of what libraries stand for; participatory culture, free flow of information and creation of knowledge.

Joe asks us what open source is - in the most naked sense. It’s software where you can get access to the code and use it and change it (the license says so). But in a cultural sense, I take a piece of code you wrote and then I add to it and then I put it back into the software - you get a community built set of tools that does what that community needs done. The focus in the open source world is on the process used to develop it - not the product. Innovations in process are often much more profound and compelling than the product that comes out of the process (Weber, p.56). In open source the primary focus is on making things better for users - as opposed to making something so that I can own it and you can buy it.

Joe explains how good open source products emerge:

• someone has a need, software is developed to scratch an itch
• you build or extend on work that has already been done
• components are highly modularized - you take small pieces that do things well and put them together
• simple standards and methods link them together
• instead of long complex release cycles (how many years did it take for Vista to come out - and is it stable yet?)
• Linux comes out with releases every month (fixes and features)
• a large community looking at code bugs are patched quicker - faster than the 20 guys who are testing MS

In short, open source is superior because of the way it’s built - the fact that the community is building it for the community - not for commercial reasons.

That said, there are real costs to participating in open source:

• migration costs
• support costs
• investment and development
• maintenance costs

So how do you get there (to switch to open source) in libraries when you have legacies of systems in place that do things we need to do from a business standpoint? Joe says that we all need to make some sort of payment on a monthly basis for technology in our libraries. He thinks that if we figure out how to redirect 1/4 of this money into to the development of open source software we can fund an open source revolution - an idea I like a lot!

Joe calls librarians to commit to a deeper culture of technology resource sharing in our libraries. We should take the risk of cutting off the support costs on our stabler systems so that we can redirect those funds to open source development. We need to understand why this matters to what we do culturally - library leaders need to push this agenda - it can be done and should because the open source mission matches our cultural mission in libraries.

Joe ends by encouraging us! He says that we’re almost there - there may be no system that can do everything you want it to do right now - but the more libraries that contribute the better it will get.

Today I participated in a series of open source talks at the Pennsylvania Library Association (PaLA) conference. After I gave my talk, John Houser from PALINET stepped up. You can view his slides on his blog.

John started with a very important point - you don’t have to install an open source operating system to use open source software - can run on it on Linux, Windows and Mac (depending on the software package).

I always tell people in my open source talks that when they go back to their computers (at home and work) they should switch to Firefox. John backed me up and told everyone to use Firefox because it’s not only better in all ways but more standards compliant than IE. He also advised that once you get Firefox you want to install plugins to get the most out of it. He feels that the best plugin to install is a delicious tool or a furl tool - that way you can bookmark your resources on the web. I’d add to that that you should add Adblock Plus.

John pointed out that we’re seeing public libraries replacing Windows and MS Office with Linux and OpenOffice - saving money in licensing. These libraries are saying that they’re providing better services than they could with proprietary software. He mentioned two library systems in particular, Crawford and Howard.

One of the common myths that I hear a lot is that open source is too hard for libraries to adopt, John points out that open source apps do not necessarily require more skills than proprietary software - some are even easier - like Firefox (over IE). Even Linux is getting much easier to install and comes with a whole set of applications you can use right out of the box. Why not try to install Ubuntu (the easiest to use of the Linux desktop distributions) on an old PC to create a place to play and learn.

The other big myth is that open source isn’t secure. The fact of the matter is that Windows was designed for a single user and security was as add on later. Linux was designed for networked computers and so security is inherent. Any IT professional who doesn’t know that might want to find some continuing ed classes of his/her own (that last sentence added by me).

I’ve been saying for years that librarians should learn some programming skills so that they can participate in the development of their own applications. John mentions that some librarians might respond to that by saying, “I’m the librarian and that’s not what i do …” His opinion (and I agree) is, that to maintain our relevance in the world we should all know how to program to some degree - being able to read a basic script and understand what it does is very very useful. Open source development is a way of resource sharing and that is what we do.

One other note that John added is that as librarians we’re used to answering questions - but we’re not so great at asking them - we need to learn to ask - it’s a real skill. Why? Because if we know what to ask then we can ask for developers to create the tools we want and need in our libraries.

Overall a great talk and a great group of attendees too. Keep an eye out for part 2 which I hope to write up next.

The people over at the MaintainIT project have these great resources called Cookbooks for libraries and librarians. One of the ones that struck my fancy (of course) was the Planning for Success: Free and Open-Source Software in Libraries cookbook. Check it out and the other resources available for free!

While this post by Ramón Casero Cañas focuses on open source in education - it fits perfectly with libraries as well:

So maybe we should look for the reasons to adopt open source somewhere else. The main characteristic of open source, if done properly, is that it promotes the formation of a community of people who can get involved with the project. This is arguably a good thing in education: engaging students and letting them play with the tools. Open source projects also function as a tutoring environment, where students can learn good practice from more experienced users and developers.

Thus, maybe the main reason for promoting open source in education is that it will help students learn more. But how? In fact, the ‘why’ leads to the ‘how’. If open source is to be successful in education, it cannot be just a matter of policy or, in general, a top-down approach. Its community and playful nature needs to be acknowledged and promoted amongst students, be it through local Linux User Groups (LUGs), creating fun projects (write a computer game in a collaborative way), or joining external projects.

Read the entire post here.