port7 – co – uk

Recently been thinking, that if there is one thing that Open Source Community do really well is collaboration, and building community. Something that very few ‘Enterprise’ places do really well.

Considering why can’t an Enterprise do that, why can’t they? Is the question I am asking.

If I was starting a Open Source Project outside of work, I would be working the online community, frequenting IRC Channels, Mailing Lists, and Blogs of related projects. Announcing my new project and gathering a team around that.

Things like that just don’t seem to happen in Enterprise, sure there are no IRC Channels, or Mailing Lists. I guess the equivalent are teams, both support and project specific. To but in on those would be difficult.

Why can’t we do it?

Probably a number of you reading this will now have seen the announcement at Google I/O about the new product from the makers of Google Maps, what they are calling Google Wave.

What Google Wave is attempting to do its effectively re-invent E-mail, they asked themselves, what would E-Mail look like if it was invented today? The answer is something that looks like the lovechild of Gmail, Wiki, SubEthaEdit, Twitter, and Sharepoint. I think it could catch on.

As someone who makes his daily bread in the very conservative world of corporate IT, I can’t see it making inroads here (which is a shame), though the fact that Google are releasing the code and allowing people to host their own web-servers might make that interesting, especially with the federation aspect of the protocol.

I for one can’t wait to give it a test go, and I may even deploy it in some of my clients, if it grows in maturity.

Well done Google (again)

So yesterday I received a sales call, not a surprise as I get lots of them each day. But this time I was pleasantly surprised to discover that is was from Sirius IT, for those that don’t know Sirius are probably one of the more successful FOSS consultancy firms here in the UK. Having been around the Linux community since 1996 I have been aware of the good work they have done, and the growth they have enjoyed.

Unfortunately I couldn’t give them much work, as my current client is pretty much well served by a big outsourcing deal with Capgemini. Though I was pleased to tell the chap that they already use a significant amount of FOSS in the IT estate, and find it works very well thank you.

What encouraged me about this call was just that it indicated Sirius IT was growing into a serious contender in the UK IT industry. They have obviously started this cold-calling strategy to win business, and I hope it works from them. It certainly makes a change to hear a company calling and specifically mentioning Open Source software. In the current climate, I really think FOSS has a lot to offer business in the UK, and hopefully initiatives like this from Sirius will do a lot to make that happen.

So well done Sirius IT, I hope to send some business your way in the future, maybe not with the current client but maybe another one.

So having a number of chats with various people about what we would like to see in a corporate twit platform.

Following from a blog post by friend and colleague Mr K, I have been thinking, could we build something?

That naturally progresses to, what do we want to build, how would we build it, and with what would we build it?

Addressing the first question, could we build it? The answer is of course yes, it’s just software and assuming we have a sensible set of requirements and some clever bod’s anything is possible.

The second question is what do we want to build, is possibly the tricky one. Why not just use Twiter? Well essentially my problem with that is that it is a hosted service, and for any corporate having potentially private and sensitive company info hosted on a server outside it’s control is just simply a no-go. Also on the privacy aspect, your company tweets could appear in the public tweet list.

So what do we want?:

• Ability to ‘follow people’
• Ability to create groups, and also to follow groups
• Ability to search posts, both all and people you are following
• Options for backend auth (LDAP, AD, OpenID)
• Logging, so all posts can be logged
• Ability to post and read by various means, IM, Web, SMS, etc
• Scalability, this should be able to scale to corporations of 100,000+ users

So with with what should we build it, given the requirements above, could this be done with the LAMP stack? Or do we need a proper daemon written in C? Not being a developer, I don’t know these things. My guess is that LAMP could do all the above, though the scalability requirement might be tricky (or not!)

Anyway I am throwing these thoughts out to the ether, feel free to comment, volunteer to do it, or just shoot me down

Reading an interesting post about community equity, some interesting thoughts there. I have been wondering myself recently about how business and community can help each other, getting involved in communities I think is a big step forward.

I may post more about this in the future….

Dear Lazyweb,

Can someone please tell me what the difference between NLPOS9 and IRES2 is? And what do I get over NLPOS9 by going with IRES2?

Is it drivers, is it admin tools, is it support agreements? What is it!!??

Is anyone aware of any Debian derivatives that are targeted to the Retail market? Looking at the current market, it seem that Novell has it cornered. That can’t be a good thing!

Got a strange task today, was asked to review a Satelite Internet Thingy for the owner of the company I am currently assigned at. Basically this guy has a boat and wants to access the company VPN and do Video Conferencing from the boat.

So while doing this we thought we would have a look at the boat it’s going on. Some people just live in a totally different world! This thing is bigger than my house!!

Working on PCI: DSS at work atm, and I getting frustrated with the wishy-washy statements from our QSA and the PCI Council, that really don’t help me in convincing the exec that we need to take this seriously. They are under the impression that the PCI Council don’t really have any ‘teeth’ and so can’t really justify the spend to become PCI compliant, and in a way I agree.

So I decided to submit a petition on the petition website to ask that the government make it a legal requirement that companies become PCI compliant.

I don’t know if it will do anything but its worth a go, so when it gets approved and I get the URL, I will let you know what it is so you can sign it

This is for the contracters out there…

Interviewer: So, Steven Crony, you are the newly appointed Minister for the Knowledge Based Economy. What exactly does that entail?

Crony: Well, John, its all very exciting. We have to encourage the flexible, knowledge-based workforce, stimulate e-commerce, and take this country forward into the 20th Century.

Interviewer: Er, 21st Century?

Crony: Is it? How time flies!

Interviewer: Um, and you yourself have considerable experience in the knowledge sector?

Crony: Well yes, for many years I worked for ScrambledEggs.com. Until they suggested I …, er I mean, I decided to move into politics.

Interviewer: So what exactly is knowledge-based working?

Crony: It’s really quite simple. You take on computer whiz-kids straight out of college and hire them out at, say, 1000 a day.

Interviewer: that would be, … er … 200,000 a year?

Crony: 200 K. Right. And you pay them a salary of, say, 25 K. They travel all over the country, visiting your clients and doing very clever stuff on those computer thingies. And every month you invoice the client and get a nice big cheque.

Interviewer: So that’s … er … 175K profit then?

Crony: No, obviously it’s not all profit. There’s expenses. Secretaries. Directors salaries. Directors Cars …

Interviewer: … Buildings …

Crony: Well, you don’t need many offices because the staff are all out working for clients …

Interviewer: … Computers …

Crony: Good God no, the clients have those. But its very expensive to run a company properly. Big board rooms, shiny oak tables, that kind of thing…

Interviewer: … I see …

Crony: … and then you have to make sure there’s some money left to pay out to the shareholders.

Interviewer: Such as yourself.

Crony: Quite.

Interviewer: Well that sounds great. But surely it can’t
be that easy. There is some risk involved?

Crony: Well, the risk is that after a few years, the whiz-kids will wonder why they are only getting 12.5% of the money they earn. Then they leave, and set up their own companies. As independent contractors they might charge as little as, oh, 60,000 to do precisely the same job.

Interviewer: But you’re not going to take that lying down?

Crony: Obviously not. As a minister, I won’t stand for it. The thing is it’s all about tax avoidance. Once they have set up their own companies, they can make all the profit. Then they can take the profits as dividends without paying any National Insurance.

Interviewer: You mean, just like any other businessman who makes a profit?

Crony: Exactly. Just as if they were real entrepreneurs!

Interviewer: Which … I suppose … they’re not?

Crony: Oh no no. These people aren’t entrepreneurs. A real entrepreneur, you see, borrows stacks of money from a bank, and hires staff to do the work. If it succeeds, he becomes a millionaire, and makes a large donation to the Labour Party. If it fails he sacks the staff, and borrows more money, from a different bank, and starts all over. Whereas these people…

Interviewer: … the independent contractors …

Crony: … the independent contractors, they do the work themselves. And they expect to be treated as real businesses!

Interviewer: And they pay less tax than if they worked for ScrambledEggs?

Crony: ScrambledEggs Dot Com. Well no, actually they pay more tax. Because obviously if they worked for us, they wouldn’t earn very much, so wouldn’t pay much tax at all. But it’s about fairness you see.

Interviewer: But some of these independent contractors say that you are going to make them pay income tax and National Insurance on the entire fee they charge to a client, and not allow them any company expenses before tax.

Crony: No that’s not true at all. We only want tax on 95% of the fee.They will be allowed 5% for all their expenses. That’s more than generous.

Interviewer: But, … let me see if I have got this straight … a company like ScrambledEggs dot com would pay PAYE and National Insurance only on that part of the fee that actually goes to the worker as salary, say 12.5%, and would pay all its running costs before tax.

Crony: Yes.

Interviewer: So won’t the independents end up paying much more tax than the large companies?

Crony: Oh, much, much more. But they don’t have our overheads. Offices, Secretaries …

Interviewer: … Shiny oak tables …

Crony: … Shiny oak tables … I think I’ve made my point. Big companies like ScrambledEggs.com can’t possibly be expected to compete if the Independents continue to operate under the same tax rules as we do.

Interviewer: And they say that you won’t let them pay their training costs before tax?

Crony: Training? … Oh, training! Well honestly, if people are going to be extravagant they can’t expect the tax man to help.

Interviewer: So to recap, the Government is concerned that these independent contractors are paying less National Insurance than a full time employee?

Crony: Much less.

Interviewer: And they’re still getting all the benefits, like sick pay, maternity pay, unemployment benefit, when they are not paying their fair share?

Crony: Well no, since they are directors of their own companies, obviously they don’t actually get any of those things. But they should be willing to contribute for those less fortunate. Its about fairness, you see.

Interviewer: But you can receive dividends from your 3.7% shareholding in ScrambledEggs.com, and not pay any National Insurance on that?

Crony: Well obviously that’s completely different (laughing). I don’t do any work. You see dividends are unearned income. Since I don’t do any of the work, I get the dividends.

Interviewer: Whereas the contractors do the work …

Crony: So it’s quite wrong that they should take dividends.

Interviewer: I see. But, er, well, some might say that it was a Labour Party principle that workers should be able to profit from their own labour?

Crony: Now there’s really no need to bring up that old Bennite nonsense. We were elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour. We are fully committed to capitalist principles. It’s the bosses make the profits, you see? If the workers start thinking they can do the work by themselves, without any bosses, and keep all the profits for themselves, where would we all be?

Interviewer: Mr Crony, thank you.