Enterprising the gnuniverse, a story about business.

There I was with a friend of mine, we were chatting about people developing software. Our focus turned onto small companies, and their needs, and the edge cases for selling into them, either in philosophy, or service, the "FLOSS" software solution.

We thought about it and working on the basis that backups are interesting, and they are seen as a necessary evil, how could FLOSS get that sale?

This created a conversation around the what it is that a business wants.

They want to spend as little as possible for as much as possible.
We discussed File and Print services, there are several ways to do that, samba if you have a non GNU/Linux network, and CUPS and NFS if you do have one, you can also use samba there.

What is it that the business wants. It wants as little pain as possible, religion is a pain, you are in love with an idea if it is there for it's own sake, that does not sell. What sells is if the people using it benefit from it, mostly by having an easier life as a result of this.

With this in mind if you are going to build a small business server here are a few things to think about.

Plan a basic model, , a mid range box, and then a top of the range box, each offering should build on the one below.
Sample offerings:
A bronze offering, perhaps a basic file and print server, capable of doing samba, with some file sharing for the office network.

Then plan a silver offering which offers the above and might also offer a wiki.

Then perhaps the gold offering would be a single sign on solution, again something in the domain area, using LDAP or yellow pages depending on the business.

Each version should allow you to easily move to it, and revert back to whatever business process that the business had before. This allows for testing, and reversion if something does not work out for the company trying this implementation.

It is vital to the success that the business can pick and choose any or all of the parts of the gold offering.

Consider also off site incremental backups, they cost power and some kind of broad band on the remote site, a directors home perhaps. What, not how it is done is of interest to us here, this is only suggested as one possible way. OpenVPN, being used and the box doing an incremental backup. Those who would decry this might suggest that there is too much data to start out with. Part of the process here could be to backup onsite first before deploying the offsite box.

Now you are offering things that make sense to business.

However the easy thing is to say, we can do this with tools X or Y and Z.

Well the hard thing is to say we do it with X, and allow people use Y or Z themselves. This is why you see "supported methods or software" from some companies. The fact you can do "it" whatever "it" is, twenty ways other than the supported way is the way forward here.

The GNU and the Penguin free software but not as you know it

Perhaps you come home from work and you plug in the PC or it is already on. You want to send a mail or you want to do something and your machine is slow, slower than yesterday, slower than last week, and if compared with your machine when you bought it, it seems to be at a standstill.
Welcome to the world of the PC, with its spy ware, its virus problems, designed by Microsoft, build by Microsoft, and the problems get worse year on year. You are fed up doing a reinstall, your getting good at it, you think "There must be a better way to use your computer, right?". Perhaps there is. There are most certainly alternatives. They don't involve black magic, visiting stores where some one has the answer it is always a new version or something. So you are thinking to yourself "There is something wrong with this model, I don't know what, but this does not feel right."

Well you have options, they are best kept secrets on the Internet but they exist. They are free, while using them you learn enough about your machine that you suddenly are able to do new stuff and it is not a trauma.

These options don't have a need for anti virus or anti spy ware software. They do have a requirement that you are willing to stop existing and start living at the keyboard. This entire blog was written at such a computer. It is not a MAC or some other strange beast. It is actually a PC the difference is that the software that it is running is not windows. It is in fact a form of GNU/Linux.

There are many varieties of this software. There are many versions, so unlike the Model T Ford only in black, there are many names to essentially similar products and most of the skills you learn on any computer can be translated to a GNU/Linux system.

So rather than thinking I want to use "Word" you don't want to use the word, word, you should be thinking I want write a document, or I want to print something.

This I want to use "Product Name" is broken thinking. Think about it, it convinces you there is only one way to do something, a certain fallacy. There is not. It is not something you should be thinking but those nice people in the marketing department have you talking that way. You want do do work with numbers, you want a spreadsheet. There are lots of offerings out there even for Windows, did you know that? Just go to http://www.openoffice.org check it out. Guess what it is free to download, and to use. A full office package. It can open and close .doc format documents, and with some add ins it can even read .docx.

What a digression, now back to the core. You find the application that lets you edit and format documents and you use it. You find the application that lets you edit and format spreadsheets, presentations, it is all in one. Fun!

So what has this to do with GNU/Linux, well imagine you turn on your computer and you want to use the computer. It offers a complete system that you can use from door to door. It looks after all sorts of things, scanners, printers, monitors, mice keyboards. Most any off the shelf equipment will work straight away with GNU/Linux.

Gamers, they have choices but mostly they want to play their games so they have this program called "wine", it provides an environment similar to the environment that windows provides in a native way and allows you to run (most) windows programs.

However to get back the to the core point, what is it about GNU/Linux you want to do. Browse the web, order a book or CD, a flight or holiday, you can do that with your system. You can send email.

What might startle you to know is that most spam comes from virus software that takes over computers and makes them part of a weapon on the Internet. While you may get spam, you won't be sending it with GNU/Linux the spammers don't have the tools to make the bot nets [compromised windows machines, sending spam around the planet, if your computer likes being on the Internet is it part of one?], with the different versions. It is kind of like the Model T problem impacts all car owners, but a fault in one car part today will impact maybe one or two models on a couple of ranges at most.

So apart from removing spam from the Internet what else is good?
Well people not having problems with their machines getting slower for no apparent reason.

So at this point I tell you about three links you should check out.

http://www.debian.org
(deb ian)

http://www.ubuntu.com
(ooobuntu)

http://www.gnewsense.org
(gnu sense)

The one in the middle is the most popular desktop. The top one is the most popular server, and the one on the bottom is the most radical, it is here more so as a curiosity.

So enough about me, in another post I will tell you how to get support, for these versions of GNU/Linux.

If it all looks a bit daunting I will help people get up and running via some pointers to docs, and with some really simplified help. No substitute for the real thing.

What is in the news today

Over on the register dot co dot UK (say it like it reads ;-)), they are talking about PC World a UK chain who sell computers. Well, one of their staff refused to repair a machine that that had GNU/Linux installed on it. Of course when contacted by the hacks (in the journalistic sense), from el reg the nice people in the Dixons HQ said they would fix it. However in my opinion they owe this person a lot more now.
The free advertising, the fact that we all now know Dixons will do their duty under the sale of goods act or whatever it is now called, is great for them. What about the core issue. The sad fact that people don't know about their options surprises me.

For instance I had dealings with a person this morning, a professional woman in her fifties I would guess. Well educated, and good at what she does I referred to the news as we heard it this morning. Microsoft had managed to be convicted by the European Court of First Instance, and the fines stood.
Cost wise that is not a big issue to Microsoft, no in fact every day they did not publish the specification that the court called upon them to do was another day that they managed to keep their customers though the methods of monopoly.

For a moment, let us also consider the damaging material that has come to light about their involvement, or to be more politically correct one of their staff whom they hinted was behaving in an ultra vires fashion. This person had put pressure on people to join the ISO standards bodies to swing a vote on OOXML to create a method for document presentation that would have allowed Microsoft defeat a standard that is already in existence by offering the ludicrous concept of "Competition in Standards". The whole idea of a standard is that you have something you can measure up against and it works. Round car wheels and square wheels come to mind.

What was really annoying about this is that there has been a standard in XML and documentation around for a while now. ODF is it's name. It is ISO approved and obviously sticking to standards was not the game of Bill and Steve.

As a friend of mine would say, "Gaaaaa it's just nuts!!".

Here you have the biggest company in the software world, doing things that are not software. They are debasing the marketplace by being a monopoly (convicted again, the first time was over the inclusion of the internet explorer with windows 95). Then they are doing things in many countries that adds up to an attempt to prevent competition by messing with the ISO and how it works.

As a result of the latter it appears that several senior people around the ISO are now looking at how their organisation works. It took a big company to corrupt their world view, of far from everything in the garden being rosy, the topsoil and drainage were in deep trouble, but work will begin to prevent that happening again.

So going forward what are your options if you are a consumer?

Microsoft will still be installed on a PC if you try to buy it from PC World or their ilk anywhere on planet earth. However you have a choice.
You can get a GNU/Linux system. More about your choices later!
Search for Debian, Ubuntu, gNewSense, Redhat, Mandriva, SuSE online. I'll discuss this in my next post.