Waving an Open Source Flag in Government

The Highs, The Lows
and Community Code

Aimee Maree Forsstrom
@aimee_maree

The codebase with orhpaned from the soure which meant that we had a lot of GPL violations in the code and the code base was unable to be updatedIt was Drupal5 and I decided at the time to build it from scratch in Drupal6 and toss out all the orphaned code

Who Am I and Why Am I Here

Worked in Information Technology since 2000

Been a Linux user since 1997

Early advocate for Open Source in Australian enterprise and government

Contributions to Content Management Systems and Linux administration

Dual bachelors degree with honours in IT and programming

Post graduate studies in law and licensing

Board member of Open Source Industry Australia

Aimee Maree ForsstromWorked in Government and Enterprise It Departments since 2000 worked in the areas of Networking and Software Egineering

Professional hand holder for Open Source

Early Advocate in Open Source

Eight Years Ago

Very different scene

Most Government Departments were

Microsoft Shops

Linux servers not the norm in government

Proprietary Content Management Systems

Licensing fees where in abunbance

Tenders favoured Closed Source Systems

Lets Start With a Story

As all good things do they start with a story...

In 2008 The Bat Phone Rings

We need you to rescue a project

In 2008 I was called in to assist the Australian Learning and Teaching Council on a new web application project thet needed to take from an outsource shop to internalThe name of the code base with Drupal along with that came two Linux Web Servers And the ALTC had never had a Development Department before

Putting Out Fires On a Navy Ship At War

The codebase was orphaned code and there was a lot of GPL violations that could not be easily removedThe effort to reconnected the code base was higher then the effort to rebuildSo we rebuilt and took two Linux webservers internal

In Comes Linux

Very different scene

Microsoft servers and Microsoft admins

Will it run on MSSQL?

Our new web applications ran on Linux

This meant we needed Linux servers

But we had no Linux admins?

The development team became the admins

The ALTC at that time was a 100% Microsoft ShopIn the beginning I was asked Make it run on Windows with MSSQLMy replyNo You dont know Linux this is fine I will build a team who doesAnd so started the first DevOps Environment in Aus Gov

Breaking The Open Source Myth

But people had their concerns

Security concerns

Licensing jargon

Support issues

Do we need to release all the things?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiVnMazRIII

I think this Video explains what I was dealing with better then I could

Management became nervousPeople had major concernsThis was new Territory and what did it mean that the code base was GPL? Who would support it if Microsoft would not?Where would we get our support to tick our insurance boxesI had to start debunking Myths

Building Teams

Skill sets require new ways of approaching hiring

Traditional recruiters did not understand needs

New technology with a small pool of people

Seek out community groups

We went grass roots

Who was contributing and what

Not just code but documentation

Who was willing to learn new skills

So I had to hire a teamWhere to go?Well I had been doing this Open Source thing for a while so I went to the Community Started attending local Drupal and Web meet-ups Started my own Learning Drupal meetup Industry Recruiters did not have the talent pool we needed back then Drupal was a rare skill set and Linux Admin was a larger pool but also a smaller subset of the marketPlus I needed To get people who knew Drupal and people who knew Linux there was not many but I found some

Support Subscriptions

Even with support subscriptions

Always requires hands on the code

No more can you throw it to a company to fix

But this adds so much value for peoples growth

Support Subscriptions are something that Governments loved their was a problem they wanted to throw money at a company and wake up tomorrow to have it correctedFor our Linux Distros we used RHEL and where able to get supportBut this is not the case in OSS even if Acquia exsisited at that time they are not a one stop solution Devs always need to be able to fix the solution because each build of a framework is unique

You Mean It's In The Open?

Lawyers could not understand

Academics were afraid

Lawyers where scared

Management was unaware what this meant

Academics needed a new model of sharing

We needed champions to advocate to people

We had a dual problem because the system was not just an OSS code base and Linux Servers but it was also under a Creative Commons Licensing RegimeThis was the first of its kind in Australia a complete solution that was out there in the open We needed champions we needed to run focus groups we needed to take people along a journey with us

Open Source and Open Standards

Teaching people what Open Source means

Getting contributions going with patches

Creative Commons on documentation

Creative Commons on web content

So this meant teachin people what open source means what it meant to contribute patches upstream What was creative commons and how it would not mean an Academics life work could be plagerised or claimed by another

Where The Story Ended or Started?

This was the first big Linux and Open Source software implementation that was in the public eye

Disclaimer: **If this did happen before there was no one talking about it

What came out of this was a clear need for federal government level policy change

This was the first public Open Source Solution that the Federal Government had ever taken onThe project was born out of about five years of research it was meant to shake things upThe department ended up getting consumed by a higher level federal departmentThey knew nothing of Linux and Drupal but there was a Champion insideThe research never intended to use OSS it was just what the outsource company usedIt became clear we needed new policies to enforce change at a tender level

Policy Changes Needed to Occur

In January 2011, the Australian government released a policy requiring agencies to consider open source software for all software procurements.

Applied to all ICT procurement after 1 March 2011.

Open Source software policy requires agencies to consider Open Source software in relation to any approach to market to acquire software.

Department of Finance Australian Federal Government

So a group of people and Industry bodies went to work to help the Federal Government (AGIMO) now Department of Finance set on the task of getting policies implemented

Three Principles For Open Source

Principle 1: Australian government ICT procurement processes must actively and fairly consider all types of available software.

Principle 2: Suppliers must consider all types of available software when dealing with Australian government agencies.

Principle 3: Australian government agencies will actively participate in Open Source software communities and contribute back where appropriate.

The biggest component of this new procurement policy was the three princples that where built into the policy from the start

Note on Policy three

This Ushered In a New Era of Change

New Ways of Managing Code

Traditional companies are used to purchasing a code base that has yearly (if) update cycles

We moved into a moving target

Drupal, like all OSS, requires constant updates

RHEL, unlike Windows servers utilizes a package management system so again constant updates

You need to implement a release cycle based on days, not months or years (in some cases)

OSS in traditonal non OSS environments means Release Cycle Change Alot of propietary software locks you into yearly and in the case of Microsoft mutli-year releases this means targets dont move people at first get afraid of moving targets you need to explain to them the benefits and security is a big factor here

Freedom For Developers

Development of plugins or addins for proprietary systems like Aptrix would take months

We reduced this to two weeks

Developers are not the issue

Developers want to see what is under the hood

Give your developers the source code and they will love you for it

Developers, Developers, Developers for the Seattlites in the audience Developers where not and are not a blockerDevelopers want to build cool thingsDevelopers want freedom to understand what they are buildingDevelopers will love you for this change

Reduction of Time To Market

For marketing it means faster updates

For management it means keeping up the pace

Where you replace propietary codebases you move from:

Four month release cycles

Weekly release cycles

Daily release cycles

For Marketing you can win them with ROI on Content and Advertising aka beating the traditional press cycleFor Management it means a reduction in cost on time to market

I have generally seen this trend of months to weeks to days

Return On Investment

"The proprietary solutions require increasing fees, require expensive support or maintenance costs, and often the more advanced or popular features the ones that really make a business difference require so much investment of time and were so hard to get people to do that in some cases, it is prohibitively expensive or impossible to get out of once you're in."

John Sherriden Department of Finance 2012

Now lets look at the main take away from that last slide

Return on Investment

Here is a quote from John Sherriden a major pioneer and promoter of the policy change Currently he is Australian Government Chief Technology Officer and Procurement Coordinator in 2012 I belive his title was Australian Government Information Management Office,

No Vendor Lock-In

Open Source enables no vendor lock-inMove away from old busines models

Open Source code bases can be hosted by anyone and can be supported by a variety of companies

Removed the government away from a single point of vendor failure

We could seek support from RedHat. We could also seek support from Linux based agencies

Another key point of why there was such a need was that Government had been burnt and burnt in a way that needed surgeryWe had Vendor lockin all over the place you wanted something changed it took not only months but thosands of $$ to give you an idea one time a CSS change cost us $25,000 let that sink in for a moment Another thing we had was a single point of failure and to a room of technologists I dont need to explain the issues there

DevOps

Allows for faster cultural changeHelped break out of silos of Dev and OpsCloser working of internal departmentsGreater collaboration of internal departmentsAllowed for the beginings of traditionally siloed departments to share code, knowledge and hardware

Flash forward and DevOps culuture is now the norm and this has helped us speed things along greatly in an OSS environment With DevOps we have been able to take the policy into the new era which we are currently facing in Australia and that is allowing our departments to share and collaborate together this was unheard of beforeOnce again ROI Time to Market consolidation of services Reduction in over all outlay

Here Comes The Clouds

The cloud lead to great innovation and changeBreak out of traditional operations requestsPut the power into the developers hands

Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

Started with Amazon opening up a data center in Australia and from the get-go ensuring they meet government standards

No need to spend months on vetting documentation when we could have a dev environment in one day

The Cloud lead to great innovation and change and Amazon where a large part of that in AustraliaThey where the first cloud providers to come in that meet Government data/security needs we no longer had to vet hosting companies we no longer had to have mountains of Microsoft servers based in gov datacenters (per agency)Reduction in electrity loss of Jobs? We also could not find the people to perform them

Consolidation of Resources

This has lead to consilidation projects

Current NSW initiative is the GOVDC

This is a Government Data Centre that also has a Government Marketplace

All these services are pre vetted and meet procurement initatives and security requirments

Various companies involved so you can move between vendors in the DC

Custom Code in a Propietary World

NSW State Library WOSIP

14 systems integrating to create one web portal

World class standard

Mixed licensing models

GPL CopyLeft

Permissive

Proprietary

My latest project was WOSIPWord class standatd we had to meet so it involved a lot of systemsExlibris EventBrite SaSS PaSSA lot of propitary You need to play nicely sometimes it cant all be OSS this is sad but still a representation of the times we live in

Slow and Steady Wins The Race

Tortise and the Hare

Incremental changes

Needs for a new development environment

This has been made easier with DevOps culture

Key take aways

Before DevOps

Linux on the desktop was a scary idea

How do you convince mangement

File systems and permissions

Replication of production ennvironment

We started with virtual machines

Eight years later

New Business Models

Breaking Down The Silos

Open Data for Citizen Engagement

First Gov Hack Day 2009 Thanks Steve King

Started small

Growth was inevitable Thanks Pia Waugh

This year was our first Cultural Data Hack ran by the NSW State Libary Thanks team!

You Will Not Always Get to the Goal Post

But Planting Seeds Is Most Important

We catalyze direction. That means you are the agent that makes something happen, but its your role to do this in an indirect way. Its my job to say, This is the hill we want to take, and heres why, and then let the organization take over from there.

Jim Whitehurst

RedHat CEO

Its a Hard Job But Someone Has To Do It

Long meetings

Lots of lawyers and legal speak

Providing the dream of where you're heading

Holding hands

Happy developers

Happy operations

Change in management models

Dont Be Discouraged

All this leads to greater citizen engagement

Reduction in overall operating costs and time to market

And more Open Data