Open Source Downloads An Endangered Species

by Simon Phipps

With news this week that GitHub is banning storage of any file over 100Mb and discouraging files larger than 50Mb, their retreat from offering download services is complete. It's not a surprising trend; dealing with downloads is unrewarding and costly. Not only is there a big risk of bad actors using download services to conceal malware downloads for their badware activities, but additionally anyone offering downloads is duty-bound to police them at the behest of the music and movie industries or be treated as a target of their paranoid attacks. Policing for both of these -- for malware and for DMCA violations -- is a costly exercise. (Image credit: iconseeker.com)

As a consequence we've seen a steady retreat from offering downloads, even by those claiming to serve the open source community. First GitHub bowed out of offering the service, claiming that it was "confusing" for the clients. More recently Google followed suit, bringing Google Code Download services to an end. They stated that “downloads have become a source of abuse, with a significant increase in incidents recently”. Community reactions to this have been mixed.

GitHub didn’t have an alternative plan for it’s users and clearly has no desire to be a full-service community host. Google suggested using its Drive cloud file storage service to host files, though this is clearly far from ideal as, for a start, no analytics are available for downloaders. Small projects are left with a rapidly decreasing number of options. They could pay of course, for S3, but for a free downloader solution SourceForge seem to be the only high-profile answer. SourceForge are doing everything in their power to make it easy for users of Google Code and GitHub to transition across to their service and GitHub have even included a link to SourceForge in their help pages, recommending them as a viable alternative. SourceForge assures us that they have no intention of shutting down their upload/download services at all.

SourceForge providing an alternative is potentially handy for those whose projects would otherwise be held up by this lapse in services and they will no doubt welcome the wave of new users. The issue shouldn’t be coming up at all though. Confusion for and abuse by users may sound like reasonable pretexts, but perhaps the real problem encountered by both the closing services is a somewhat less reasonable one. There’s a growing expectation that they should regulate the downloads, acting the part of police on behalf of copyright holders.

The pressure to behave that way, whether through a desire to preserve a safe harbour status or simply to tread carefully in the eyes of the law, is an unreasonable hack that appears to mend copyright law online but in fact abdicates the responsibility of legislators to properly remake copyright law for the meshed society and over-empowers legacy copyright barons. These changes to downloads are an inconvenience for open source developers, but should serve as a warning to the rest of us that the copyright system is beyond simple patching.

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Migration Needs a Plan

by Guest Writer +Simon Phipps

Migration Needs A Plan

Simon Phipps, Meshed Insights Ltd

Perhaps you’ve considered migrating your company to an open source desktop productivity suite? There are a host of good reasons for such a move. The most obvious one that comes to mind is to save on license fees, but don’t be fooled. For the migration process to be a success and the full benefits to be reaped, you must invest in the changeover itself. Don’t believe that because you want to save money long term you should skimp short-term. A look at the City of Freiburg’s attempted migration reveals the dangers of treating the new software as a drop-in replacement. (Image right Credit: Wikipedia.org)

The true benefits of the change arise not from avoiding license fees but from the flexibility your company gains. That flexibility comes from cross platform interoperability and the longevity given to the tools and file formats you are free to use. Even simple changes can make a big difference. For example, a company-wide policy of using hybrid PDF format for all documents distributed internally is a significant first step into freedom. Distributing editable document versions of any format, open or not, encourages unnecessary complexity at the desktop as well as potentially limiting the life of your “corporate memory”.

Together these benefits give a significant level of control over your IT environment and the far lower rate of change makes documents accessible for the longest possible time. That stability alone ensures that the features in use across your company’s ecosystem are as interoperable as possible. Thus the savings come a little further down the line, once the new system is up and running, and not just as a result of the changeover.

To make sure that the changeover to open document formats and open source tools is a successful one (bringing all the desired benefits and being adopted quickly by staff), requires planning, foresight and intentionality with regard to the migration process itself. Continuing their practice of creating resources and “letting the work do the talking” The Document Foundation have recently issued a white paper explaining how to conduct a successful migration. Naturally TDF use LibreOffice as the open source suite to install, but other open source alternatives work just as well with the same ideas.

The migration guide condenses the hard-won experiences of a number of community contributors who make their living consulting on office productivity migrations. It walks through a 10-step plan, involving everything from analysis of your existing practices through training strategies and implementation of the new software and beyond into recording and learning from the process itself. Hopefully the paper will evolve as the community adds its experience – it’s a hybrid PDF after all, anyone can edit it and this would make a great focus for the cross-community collaboration some folk are calling for.

Already TDFs migration guide has a wealth of good advice, highlighting the need for planning, preparation and ongoing funding for making a change of this nature to your companies working habits. The obvious subtext to the document’s creation is that with the growing importance of the open Web and interoperability, making the migration to open source tools and formats is a consideration worth serious thought. It’s a change which may just make the difference for your company.

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Simon Phipps is currently President of the Open Source Initiative and a board member of the Open Rights Group and of Open Source for America. He has served on a number of advisory boards for other projects, including the GNOME Foundation, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, and OpenSPARC.

© 2013 Meshed Insights Ltd.   Licensed for use under CC-BY-SA 3.0 crediting meshedinsights.com, other rights reserved.

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