Scottish Open Source Awards 2008: And The Winner Is... Everyone!

I WAS honoured recently to be asked to help judge this year's Scottish Open Source Software Awards and, if I am being honest, more than a little daunted by the task.

My fellow judges were Dan Shearer, a dynamic Australian now living and working in Scotland who was one of the original founders of the Samba project, and Greg Soper, managing director of SalesAgility.com, a company specialising in SugarCRM (Customer Relations Management), and who are the organisers of the awards.

SOSA 2008 was this year sponsored by SalesAgility.com and Open Source Scotland, whose website acts as a bridge between Open Source practitioners and organisations and companies wishing to develop, deploy or support Open Source applications and services, or to discover how Open Source can help cut costs, strengthen security and improve flexibility.

For those of you still unfamiliar with Open Source, OSS have a useful introduction on their website here.

The SOSA presentations, held at the Radisson Hotel in Glasgow, Scotland, on Friday November 28th, were staged as part of the Scottish Software Awards 2008, but I only plan to focus here on the Open Source elements of the ceremony.

The Open Source Awards were split into two categories: Education and Enterprise. The aim of the awards is to both publicise and celebrate some of the fantastic work being done in Scotland's industrial, commercial, educational and governmental sectors in the field of Open Source.

In the Education Excellence section, three entrants were shortlisted:

JISC Regional Support Centre (Scotland North and East), for AccessApps (http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/index.php)

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh (http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/), for their computing environment

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh (http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/), for their Moses automatic language translation tool

Let me deal with each entry in a little more detail.

JISC Regional Support Centre - AccessApps

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) is a strategic advisory committee working on behalf of the funding bodies for further and higher education (FE and HE) in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The JISC promotes the innovative application and use of information systems and information technology in FE and HE across the UK by providing vision and leadership and funding the network infrastructure, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and information services, development projects and high quality materials for education.

The Regional Support Centre is the first point of contact for institutions requiring information about JISC services, ICT-related awareness-raising, support and training.

Within Scotland, two RSCs have been established. One covers the area from the Glasgow area south to the Borders and from Lanarkshire to the south west coast (RSC Scotland South & West). The other covers the rest of Scotland, including all of the Highlands and Islands (RSC Scotland North & East), and it was from this centre that the SOSA entry came.

Now to their entry: Here's what they said about AccessApps:"The JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland North & East recognised a need to devise a simple method by which educators and students could access the technology and experience the benefits that OSS has to offer.

"This led the RSC to develop and promote AccessApps. AccessApps is an initiative which packages together over 50 open source and freeware assistive technology applications which can be run from a USB stick on a Windows computer.

"All of the software can be launched through an accessible open source launcher, ASuite, which sits in the system tray.

"Using open source and freeware applications packaged in this way, users can access assistive software in an incredibly flexible way without the stigma of using dedicated machines.

"For example, they may need visual support tools to make reading easier, or they may need accessible web browsers, or software to assist with reading and writing difficulties.

"All of these are available on AccessApps. AccessApps also adds value for everyone through its suite of useful generic tools ranging across office applications, multimedia packages and system utilities. And if the AccessApps user wants to take a break from all that hard work, there's also a selection of games on offer!

"AccessApps is being distributed on USB sticks to key learning support staff around Scotland. To promote wider adoption of AccessApps, the RSC has developed a customised delivery system to distribute the software online (www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/accessapps).

"Users are free to select the applications that match their needs, making the final suite anywhere between 3MB and 1GB, flexible enough to fit on most USB drives. A range of supporting guides, advice and tutorials can also be found on the site.

"In summary, AccessApps attempts to reduce the digital divide between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots'. Some are 'have-nots' because they can't afford the technology; some because perfectly resolvable physical obstacles to their learning have not been surmounted. AccessApps has something valuable to offer to everyone."

There is a full list of the 50-plus applications included in AccessApps here.

School of Informatics - Computing environment

Open Source Software is at the heart of the School of Informatics' computing provision, from network infrastructure to the desktops used daily by students and staff alike.

The School has been a long-term Linux user, originally deploying RedHat Linux in 1995, and rolling it out the desktop in 1997. This RedHat variant is now a core component of the school's computing environment, DICE.

This environment encompasses the network infrastructure (including firewalling, routing and name service), almost 200 application servers and over 700 desktop machines.

DICE is built entirely on, and using, open source software. The School's software stack, from operating system through to end user application is predominantly Open Source.

In addition to being prolific users of open source software, computing staff at the school also contribute heavily to the open source ecosystem. They developed, and open sourced, the first automated machine configuration system, LCFG.

Code developed by Informatics is present in the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird mail reader, the OpenSSH remote access tool, the bind name service, the Kerberos authentication system, the OpenLDAP directory service and the X Windowing system present on every Unix desktop machine, to name just a few examples.

The School's staff hold prominent positions in the communities of many open source projects, and are regular contributors to project mailing lists and discussion groups.

They are also active advocates of open source use, both within the university and in the wider community.

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh - Moses automatic language translation tool

Machine translation is a research field which investigates the use of computer software to translate one natural language to another. Machine translation is a subject that has captured the imagination of many thinkers and researchers who see language as a barrier to understanding between people.

It also offers commercial potential in helping people speaking different languages to communicate with each other.

The School of Informatics have developed an open source machine translation system, 'Moses', in conjunction with leading scientists and institutions, which combines state-of-the-art methods and technology into a single system to deliver the best-of-breed translation quality and systems performance.

Moses is widely used in the academic field, forming the basis of many tutorial, workshops and conferences on machine translation.

The software development was informed by the School's commercial experience to produce a system which is modular, clearly written, extendable and cross-platform.

Their entry stated: "We have striven to lower the learning curve so that Moses can be used by students interested in machine translation and as a useful teaching tool.

"However, this has not imposed a burden on more advanced users who have taken advantage of its extensibility and open source license to incorporate their own ideas and innovations into the system.

In the year three years since its inception, the Moses system has become an indispensible tool for researchers and the de-facto standard by which they can measure their own system performance.

The reliability and maturity of the Moses system has also meant that it has also gained traction outside of academia as a core component in commercial translation systems. The Moses system is an integral part of the University of Edinburgh's machine translation research and projects we are involved with."

So, that's the detail on the three very worthy candidates for the Education award. So, without further ado, this year's winner is (queue drum roll...) JISC Regional Support Centre and AccessApps!

Congratulations in particular go to the two guys whose input made AccessApps such a great product - Kenji Lamb and Craig Mill, and to JISC Regional Support Centre regional manager Sarah Price, who received the award in front of several hundred delegates at the Radisson.

I have used AccessApps quite a lot myself since the judging process and can confidently predict a bright future for the project. The software selection is excellent and comprehensive, and I have rarely come across a more well-documented project - the online video tutorials alone were enough to make AccessApps a strong contender.

And now we come to the Business Excellence Award, where again we had three entrants shortlisted:

Gladserv (http://www.gladserv.com/) - bases in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, hosted Open Source software solutions for business

National Semiconductor (UK) (http://www.national.com/analog/locations/greenock) - Greenock-based, manufacturing semiconductors with Open Source

Wolfson Microelectronics (http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/) - Edinburgh-based, working on embedded frameworks for Linux

As I am aware this article is starting to take on a life of its own, I'm going to cut to the chase and report that Wolfson Microelectronics were the winners of the Business Excellence award for 2008.

Here's a little of what they said about themselves in their entry:

"As a hardware manufacturer Wolfson has for a long time worked to provide drivers for several OSes, including Linux.

"Wolfson recognises that open source software is not just about the software itself but also about the community which surrounds it and that contributing to open source software involves contributing to infrastructure which is used by all members of the community.

"This has lead to Wolfson contributing not only drivers but also generic frameworks usable by all to the Linux kernel.

"While working on audio drivers for embedded systems Wolfson recognised that while there were standard audio APIs for Linux, they did not provide an ideal framework for embedded audio, leading to a great deal of duplication of effort and making the process of developing drivers much more difficult than required.

"This lead Wolfson to dedicate employee time to the development and continued maintenance of the ALSA System on Chip (ASoC) subsystem in the standard Linux kernel.

"This is now in widespread use in embedded systems, having stimulated the development of embedded audio software using Linux by providing a framework which everyone can benefit from.

"More recently this same principle has been applied to voltage and current regulators which similarly lacked a framework for writing drivers. This has resulted in the recently introduced Linux regulator framework in the kernel from version 2.6.27. This framework is much newer but already it has attracted contributions from the wider kernel community."

So, as you can see, a highly commercial company with a strong sense of the importance of the Open Source community, and their desire to give something back to the OS community made them worthy winners of this year's award.

Let me conclude by referring you to a recent report by analysts at Gartner, which revealed that a whopping 85 per cent of the world's top companies are using Open Source software of one sort or another.

The findings came after a survey of 274 end-user organisations across the Asia/Pacific, Europe and North American markets in May and June.

The companies involved in the research pointed to cost as the main reason for using Open Source software but also the fast times to market and the fact that they could avoid getting involved in complex procurement rules and procedures.

Being involved in the Scottish Open Source Awards has been something of an eye-opener for me. As a Linux enthusiast I am reasonably well-versed in Open Source as it impacts on the home user, but I had clearly under-estimated the impact that Open Source has had on the wider community, in business and in education.

I look forward to next year's awards with great anticipation, and thank all those who entered for their hard work and dedication, and my fellow judges for their kindness in inviting me to take part.