Software > Open Source, Internet Based Software

Clouds Of Confusion

By Paula Graham, Fossbox

There's been a widespread debate around privacy on cloud services but the ‘lock-in’ issue seem to bother the general public far less but has given rise to considerable concern in the corporate sector. Should the third sector also be cautious when considering the cloud for collaboration? Paula Graham from Fossbox looks at open cloud principles and initiatives and what happens in practice.

Cause for concern?

Few corporations have been willing to entrust their 'all' to third-party providers whose customer service is frequently alarmingly casual and who often wall up their users' data without redress. These concerns have led to limited take-up of third-party public clouds and Software as a Service (SaaS) among corporates – private and hybrid clouds tend to be the rule there.

So, should the third sector really rush in where industry fears to tread? Collaboration is increasingly valued by funders – the Big Lottery Infrastructure Fund, for example, is structured in such a way as to impose a necessity for collaboration. So if third sector organisations don't use the big, third-party services like Google then how is collaboration and shared back-office going to be supported?

It's often no more trouble to go for a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) or Open Software Service Definition (OSSD) solution than just to sign up for the most popular services – it's just a question of knowing what's out there and taking a little time to work out what's really best for your own organisation – take on running it yourself or use a hosted service.

Opening up the clouds

The Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) has published a set of open cloud principles seeking to ensure interoperability and avoid lock-in for cloud users.

Cloud computing has long been an issue for FOSS – if software moves to remote, third-party servers, what happens to the right to open access and customisation? The Free Software Foundation arrived at a set of guidelines in 2008 called the Open Software Service Definition (OSSD) which says that not only must the source code be available but the user must have the ability to access and download their own data. Most FOSS web-based collaboration tools offer both a free downloadable version which you can install on your own web server or a hosted service on their servers which you pay for by subscription.

Open Social is an approach to social networking applications development - “Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site's social data from anywhere on the web.”

Open collaboration in practice

So what can organisations actually do to facilitate an easy flow for collaboration without losing control over their data? There are a number of FOSS tools which can be downloaded for free and installed on anything from a virtual machine on a cloud to an old-fashioned web server – or used as a service online for subscriptions that typically range around £4 - £10 per person month.

Here are just a few of the most popular examples:

• FengOffice – suite of online collaboration tools
• Crabgrass – enables social change organisations to get things done, collaborate and network and ELGG – fully featured social networking platform. Diaspora is on the way but not yet out of testing.
• Project Pier and Collabtiv – online project management
• CiviCRM and SugarCRM – membership and CRM database
• PHPList - email campaign manager which can be integrated with Wordpress
• Limesurvey – survey software, install it on a webserver
• Moodle – course management software
• BigBlueButton – fully featured online conferencing tools (require dedicated web server)
• Huddle – UK-based SaaS running on Rackspace OpenStack, has a commitment to OpenSocial and is already used for non-critical data by many government departments
• Memotoo is an open, cross-platform SaaS which allows you not only to share contacts, calendars, tasks etc but also to syncronise them between computers and your phones, pads etc – it's totally cross-platform and will sync anything from Outlook or Thunderbird to Evolution on Windows, Linux or Mac and to most phones for under £30 a year

Cloud on Ubuntu server

Ubuntu server edition integrates a cloud stack to make it relatively easy to set up private cloud facilities on your own servers. 10.04 LTS (long term support) offers the Eucalyptus stack but 11.10 (Ubuntu Oneiric) will offer the fully open source OpenStack cloud. Be warned, though, running a private cloud is not for the fainthearted – the technology is relatively new and needs a lot of technical babysitting. A conventional web server is perfectly good for running most FOSS web-based collaboration apps.

Using cloud services also opens up operating system choices...

So this might be a good time to consider putting Ubuntu on your existing PCs and avoid expensive hardware upgrades now that funding for IT is so very thin on the ground. Next LTS release is 12.04 due in April 2012 so now's a good time to start planning your migration.