[Gllug] open source centric ICT in Schools from Sept 2012 ?

[Philip Hands]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:44:58 +0000, James Courtier-Dutton <james.dutton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13 January 2012 11:01, Alain Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > I have always believed that open standards are much more important than
> > open source[**]. If you have open standards (ie documentation good enough to
> > allow independent implementation) that is freely available then you have
> > the potential to stop one company (or cartel) from dominating.
> >
> 
> In reality, the documentation of any protocol or file format is rarely
> good enough to implement a new version of software to work with it.
> The document will invariably be interpreted by different people in
> different ways.
> You then need to go to interoperability workshops and do lots of tests
> to make it work fully.
> The best documentation is a full open source implementation, including
> all error paths.
> 
> So, I disagree with your view that open standards is enough.
> Open standards with an open source reference implementation is really
> the minimum requirement.
> 
> Well defined interfaces is what is really needed.
> This is why XML is quite good, because it forces people to fully
> define the interface between two software components.

Well, normally, although MS (or more likely the contractors who decided
to use MS's off-the-shelf components) managed to screw that up when
implementing the government gateway's signed-XML stuff -- they would
only verify signatures on XML documents that had been normalised using
the MS .dll, which incorrectly used CR-LF line endings.

And once such things are in place, you're screwed, since 99% of the
clients are using the same duff DLL, so don't notice, and the only
people who have to bear extra costs are competitors that then get forced
to implement a bug-compatible version of their product.

> Take the new National NHS computer system that failed quite
> spectacularly, never going into the production use.
> The main reason it failed is because the project was too big and had
> too many dependencies.
>  If they had approached the system by first defining the interfaces
> between components.
> For example, defined the interface between a doctors surgery and the
> central data center.

You're describing what happened in Wales AIUI.

  http://www.leshatton.org/Documents/how-to-build-successful-complex-software-systems.pdf

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
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