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Yesterday was World Plone Day, a series of events held around the globe to promote Plone and Open Source in general. In my role as one of the directors of the Plone Foundation I was kindly invited by Jonathan Camilleri Bowman of 2i Ltd to come and present at their World Plone Day event in Valletta, Malta. Needless to say, it was an offer I jumped at, as it was a chance to visit Malta, somewhere I've never been before, but also a chance to see how Plone was being used by a central government.

Malta is an interesting place with a mix of Mediterranean and British cultures. They drive on the correct side of the road (left), their road signs are in English, and their buses and lorries all beautiful old vintage British Leylands, Bristols and AECs. And yet, their buildings are all low, limestone rendered structures, many only half finished in that typical relaxed Mediterranean style. There are something like 360 churches across the island, wherever you are you can see one. Oh, and the sun shines and of course there are beaches everywhere. Maltese is a mix of Arabic and Italian.. with smatterings of pretty much every other language in there. As Jonathan told me: 'Pretty much everyone has invaded Malta at some time'.

Today Malta has a population of about 400,000 people (approx the same size as the city of Bristol) and its main industries are shipping (many large container ships stop to refuel and reload here), finance and tourism. Since Malta joined the EU in 2004, it has been seen as a very favorable location for business due to its adoption of the Euro, its official second language of English, and its welcoming tax rates.

The World Plone day event organised by 2i was aimed specifically at the public sector here in Malta, and was held in the Chamber of Commerce in the capitol city of Valetta. There were both delegates and speakers from various government departments, including the opening address by Mr Claudio Grech chairman of MITA, the Malta Information Technology Agency. MITA is the prime agency appointed by the government to implement ICT on its behalf and reports directly to the Minister of Communications.

I was presenting two talks, one a case study on the Kent Connects Portals project, and talking about their Open Source 'journey' starting with discovering Plone and using it out of the box, through to engaging 3rd party support and development as the project grew. The second talk I did was on the Plone Community -- one of Plone's great strengths. I covered the vast array of support out their available for Plone from one-to-one training, to conferences, sprints, Plone Bootcamps, books, irc channel etc. When I was first proposing my talk, I was a bit worried I wouldn't have enough material to cover half an hour of a talk, but once you look at how wide the community is and what is going on, you realise just how much support for Plone there is out there. Of course, I also covered the Plone Foundation and its role within the community to promote and protect Plone and offer some of the aspects that many Open Source projects lack, such as marketing support, legal help and trademark protection.

There were also talks by Mr Michel Bugeja from the Government Enterprise Architecture Unit and from Mr Cedric Mallia of the Government Quality Assurance Unit talking about Plone and Open Source respectively. Every single government IT project has to pass through these two departments to be vetted, so to have representatives from both of them speaking at this event shows very strong support for both Plone and Open Source in general in Malta. Mr Karl Pullicino presented a case study of Plone's use in the Office of the Prime Minister.

The total attendance was about 70 people, an amazing turn out for such a targeted event. My hat goes off to 2i's team in organising this, I know I might struggle to get 70 government officials to attend a Plone seminar in London, let alone such a compact country as Malta.

The evening before, Jonathan had been telling me of the dominant position of Microsoft in the country. Every student can buy the entire Microsoft suite including tools such as Visual Studio for about GBP 7. And as you'd might expect the majority of the systems in government are based on Microsoft technologies. Earlier in the day, he pointed out Paul Allen's yacht, Octopus, in the bay dwarfing the battlements and stone walls surrounding it. Hrmm....

This however makes it all the more interesting to see Plone being used in such a Microsoft-centric environment. Many people still believe that Open Source and proprietary software are mutually exclusive in an organisation. At a conference I was at in Manchester earlier in the month, Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer commented on how he never understood people when they said 'We don't use Open Source, we are a Microsoft shop'. Surely people should be using the most appropriate tools for the job?

2i is a very good example of using the best tools for the job. They have historically been a 'Microsoft shop' and are a Microsoft Certified (soon to be Gold) Partner, and they develop in some of the most traditional bastions of commercial software, the likes of business intelligence and reporting. Yet when looking at content management, they got tired of not being able to do what they wanted with Sharepoint and started to look around and found Plone. Plone has offered them a way to provide the functionality that their clients need regardless of the platform or existing technologies they are using.

After the WPD event and a quick tour around Malta, I was invited by Michel Bugeja along to a Plone users group hosted by MITA at their offices. Again, a very well attended event with about 20 people from MITA there to discuss specific questions about Plone. Topics ranged from load balancing, and setting up a ZEO cluster behind a Microsoft ISA server, integration with Malta's central authentication, aggregating searches from external systems and communicating via SOAP to other .NET systems. There were also questions about more community oriented aspects of Plone, such as how to go about finding others interested in what you might be developing and how to release a product you have developed into the community.

So the end result was an amazing couple of events in Malta, really showing a lot of support for Plone and showing it in use at the national government level. I'm looking forward to seeing, and hopefully be involved in, Plone's use increasing even further both in Malta, in the UK and of course across the globe. After all... that what we set out to achieve with World Plone Day.

With the recent launch of Internet Explorer 8, and many people looking forward to the day when IE6 is a distant nightmare I thought I'd take a quick look at our Apache logs, processed via Sawmill, to see what the current landscape from March 2008 - March 2009 is looking like.

The Apache logs I examined cover a range of public sites that all target different sectors and niches and so gives a fairly broad indication and certainly a fair bit of variation. Below is an overview of my findings.

Generally for 2008 Internet Explorer leads the pack by a huge margin. Between the various sites it usually averages between 60 - 80% of the overall share of visitors. Breaking it down to subversions of IE, we see that IE 5.5 and below are now almost irrelevant with less than 0.4% of visitors using those versions. Internet Explorer 7.0 is now starting to overtake IE6, although generally IE7 and IE6 are split almost 50-50. IE8 is obviously insignificant at this time, but I expect number of visitors will dramatically shoot up now it has been released and will probably halt IE7 from gaining any additional share in the next year. Obviously its going to take years to eliminate IE6 :(

Firefox is the next most popular browser among visitors, although it lags a fair way behind IE, but seems to have been steadily increasing its userbase. It currently seems to average between 10 - 15% share of visitors across the sites checked.

Safari currently seems to have around 2 - 3% share of visitors using it. I expect a lot of Mac owners likely use Firefox on Mac OS X. Webkit doesn't seem to show up, so it is possible it might come under Safari stats with the version of Sawmill we are using (I might update Sawmill at some point soon). It will be interesting to see how WebKit adoption by Google's Chrome, Gnome's switch from Gecko to Webkit with Epiphany and the iPhone affect its share over the next year.

The most surprising find was that Netscape Navigator 4 still seems to be in use. It seems to get around 2% share It boggles the mind why anyone would still be using this browser! Even if there are stubborn people who don't like user interface changes they could upgrade to Mozilla SeaMonkey (a continuation of the old Mozilla suite) with the classic theme and have a modern rendering engine! I'm sure that will still run on Windows 98 too!

I also had a quick glance at operating system usage as well. It seems that Windows XP is the most popular operating system with between 60 - 80% of visitors running it. Windows Vista is in 2nd place with between 10 - 20% share. I expect Vista will never get to the huge user numbers that XP had due to Windows 7 being released in the near future. Tried and true Windows 2000 is still hanging in there and seems to be around 4% of visitors. Windows 2000 leaves its extended support phase on 13th July 2010, which means no more security support for the general populace very soon. I suspect its usage will drop a fair bit over the next year.

Mac OS seems to be around the 3% mark and holding steady. A nice pleasant surprise was Linux showing up this year in the stats! In previous years Linux has been almost non existent but over the last year its usage appears to have shot up to just above 1% on average. Given that ARM is working with Canonical to launch a new range of Cortex 9 based Ubuntu running netbooks in the summer, it will be interesting to see if Linux usage continues to rise! Also Googles Android might well have an impact here too, especially if HP go ahead and launch Android based netbooks!

Yesterday I was at an event, Harnessing Free and Open Source Software in Local Government, organised by Public Sector Forums. I was actually presenting a case study on Kent Connects Portals, a project we have been working with that is a Plone Portal for various groups of people within the various Kent Connects partners (councils, fire service, etc).

It was great to show how the project had evolved, and how they were able to pick up Plone out of the box a few years ago, and setup a useful service with very little cost; then how as their project and membership grew how they were able to partner with Netsight, get an SLA, support, further development etc. To me this is one of the key benefits of Open Source, the way in which you can start small an incrementally build up. You can choose how much support you need, when, and who will provide it.

The whole event was actually pretty good [*], with quite a few speakers talking about various aspects of Open Source. However I think one of the highlights for me was actually the keynote right at the start by Simon Phipps, the Chief Open Source Officer from Sun Microsystems. What struck me mainly was how similar what he was talking about echoed my own experiences of promoting Open Source, and I suppose more specifically selling the whole concept of Open Source to businesses and organisations.

One thing he said that suddenly made the bulb above my head light was to do with procurement. At Netsight, we pretty much gave up on responding to blind tenders we were sent many years ago due to the overhead of responding to them. Not just that but we always thought that the tenders generally asked 'the wrong questions' which made it very hard for us, as an Open Source implementation company, to really give a decent answer. Many of you, no doubt, will be familiar with this scenario as an example: The tender has a cost table you have to fill in the blanks in. You are not allowed to deviate from the format of the table (because the tenderer wants to try and compare apples with apples). So you fill the table in, but your numbers just don't quite fit in the boxes right. We've even had feedback from tenders we've lost saying things like 'Well your solution costs 0 for licensing and 50K for implementation; the solution we chose cost 40K in licensing and 30K in implementation, so must be the more appropriate solution for our needs'.

Now I can see their thinking here. Our solution cost 50K and 100% of the cost is in implementation/customisation so obviously wasn't the correct solution to start with. The one they chose cost 70K but only 42% of that was implementation/customisation. What they don't realise that (especially in the CMS market) any large software procurement is only going to give you a fraction of your requirements out of the box. That is because every business is different, and so no one piece of software can do everything you need. Open Source might give you slightly less out of the box than a commercial offering, but that is generally because Open Source software focusses on delivering a lowest common denominator out of the box, whereas commercial software has loads of bells and whistles (many of which you will never need), but more on that later. You are still going to need professional services to tailor the software to your specific business and its requirements. The problem is looking at ratio of costs and the perception of these ratios.

The bit that Simon said that made the bulb go on in my head? He said that most companies set out on a procurement process to procure a software license. That is what software is to them: licenses. That is what they know, and that is how they think. If you've ever had the fun of dealing with the contracts/procurement department of a large company you will recognise this thinking. And so with that goal in mind, of course they end up succeeding in their quest to procure a license for software.

That is why the procurement process is so alien to us... we don't sell software licenses. Put another way, we don't sell what it is that they are trying to buy. Note that I said what they are trying to buy, not what they actually need.

To make matters even worse, these procurement processes end up so long and expensive for both the tenderer and the software vendor, that the vendor has to recoup the cost by adding it on to the software license. Lather, rinse, and repeat this process a number of times and you will soon see why it is often said that 70% of the revenue of commercial CMS companies goes to their sales and marketing depts. And... its not really the vendors to blame! It is the tenderers that do these long winded procurement processes in the first place that started this.

You then end up with a situation that if you are going to end up buying a 100K piece of software, you expect it to be pretty damn well worth it. And how does a commercial software vendor justify that high price? By having a feature list as long as your arm; or by implementing absurdly complex and costly protocols (example from Simon: CORBA, etc). Again, how many of us have looked at the end result of a tender process and said 'Well I could implement that in a handful of lines of python and a nice REST-ful API for a tenth of that cost'?

The final bit of advice: look at the exit costs of a piece of software as part of your costings when looking at systems. Something vendors are very reticent to tell you is how much it will cost to move away from their system at the end of it.

[*] Apart from them managing to somehow not print name badges for us, despite being speakers. And them censoring the delegate packs by actually removing the What is Open Source? / What is Plone? brochure from the info packs we'd sent up with the case study info.