Software > Open Source

Utilising Free Software at People and Planet

By Matthew Edmondson
Mark Brier

This case study documents the Debian GNU/Linux servers, the services and the Desktop FOSS applications successfully implemented by this NGO in a canonical implementation and migration to Freedom Software.

People & Planet has an official IT policy of using Free Software whenever possible. The long term vision is to be free of all proprietary software and the current costly “vendor lock-in. They name five ethical and technical key reasons to use Free Software; hardware life extension, cost, security, avoiding “vendor lock-in, customisation.

About People & Planet

People & Planet are based in Oxford and have 19 full time employees. They are a campaigning group that organise “student action on world poverty and the environment. They operate on a national level and have around 150 groups in University's and Further Education colleges.

IT Support at People & Planet

Rich Lott manages the support team and in addition develops the Content Management System and the website. Charlie Harvey is part of the support team and works full time on IT, covering the rest of the technical support for the organisation. Between them they provide People & Planet with IT training, desktop support, server administration, infrastructure, consultation, planning and implementation. They are two of the most relaxed and happy people working in IT that I have met.

The Legacy

When Charlie arrived 5 years ago, the entire operation was hosted on one Microsoft Windows 95 computer. Acting as their file server, their Access database server and it ran Pegasus for their email, it was overstretched. Charlie illustrates, "When running backups, nobody could log on. As you can imagine it fell over at least once a week."

Present system

The Windows 95 machine was replaced early on. People & Planet now run Debian GNU/Linux "Sarge" on two local servers and a virtual server on the Internet. Between them they provide all the IT services for the organisation this includes their email, database, web hosting, backup and seamless Windows file "shares".

They have about 25 workstations, including 3 dedicated machines for graphic design. Free Open Source Software(FOSS) applications that run on Windows 2000 have now replaced most proprietary applications except for Quark (Desktop Publishing), Quickbooks(Accounting) and Access(Customer Relationship Management). The administrators have dual booting Windows 2000 and Debian "Etch" machines.

IT Strategy and FOSS Policy

People & Planet now has an official IT strategy, which includes a policy of using Free Software whenever possible. The long term vision is to be free of all proprietary software. There are many ethical and technical motivations that are behind People & Planet's policy, Charlie names five of the key reasons:

1. "Vendor Lock-in"

To avoid "Vendor Lock-in" in the future they will use software based on Open Standards. This means that will be at liberty to switch applications without the costs and hassles that proprietary standards generate.

2. Hardware life extension

Part of People & Planet's policy is to use recycled goods as much as possible. Making the choice not to use the latest version of Microsoft Windows means that they can use older machines to do the same work.

3. Customisation

Free Software allows in-house customisation so that the software can be changed to fit their specific needs. Charlie believes that this 'has been crucial'.

4. Security

"With many eyes, all bugs are shallow". It is a widely held belief that bugs and security flaws are found and fixed quickly with Free Software. In other words because the code is open, the Free Software community can 'look under the bonnet' and identify potential bugs at the source code level.

In five years, People & Planet has only had 2 viruses. Both incidents were isolated to single machines. The minimal impact of the infections was probably due to the choice not to use Microsoft Outlook. People & Planet recognises that maintaining their security is as much with the quality of their Free Software firewalls and applications as to do with training staff. People & Planet employees are given security training which includes the discipline of never opening suspicious emails or attachments.

5. Cost

People & Planet pays £200 for a desktop computer and a further £300 per machine for proprietary licenses. Using free Software will have obvious financial benefits.

Debian GNU/Linux*

Debian is a distribution of Linux, an operating system and associated applications that is an alternative to Microsoft Windows. It was chosen because of its security, stability and ease of administration. Furthermore it is the only distribution of Linux with a social contract, consequently Debian is entirely, indeed “militantly” based on Free Software. Installing applications and keeping them up to date with Debian is easily done with "apt", Debian's advanced package management system. As Charlie puts it, "apt-get rocks". Using this technology can significantly reduce the administrative overhead of keeping systems up to date and secure.

* Debian Releases

(edited from the Wikipedia)

The code names of Debian releases are names of characters from the movie Toy Story.

Debian GNU/Linux "Sarge"

The latest released version of Debian is called stable. The latest stable release is version 3.1, code name sarge. The released stable branch is intended to be an unmoving platform, such as for servers or development, it only receives security updates.

Debian GNU/Linux "Etch"

Release 4.0, codenamed etch is currently planned for December of 2006. This testing branch of Debian contains updated software and is more stable than its name might indicate. But this branch can become turbulent after a new release of the stable environment.

Access Database - "Vendor Lock-in"

Staying in touch with thousands of students is made possible by their Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). It was developed in-house prior to the provisioning for a full time systems administrator. Microsoft Access was used because 'it was there'. The result is a “vendor-lock in situation which has considerable associated costs and inconvenience. Staff manipulate the CRM via Microsoft Access.

Although People & Planet now use no other part of the Microsoft Office suite other than Access, they are required to buy licenses for the entire Microsoft Office Pro suite. Furthermore this means that they must maintain two versions of the Access 'front end' (the user interface to the database), because half of the desktops have licenses for Microsoft Office Pro 2000 and the other half have Microsoft Office Pro 97.

People & Planet plan to move all their Desktops computers to Linux. Since the FOSS applications [see list] that People & Planet use are the same whether running on Windows or Linux, it is anticipated that users will find migration easy. This will save money because the re-training cost will be minimal to zero.

Unfortunately it is estimated to be five years until the organisation can avoid spending money on Microsoft licenses and staff are able to enjoy using a FOSS desktop. This is because there appears to be no viable method to convert the Access front end for use with a FOSS application such as OpenOffice.Org. Charlie's plan is to re-write the front end in a FOSS programming language (PHP), which is vendor neutral and will free them from the requirement of using Microsoft Access.

The back-end of the Access CRM has already been migrated. MySQL is a FOSS database, which Charlie has installed on one of the Debian GNU/Linux servers. This has resulted in speed and stability improvements. Migration to Debian GNU/Linux has other advantages too, such as powerful command line scripting. For example the administrator can write his/her own SQL queries to extract any data from the database with ease. Charlie is clearly enthusiastic about this.

Documentation

Charlie is lucky to find work with a charity that recognises its reliance on IT. Despite the organisations cuts and restructuring he has remained fully employed for the five years since he started. This long term relationship has allowed him to improve the entire system, whilst keeping within their ethical policy. Could the organisation replace him should an unlikely or unfortunate event occur? Would the cost of understanding the systems be so prohibitive as to exclude other companies or individuals from tendering for the task of providing support?

A few months ago, the People & Planet support team spent a week writing down every operational aspect of the organisation and this included the IT systems. This resulted in a "fat IT operations manual with everything that you need written down". It contains instructions to do most administrative tasks, such as adding a user by using the bespoke scripts. This means that super users could do many technical tasks without having to delve into the complexities of systems administration.

Further IT support

People & Planet do not have a support contract with an external IT supplier. Given that FOSS is the primary software license, where do they go for support? Charlie uses the Internet and the Local Linux User Group for his support needs. Similar to the principle of sharing the software, sharing advice and expertise is a key part of the FOSS community too. Charlie subscribes to the local Linux user group (LUG), an email list where participants can ask questions, support others and announce events about Linux.

Off-site backups are in place to cover them against the threat of physical explosions of hardware or malicious cracker attacks. Given that both the expertise and backup needs of People & Planet are addressed, I understand why they do not require an external support contract.

Single Point of Failure?

I tentatively ask the "What if the systems administrator for People & Planet were to be run over by a bus question". He looks me in the eye and answers, "Yes, I could be replaced by someone that knew how to use Linux".

Technical Profile

Server Hardware

Maui == £300 plus £40/£50 for each detachable drives

Oahu == £500, purchased two years ago

Server Specification and services:

Oahu:

512Mb PC133, AMD Athlon 1.2, 1*80Gb 7,200 IDE drive, Mandriva Linux (due to move to GNU/Linux Debian “Sarge” later this year)

• Postfix, Cyrus, Samba, amavisd, SSH

Maui:

512Mb PC 2300, AMD Sempron 2600, 1*80Gb 7,200 IDE drive + n detachable 80Gb 7,200 IDE Drives, Debian Sarge

• [Backup] Postfix, Cyrus, amavisd
• Apache, squirrelmail, phpmyadmin, rails, samba, subversion, rsync and incremental backups, SSH

Desktop Systems

• Variety of recycled machines costing about £200 each.
• Microsoft Windows 2000.
• GNU/Linux Debian “Etch”. (Administrators machines, can 'dual boot' into Windows 2000)

FOSS Desktop Software

• OpenOffice.org 2 - word processing, spreadsheets and presentation.
• Mozilla Firefox - Web-browser
• WorkRave - RSI preventer that reminds you to take breaks. (because early RSI identified in one employee)
• GIMP - Image editing (like Adobe Photoshop)
• Thunderbird - Email client

Non-FOSS Desktop Software

• Microsoft Access - Database front end for the People & Planet CRM
• Quickbooks
• Quark Express

The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Database

MySQL

People

• People can have unlimited numbers relationships with organisations
• People can have unlimited numbers of actions, mailings, notes, payments, addresses.
• 56,583 people (the 35,000 are ones with valid email addresses)
• 10,009 organisations
• 64,369 relationships between people and organisations
• 43,093 relationships between organisations and other organisations
• 39,696 ‘actions’
• 285,373 mailings
• 32,729 website users

Organisations

• 60-ish University groups, plus groups that People & Planet work with on campus
• 75-ish sixth forms groups
• Potential Groups that we're supporting
• Every school and University in Britain The NGOs People & Planet work with