A look at free software in Ecuador

I recently spoke at the Congress on Free Software and Democratization of Knowledge hosted in Quito by the Universidad Politecnica Salesiana of Ecuador. My general report about the conference and Free as in Freedom knowledge in that country is at the P2P Foundation blog: the trip, however, was also an excellent occasion to check out the most interesting Free Software projects currently taking place in Ecuador. It turns out that there is a lot of activity at the Government level to promote Free Software, and interesting news from some cool projects developed locally.

FOSS in the Government

A recent presidential decree mandates that most national Public Administrations migrate entirely to Free Software. Ing. Mario Albuja, head of the Subsecretariat for Information Technology of the Presidency of Ecuador, explained during the congress the reasons and the general guidelines of this initiative. Later on, I was able to get more details in a couple of meetings with the members of his staff. Among the most important things going on right now there are the studies and tests for a Government digital signatures application which runs on Gnu/Linux and a unified document management system for 45 central Public Administrations. There is also a field trial of the GPL hospital management software Care2X in the works.

The initial implementation of the digital signature project, which uses Free Software whenever possible, is based on keys and digital certificates stored on SafeNet iKey 2032 USB tokens from Entrust. The first official field test will take place in the next weeks, when President Correa himself will use one such key to sign a decree. The Certificate Authority infrastructure which will issue keys and certificates is the same implemented by Banco Central del Ecuador in November 2007.

The software application, instead, runs inside any browser. A PostgreSQL backend stores all the documents, together with administrative metadata, on a CentOS-based server. The decrees waiting for electronic signature are presented to the user via a simple Apache/PHP front-end. The actual digital signature happens through a Java applet which reads the encrypted key from the USB token thanks to libraries provided by Entrust.

Another big step in the process of freeing Ecuador institutions from proprietary software will be the formal ratification of OpenDocument 1.0 by the Ecuadorian Institute of Standards (INEN). Large-scale usage of this format for public documents should take off right after that, around mid-2009.

All the public officials I talked with really believe in the potential of Free Software for a developing country like Ecuador. This only makes more relevant, and worthy of careful consideration, a comment I got from them: there, they say, is no coordination or common vision among the developers of the several FOSS applications they need to deploy. This was no surprise, of course: people at the Subsecretariat understand how FOSS development works. Nevertheless, the fact that there is no unified, local, reliable source for support, with predictable, if not guaranteed, response times, is creating them more problems than they expected when they began. There may be quite a business opportunity here for local FOSS entrepreneurs.

Talking with hackers

Rafael Bonifaz told me what's new in the Elastix world. In case you never heard of it, Elastix is a specialized GNU/Linux distribution born and (mostly) developed in Ecuador. Its goal is to solve all the communication problems of organizations of any size. Elastix integrates in one easy to administer package all you need to have PBX, VoIP, email, instant messaging, fax and fax/email gateway through Asterisk, Hylafax, Postfix and Openfire for Jabber. You can manage all the PBX functions with a customized version of freepbx. Other tools developed by the Elastix team provide hardware detection, centralized automatic configuration of phones and billing support with a2billing.

Elastix is doing great in Ecuador: RTS and Aerolineas Galapagos (Aerogal), which are respectively one of the most important TV channels and one of the main domestic airlines in Ecuador, are using it. Namely, Aerogal is running its call center off Elastix, which is being deployed also in the Ministry of Public Health.

Rafael, who is the current coordinator of the Elastix Community, is also proud of the fact that Elastix is the only Gnu/Linux distribution for communications which has two manual books, totaling about five hundred pages, freely downloadable from the Internet: Elastix Without Tears [PDF] by Ben Sharif and Unified communications with Elastix [PDF] by Edgar Landivar. The second manual is still a beta version, currently available only in Spanish. There already is, however, a new mailing list devoted to coordinating all the translation efforts for this second book.

Still thanks to Rafael, after knowing about Elastix I met a local group of Java developers who have very recently begun developing a new, interesting content management system called Melenti. Adrian Cadena, member of the Melenti team, explained to me that he and his partners needed a GPL, friendly, easy to use and fast CMS that could scale well from personal web pages to corporate portals. Another must on their requirement list was ease of integration with enterprise software (Java or not) for ERP, CRM and SAP services. That's why, three months ago, after some unsatisfactory experiences with the popular Joomla CMS they started writing Melenti.

One of the main features of Melenti should be performance under high loads. Adrian said they are aiming for something able to handle hundreds of thousands of clicks per second, something which Joomla "simply could not handle, when we tried it". Melenti administrators, instead, would be able to configure load balancing without problems, thanks to an interface based on Jndi and other tools.

Melenti should run on any JEE infrastructure, from Websphere to JBoss, BEA, Oracle AS, Tomcat, Jetty and more. According to Adrian, Melenti will also be much simpler to set up and extend than most other GPL software for Content Management. Installation should be as simple as dropping a .war file into your flavor of JEE container and following the steps of the graphical wizard which will pop up. Writing Melenti "gadgets", that is plugins, should also be easier than with Joomla, Drupal, Php-nuke and similar products. This because, says Adrian, "unlike those products, Java has worldwide standards like Spring, JPA, JSF, GWT and so on: new developers can just take a look at the core Melenti API and start writing their own gadgets in no time".

The first releases of Melenti will support basic CMS functions like management of web pages, images and other files. There will be also interfaces for banner rotation, creation of user polls and a Web Services Creator. The latter is a simple wizard to create Web Services from existing Melenti gadgets. The first alpha version of Melenti has been just uploaded to Sourceforge. You're obviously welcome to have a look at the code and to participate in the development of Melenti.

Let's go back to the reason why I went to Quito now, that is Free Software and Democratization of Knowledge. Quiliro Ordonez, with one friend and other occasional volunteers, is now implementing in the field a project first announced in 2007: placing Free Software in a school of the community of Quilapungo, south of Quito, which serves about 200 students. Thus far, Quiliro has installed 2 servers and 4 thin clients running gNewSense. He chose this distribution because it is "100% free software, without non-free repositories or blobs in the kernel which promote functionality before anything else, as this would weaken our position for freedom". He's also very happy with TCOS, which made setting up the thin clients a breeze. The school staff will use Projecto Alba, a modular administration and planning software for schools first developed in Argentina. While gNewSense worked fine out of the box, Quiliro and his partners had to localize Alba to adapt it to the terminology and procedures adapted in Ecuadorian schools.

Eventually, the school in Quilapungo will have about 40 Gnu/Linux workstations, but Quiliro doesn't plan to stop there. If all goes well, Quilapungo will be presented as a pilot project in a proposal for Free Software deployment in all public schools in Ecuador. Let's wish Quiliro good luck!