USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN) [LWN.net]

GCN reports on a move to SUSE Linux by a division of the US Postal Service. "Postal Service information technology officials have upgraded the 15-year-old, mainframe-based system to handle more transactions and lower the cost of operating the system. The work to upgrade PTS is part of a larger plan to standardize on the open-source and less expensive Linux operating system, said John Byrne, manager of application development and head of USPS Integrated Business Solutions Centers. The service is moving 1,300 Sun Solaris midrange servers to a Hewlett-Packard Linux environment."

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USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 9, 2009 22:27 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (34 responses)

Hmm.. the most interesting part of the article is really about how they are handling the porting of existing Cobol code to run in linux on the existing mainframe iron using a proprietary compiler application.

Makes you wonder, how many enterprises are hamstrung by legacy Cobol code and is there anybody making the investment into an open source solution to the problem that can work as the foundation as an integrated solution in the open linux stack?

-jef

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 9, 2009 22:54 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (30 responses)

"""
Makes you wonder, how many enterprises are hamstrung by legacy Cobol code
"""

I think I'm hearing an implicit "custom" in that statement: legacy custom Cobol code.

But, unfortunately, OSS is having trouble even against *current shrink-wrap Cobol code*. Don't believe me? Look into the very important area of business accounting, point of sale, and manufacturing accounting software. The really cabable stuff is still largely Cobol. And we don't have a thing that can compete with current offerings. GnuCash? SQL Ledger? Please...

Nothing even on the horizon.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 9, 2009 23:41 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (28 responses)

How much of that is that those systems are superior technically to Open Source alternatives, or that their sales people are better?

It's a rule in this industry that "Enterprise" typically means "over-engineered, flaky decrepit garbage that costs millions of dollars." Maybe that's unfair, I don't know. But you don't of companies going *bankrupt* trying to adopt Linux, like with SAP.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 1:16 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (27 responses)

Superior enough that I can't even consider proposing the FOSS equivalents. That is... where foss equivalents even exist. Point me to a good FOSS product that includes shop floor control, BOM, JC, and whatever other modules my customers might need. Payroll? Guaranteed yearly updates for Federal and Oklahoma and Texas tax laws? Point of sale... which supports their prefered credit card processor? It's all exactly the sort of non-sexy stuff that OSS devs don't care to touch with a ten foot pole.

No. This is one area where you can't just say "The proprietary folks have better marketing". At this point we're still losing by default, because we don't even show up to play.

And I'm really not even talking SAP level. I'm talking the SMB level that lives right above Quick Books.

Even the LWN.net folks, try as they might, have been unable to get off of proprietary accounting.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 2:02 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] (23 responses)

> Even the LWN.net folks, try as
> they might, have been unable to
> get off of proprietary accounting.

The reader might be forgiven for wondering just how hard they've tried,
given the years old pledge to open their own site code "once it gets a bit
more ready" (see the site FAQ, under Site Code Questions). LWN, a
would-be flagship of the community were it to open its own code and thus
have its message synced with its own actions, regularly lambastes others
for failing to open code. But in the years it has been doing so, ATI and
others have indeed opened their code and specs for the most part, while
LWN is still sitting there on its "once it gets a bit more ready" promise,
the same one that was there when I first checked the site 2002-ish.

That's why I dropped the subscription I'd otherwise LOVE to have. While I
was at first proud to support this flagship of the community, and did so
gladly, even when I didn't have time to actually make use of my
subscription, my conscience began to prick me horribly after the first
year or so, due to the fact that I wasn't walking my /own/ talk in my own
purchasing choices. So when it came time to update my subscription, I
couldn't. I wrote a nice email explaining the issue, and got a nice email
in return, but, well, that's been years now, years in which much of the
the world which never even claimed an interest in the issue itself, has
never-the-less been step by step opening its own code.

And that's LWN's own code, that it has the rights to. So the reader can
certainly be forgiven if they're a bit skeptical of how hard LWN has
worked to kill its dependency on proprietary code from others, when it's
running on its own still proprietary code, that it owns the rights to and
thus has full control of whether and when it opens it. No, I don't
believe there's deliberate intent to deceive, and I believe they've always
intended to open it, but it's a question of priorities, priorities ATI and
others were apparently expected to arbitrarily rearrange for the good of
the community, while an otherwise flagship of the community, LWN, can't do
the same. Very disappointing, really, particularly given the
uncompromised flagship of the community LWN could be, were it to walk its
own talk.

Duncan

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 7:34 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

Hmm... until now I never even thought about the question of LWN releasing source code for its own site. Although I prefer to run free software on my own computer, if someone is just serving me a bunch of text pages I don't think it matters how they do it. Even if you did have LWN's source code, you wouldn't be able to modify it and then run it on LWN's servers, nor run it on your own server using LWN's content (which is copyrighted), so it wouldn't really give you any extra freedoms you didn't have before.

But yes, from the point of view of helping others to set up similar news sites, 'many eyeballs', and a general feeling of practising what you preach, it would be cool to download a tarball of the code that runs the LWN site. If it got packaged for Debian or whatever, it might even make the LWN site admin's job easier.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 15:50 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

If you had LWN's source code, you could set up a site for some different sort of news. This is actually entirely plausible; Groklaw runs the same site source that Slashdot originally developed.

Groklaw on Slash?

Posted Jul 10, 2009 17:06 UTC (Fri) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link] (1 responses)

I believe that's incorrect. Groklaw, IIRC, ran on Radiolog or something like that in its early days, and it's been on Geeklog since 2003. I don't believe they've ever run Slash.

Groklaw on Slash?

Posted Jul 10, 2009 17:32 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I'm pretty sure there was discussion about moving it to Slash when it was leaving Radiolog, since PJ had previously been a frequent commenter on Slashdot before having her own site and was therefore used to it. I guess I missed the actual move being something different when it happened, and always thought it was to Slash. (Of course, the discussion of what the move should be was before the move, and therefore not in the archives, which start immediately after the move, as far as I can tell.)

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 8:04 UTC (Fri) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] (9 responses)

Is undistributed GPL'ed code proprietary or free ?

It's not really that important a question, so usually such code is referred to as "in-house". It certainly doesn't warrant casting doubts on the motives of LWN.
With all the publishing frameworks available today I doubt if distributing LWN's code would amount to anything more than a feel-good token release.

Properly releasing in-house code as a maintainable open-source project takes time; and with so little to gain from it I would rather have they spend that time doing other things we do stand to gain a lot from.

So I would suggest that instead of asking for LWN's code to be properly released as open source, it would be better to ask for a "code-dump of good intentions" instead.
That way less time would be lost in producing something we do not actually need, yet it would still alleviate the aspersions being grounded on that that prop up from time to time.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 14:32 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (8 responses)

> With all the publishing frameworks available today I doubt if distributing > LWN's code would amount to anything more than a feel-good token release.

Yeah, there are a lot of good off-the-shelf CMS packages avaliable. Also building a CMS from scratch (er, in Django) with the appearent complexity of LWN.net would generally cost my customers a few thousand dollars.

The value in LWN.net's custom codebase is that it presumably is customized meet the needs Jon's workflow. It's really unlikely that it would have the same value for anyone else. If you don't need a customized solution, then use an off-the-shelf CMS. If you need one, pony up for something that fits *your* needs, not somebody elses.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 15:59 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (7 responses)

All of this is absolutely true. However, it also means that complacent LWN members shouldn't go around calling on other people to release THEIR source code!

If you intend to open the code, then open it (LWN's promise, now an intention, is starting to close on being a decade old). If you intend to leave it closed, then explain why you advocate open source in the kernel but not for your site. But claiming you intend to release it and never making any progress toward that goal? That's a fairly poor example to set for other companies.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 18:33 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

I don't remember LWN editors calling for website code to be released (some individual subscribers are very insistent on it, especially related to Canonical ;-) so I don't see the hypocrisy that you do.

personally, I don't have a problem with websites not releasing their server-side code. I am happy when they do, but I do not get upset when they don't, especially in cases where they developed the code from scratch (as I believe LWN has)

there is a case to be made for people who want to release a webserver framework and want to get updates back, but there is a license available for those people to use (the Affero varient of the GPL).

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 19:54 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (5 responses)

Oh, I don't intend to call LWN hypocritical! I'm probably even more backed up in my projects than they are in theirs.

Maybe LWN should put a brief description in its FAQ of how server-side source code is different from kernel code? Open graphics drivers are far more valuable than yet another CMS, no question. I just think that to claim to want to open LWN's source for 8+ years without ever finding the weekend to do it, well, that's not a very good example to set.

It could be as simple as just rewording 2 sentences in the FAQ.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 19:59 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (4 responses)

The FAQ will be reworded because we get tired of this discussion.

Releasing the source is still something we want to do. There is far more than "a weekend" involved in doing that, though. Isn't that one of Dilbert's laws? That any project you don't understand is automatically easy?

BTW, 8+ years ago the source in question did not exist. We were still running with flat files and nasty PHP scripts then.

I'm sorry it has taken so long. I would have never dreamed that, after all these years, I would still be so focused on just enabling LWN to continue to exist. I still believe that's more important than putting out the source to yet another CMS, and one aimed at very specific needs at that.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 20:31 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (3 responses)

You bring up an interesting point. Assuming you dropped everything you were doing and did the absolute minimum necessary to open the codebase..would it be worth doing? Would it be likely that a community would grow up around it?

Could you take the time and use spot's scoring system and tell us where the LWN opening effort would fall on the failure scale?

http://spot.livejournal.com/308370.html

While spot's list is both humorous and angry (and more humorous because of the angst) he makes a very valid point. Throwing code over the wall doesn't make the code instantly valuable as a piece of the open source ecosystem that can be nurtured and sustained. It does take effort to prepared for success in terms of building a community development model.

For me the question isn't why isn't the existing LWN codebase not open. I accept that the code you are dealing with is high maintenance, custom crap that you aren't particularly proud of nor want to show off but gets the job done. I am myself a master of such..artful..plumbing work. Both in software and in real life. Everyone is happier if they never watch how I sweat a copper pipe or write php code. And not just because I tend to do both in just my underwear.

The question is, why aren't you using an AGPL open solution that will in the long term lower your own maintenance burden by allowing you to share that burden with a community of users/developers who share pieces of a larger solution?

-jef

LWN site code

Posted Jul 10, 2009 20:47 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Could you take the time and use spot's scoring system and tell us where the LWN opening effort would fall on the failure scale?

It would be up there, but probably unfairly so. We don't have things like "releases" or build documentation because there's only one deployed site. For similar reasons we have no mailing list, no web site, etc.

It's actually not all that bad of a code base, considering; I'm not ashamed of it. But, naturally enough, neither is it particularly polished or ready for more general use.

The question is, why aren't you using an AGPL open solution that will in the long term lower your own maintenance burden by allowing you to share that burden with a community of users/developers who share pieces of a larger solution?

If we were starting now we'd probably do that; there's a lot of good stuff out there. When I did start, back in 2002, I based the first version on what seemed to be the best option available at that time: Zope/CMF. But then I got distracted for three months, came back, and realized that I had absolutely no clue of what my code was doing. That was a shock - Python isn't normally like that. So I decided I was better off doing something new, and I've not regretted that.

Now there's so many good options that it would make little sense to start from the beginning. We've talked occasionally about switching to something more mainstream, but that would be a world of pain too.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 20:56 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

exactly what AGPL codebase do you suggest? while it will implement lots of things that LWN doesn't currently have, does it implement everything that LWN _does_ currently have? (including the subscriber pass-along links?)

how much work would it be to migrate all the content from the current system to the new system?

how big a problem is it that all the persistant links to the current content would no longer work with the new system? (remember that some of these links are in kernel commit messages, you can't change them, even if you could somehow track them all down)

frankly, I like the way LWN works a lot better than just about any other site I deal with.

it's simple, clean, and to the point.

all of the 'popular' systems that I have seen are written by people who would instead use terms like 'pathetic', 'obsolete', possibly 'boring' if they were being kind.

I would like to have the code for the LWN site available, but not at the cost of taking enough of Jon's time that LWN suffers as a result.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 11, 2009 17:43 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

FWIW, I think you could maintain working inlinks without too much trouble; Jon appears to have made good decisions WRT URL structure upfront...

Life is unfortunately too short to do everything

Posted Jul 10, 2009 9:10 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (7 responses)

While it would be nice in theory to see, admire, and be edified by Jon's Python code, he's a busy man, you know.

I for one, am happy to pay my subscription in support of all the things that he does have time for, related to LWNs news and technical coverage. Top-quality technical writing is an extremely precious commodity in the open-source world, and in my opinion we get far more bang per buck out of a Grumpy Editor review than we would out of a code drop for a relatively generic function.

Life is unfortunately too short to do everything

Posted Jul 10, 2009 10:30 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link] (6 responses)

And they can even say the code is already GPL. As they don't distribute it, they don't need to give it to anyone.

Life is unfortunately too short to do everything

Posted Jul 10, 2009 14:00 UTC (Fri) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link] (5 responses)

Which is what the Affero GPL is all about.

Go check it out.

Life is unfortunately too short to do everything

Posted Jul 10, 2009 14:07 UTC (Fri) by regala (guest, #15745) [Link] (2 responses)

do you plan on saying anything relevant ?

Life is unfortunately too short to do everything

Posted Jul 10, 2009 16:03 UTC (Fri) by dougsk (guest, #25954) [Link] (1 responses)

I think he did. See Section 2d.

Life is unfortunately too short to do everything

Posted Jul 10, 2009 17:11 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

This section is irrelevant since it does not apply to the sole copyright holder.

Life is unfortunately too short to do everything

Posted Jul 10, 2009 18:27 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

this would only be relevant if lwn decided to use this license for their code.

since they have not done so, pointing out that if they used a particular license they would be required to release the code running on their website is not relevant.

Life is unfortunately too short to do everything

Posted Jul 10, 2009 21:15 UTC (Fri) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link]

Wow, I thought it was relevant b/c it is a license which more people who care about freesoftware who write web apps should use. It empowers the user of the app. It promotes openness.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 16, 2009 11:33 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

I, for once, want my subscriber money go towards what I paid for: Creating high quality journalistic articles about Linux and Open Source Software.

Making the internal CMS with highly customized code, catering to a special workflow, deployed exactly once, is neither part nor aim of our subscriptions.
Quite to the contrary, setting up and maintaining a needed external-facing infrastructure (web site, mailing list, etc.) detracts from the journalistic work, so it might be even detrimental.

Open source solutions

Posted Jul 10, 2009 12:47 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses)

Open source business systems covering inventory, point of sale, payroll, taxes, ledgers and such are in a pretty healty state with OpenERP, OpenBravo and Compiere.

They are not plug-and-play with guaranteed yearly updates -- obviously, and neither are many proprietary systems -- but find a local consultant and they will constitute a very competitive offering.

SAP is way above all this, as well as everything else, so let's be realistic. But it goes well beyond personal ledger stuff which I presume Quick Books is an example of. It would not surprise me if open source solutions take a larger share in the small business segment in the near future.

Open source solutions

Posted Jul 10, 2009 20:07 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

Thank you. I was aware of OpenERP and Compiere. I was not aware of OpenBravo. And it looks interesting. I'm installing it for evaluation now. My initial impression is that it is the most professional and capable OSS product that I have seen, when you put the POS and ERP products together.

I would be interested in any comments that anyone might have.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 11, 2009 1:25 UTC (Sat) by dfarning (guest, #24102) [Link]

FWIW Last summer I was doing an analysis of our git repository for Sugar Labs. I asked Our Editor for a copy of the code he and Greg use for The Kernel Report.

Within a week he had posted a link to the code.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 11, 2009 10:40 UTC (Sat) by ejmarkow (guest, #56170) [Link]

sbergman27 said: "And we don't have a thing that can compete with current offerings. GnuCash? SQL Ledger? Please...Nothing even on the horizon."

There already is something out there. You must download and install Xtuple's PostBooks Accounting / ERP Open Source software. It's the best I've seen and stands way above GnuCash or SQL Ledger. Their software can be downloaded at: http://www.xtuple.org

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 5:38 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

I wonder why they weren't able to use OpenCobol.

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 11, 2009 10:45 UTC (Sat) by ejmarkow (guest, #56170) [Link]

Good point, I'm wondering the same. OpenCobol is an excellent Open Source alternative and meets many Cobol standards. Why isn't the USPS utilizing it?

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 16, 2009 11:46 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

I have been engaged in migration of a suite of 10,000s of mainframe programs to open systems at financial institutions, written in Cobol and /370 assembler.

In my experience, the difficulties are less the Cobol code. There exist good Cobol compilers for Linux/Unix, both open source and proprietary. Well, very often, preprocessors were used to generate Cobol that must be rewritten (e.g., Columbus Cobol), but even that is doable in such a project with acceptable resources.

The real problem lies in the used infrastructure: JCL jobs (dd is not a replacement for IEBGENER :-)), CICS, DB2 (incompatible to UDB), processing centered on ISAM files, structured record files, and other basic infrastructure that does not exist with similar performance characteristics in our POSIX world.

In addition, documentation that is quite often not up-to-date or missing -- after all, the code is decades old. Thus special interactions or special setup needs are often not known. I even had migrations where we only had object code for a few modules and the source got lost some 30 years ago. We had to disassemble them. (They were written in assembler in first place, so that's not as bad as disassembling optimized C or C++ object code for current processors. /370 binary code is almost readable in hex.)