Who is funding it?
We have got £4.5m funding from Advantage West Midlands, the Regional Development Agency for the West Midlands area. The project is funded for three years -- we have funding until the 31 October, 2006.
What are you actually doing to help people who are using or developing open source software?
We have various targets set by the funding body. The main targets are that we have to help 400 businesses for a minimum of a day; run 100 training courses of 30 hours or more; run seminars which are attended by a total of 1,000 people; and help at least four community regeneration projects.
The business assistance involves helping companies to understand or implement open source software. For example, if a business wanted to roll out a content management solution to client, we could help them sort through the options. We may do some research and write a report recommending the best three and would then put the different CMS systems on our servers and let the client try them out. We try not to rip and replace, instead we try to find an area where a company has a gap in its technology. For example if a company hasn't got a firewall, we suggest, "Why don't you try an open source one."
The training courses are on a variety of topics, such as Linux, Plone [an open source content management system] and Samba. We try to make our courses vendor-neutral. We don't have an affiliation -- we're not here to make sales. That's one of the things people like about coming here -- we're not trying to close the deal. We're happy for people not to use open source if it's not appropriate for their situation.
The seminars cover various areas. The most popular is "How to make money from open source". We also have seminars on how to defeat viruses and spam using open source products such as Samba [a file and print server], and how to do Web development using open source applications such as SugarCRM [a CRM application], SquirrelMail [a Webmail package] and Zope [an application server].
What kind of technical facilities do you have there?
We have a room with 14 machines, which are a mixture of Macs, PCs and thin clients. We can run whatever people want -- Windows XP Pro, any version of Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD. On the server side we can also run whatever people want.
Everything in the building is open source except the swipe-entry system. For example, we use Linux, OpenOffice [an office-productivity application], Evolution [an email application] and Asterisk [a VoIP system].
Your server room appears to be the office centrepiece [the server room is in the centre of the OpenAdvantage office surrounded by glass walls], why is that?
When we were talking to the people who kitted out the interior, they wanted to know about what we were doing here so they could decide on the design. We tried to explain what open source is and said that it's about "opening the building blocks of software so that you can get under the hood". Their interpretation of this was to put glass walls around the server room, so that people can see the servers.
Do you enjoy your job?
I have been lucky. This is my dream job - helping people get into open source. When you are sat in the pub, putting world to rights, you often feel there's not a lot you can do -- you can't go into Gordon Brown's office and change things. Before I was sat in a pub going, "people should be using open source." Now I've got the opportunity to make it happen.
