The Format and Rationale for the Migration Guide

GNU/Linux and Open Source Software in general demonstrate that high-quality, robust, reliable and secure software can be developed using management and methods that look different from or maybe even inimical to 'traditional' methods. The Migration Guide's definition of Open Source does not rule out any development method or source of funding, but for most realistic adopters of Open Source technologies, the options will mostly be the free-of-cost GPL-licensed ones. For those projects any budget is spent on software development alone. The very low or nonexistent budget for such projects has important consequences, one of which is the need for a Guide like this one

Software that has no cash budget or more particularly, no sale price, will have no marketing budget either. That means that its suitability or not will become known only by word of mouth or grass-roots or viral marketing. It is commonplace that the effort to produce documentation for those products is at best limited and at worst nonexistent. Marketing or promotional literature for Open Source products is as rare as hen's teeth.

Highly technical people with a lot of time on their hands can work through the mass of Open Source products from the bottom-up, reading the technical howto-guides and figuring out for themselves what might be applicable and what would fit into their organisation's migration towards Open Source. It is very time consuming and inevitably prone to suck-it-and-see approaches with a lot of backtracking. There is far too little information available that describes typical business software architectures and then provides coherent guidance on what Open Source software has to offer in each part of the architecture.

This Migration Guide sets out to provide that higher-level guidance. The two largest components to the Guide will be the case studies and the software package descriptions. The case studies will be drawn from real industry experience wherever possible, showing how people have already started to migrate, the architectures they chose and the tradeoffs that were made. The reason for basing that part of the Guide on case studies is to give real-world guidance rather than theorising. People with a business to run need verifiable evidence and hard facts. The categorisation structure for the case studies will be refined over time.

The case studies will be counterbalanced by a large section containing overview descriptions of the most important software packages. Whilst many are well known, it is frustrating to find that (for example) an IT director of a business considering migration towards an Open Source desktop is unaware of packages like Wine or VNC. The software package descriptions will mostly comply with a common format (currently being established) for ease of use and future reference. Both major sections will be cross-referenced to one another to provide context and understanding of where and how the software fits in.

The Guide will not attempt to be a comprehensive repository of all Open Source products since those exist in other places and it is an impossible job to remain up to date. The intention is that the case-studies will prompt inclusion of packages and that as a consequence the package list is likely to be of interest to people whose focus is on migration in commercial or similar environments.

Other parts of the site will provide background material and references. There is also a news section to the site where important or interesting stories are gathered from other sources.

Completing the Guide is dependent on the amount of effort available. At the time of writing it is being done as a spare-time activity and is receiving rather less than half-a-day a week. Because the Guide is not attempting to be comprehensive, but instead merely representative, it is possible to estimate that it will be in a usable state with a further twenty to forty days of effort being spent on it, after which it can grow organically. At the current rate of progress that puts 'completion' some forty to eighty weeks away from mid-May 2003. Serious offers of assistance or sponsorship are being requested to help reduce this far-distant goal.

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