mirror.nus.edu.sg – Go Open Source Faster (in Singapore…)

A quiet chat with Guan Sin the other day about the role of NUS in the support of Open Source operating systems got me reflecting a lot on what open source really means these days, especially in a place where commercial deals are commonplace, otherwise, theft of commercial assets are preferred.

Even within the niche community who still download complete ISOs or kernel sources and compile operating systems themselves, how many bothers to download them? Does local mirrors like the one provided by the National University of Singapore make a discernible difference? I mean really, what are trying to encourage here? In the so called “industry”, most of the working professionals have to deal with a sleuth of commercial technologies – yes some of which are open source, but they are mainly used at the very high level (e.g. applications) where risks are smaller. Rarely you’ll see a local firm who does some form of digital asset governance allowing you to run a custom compiled Ubuntu on the Lifebook or Thinkpad they specifically _imaged_ for you. At home, building a Fedora box means long nights of driver searching for the latest and greatest game to play, etc.

And I quote GS:

… NUS used to run a major ftp archive for Singapore as a national service. But that heritage is lost for whatever reasons. There is a half-working site at mirror.nus.edu.sg, run by School of Computing. But it’s giving me 50kb/s, for me to download a 3gb+ CentOS DVD ISO …

Go verify – now maybe it is the infrastructure that it is sitting on that’s old. 50KB/s 10 years ago (it must be there at least for 10 years – e.g. this directory “boot” is created in 1997) is huge! But then CentOS (then still RedHat) wasn’t 3GB either then. Some of the archives were just recently refreshed, but there’s still quite a fair bit to do to get all the major forks to their latest patches.

So should NUS continue to be the bastion of Open Source (let’s just focus on operating system here)? Say if our hero here completes the update, swings it back into action, manages to convince his management to continue to fund it, would you download and use it? In school the labs etc. already have their own maintenance team to take care of things (be it solaris, any flavor of linux, windows, what have you). They rarely run the latest and greatest patch (this is no Patch Tuesdays where the bulk of the users “Set It, And Forget It!”) as there are presumably a lot more compatibility issues to deal with. If so, for what? Geek pleasure, hobbyist I can relate to, but as technology matures the bulk of us tend to float to a higher level of abstraction.

To be clear here, if you were to say, “the role is to be the cache la!” Then basically it serves no “purpose”. NUS is no content distribution network – it is a premier regional university as many like to call it. A purpose in case is like “to promote the use of Open Source systems in Singapore”, ah, then if that makes sense this is very good.

One day we will all forget what an operating system is (do you know what chip brand / model your washing machine uses?) – or maybe you’ll see them mentioned in one of those infocomm shows they do in Expo where desperate organizers try to squeeze in as much trivia about the historical development as possible. So perhaps one sad hindsight way of looking at it would be to see how much space the future infocomm history organizer devotes to the role of Open Source and NUS.