We have not yet reached point where everyone has 2Mbps in 2016. Stalling on the USO consultation and pushing it back adds to the confusion around a long-term vision on where we are heading, she said.Onwurah believes that Culture Secretary Ed Vaizey is too preoccupied with the upcoming referendum on the EU to think about the USO strategy. If the USO is to take the form of a publicly-funded scheme, that would need EU permission to go ahead, under the bloc's state aid laws. Therefore it is also plausible that the strategy may be on hold while we await the possibility of a Brexit.However, some have noted that the USO is a distraction from what needs to be a far more ambitious plan to improve the UK's digital infrastructure. Dan Lewis, a senior adviser at the Institute of Directors, is calling for speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second by 2030 – although that would not be under a USO.Lewis believes the key to getting better connectivity is greater market competition, rather than by setting a relatively low USO. To that end, he supports the aims of Ofcom's Digital Communications Review to open up access to BT’s telephone poles and ducts and thereby dominance of the former state-owned telecoms group.They have the right vision, but what we need now is more details as to how it will happen. We can't afford to wait, he said. BT's uncompetitive cost structure for competitors wanting access to its infrastructure should not set the pace at which we move to a digital future.
Until various regulatory and legal decisions are made, it looks like those lacking in decent connectivity will just have to wait for an update on their legal right to 10Mbps. If you're working on your mobile smart device and desktop, Druva's inSync product will protect your data on that device. Now, if you are using Box, Google Work (Google Drive, Google Docs and Gmail) or Exchange Online in Office 365, inSync will protect that cloud-resident data as well.The updated inSync also provides audit and compliance support, and it's managed through a single platform.Druva says inSync aggregates end-user data, whether it resides on a laptop, mobile device or in cloud applications, so that enterprises have better visibility and control of their data. It's a way of countering mini-data silos and combining them.The EU's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Privacy Shield require visibility of what data you have for legal and compliance requirements. InSync can help with that.Druva quotes Jeffrey Mann, a Gartner Research VP, who says: The long-expected surge in adoption of cloud office systems has been underway since mid-2014. Very soon, the question facing enterprise collaboration and communications leaders will not be whether to move these workloads to the cloud, but how painful will it be to remain on-premises?
Druva CEO and cofounder Jaspreet Singh told The Reg that inSync will be developed to support the SalesForce cloud next, and it could be ready early next quarter. He thinks SalesForce users have data protection issues at the moment.Druva inSync for Box and Office 365, including OneDrive and Exchange Online, are available today. Google Apps is in limited availability, with general availability next month. Cloud Application support is part of the Druva inSync Elite and Elite Plus subscription plans for an additional charge. Open-source software is not possible without collaboration and collaboration is not possible without communication. Collaborative communication in open source projects typically means some form of distributed chat.In the past, and indeed the present for most projects, that has meant IRC. IRC has some disadvantages, though, and developers love a shiny new toy, which is part of the reason more than a few projects have moved to Slack, the startup attracting crazy amounts of venture investment and equally crazy valuations.While there is nothing wrong with Slack – in fact it's insanely good at managing and organising distributed conversations – Slack is not necessarily the best choice for open-source projects.
Indeed this is not the purpose of Slack. Slack's intended use is to provide a single dashboard or app for all sorts of different communication tools - email, chat, Twitter and more.Slack is not primarily for public chats. The company itself discourages this use case, which should give large open-source projects pause. But more to the point, Slack is closed-source software controlled by a single company. It's the antithesis of open source.In effect, moving from IRC to Slack means replacing an open protocol with decades of open source client software development and a robust distributed system for a single point of failure. Again, not to disparage Slack.Some in open source have spoken out against Slack as a replacement for IRC, notably Drew DeVault, whose post please don't use Slack for FOSS projects made the rounds in programming circles a few months back.According to DeVault: Slack is not a tool built for open source projects to use for communication with their userbase… It's a tool built for teams and it is ill-suited to this use-case.There are essentially three problems with IRC that Slack and its imitators (more on those in a minute) solve. First, creating an account is easier. Enter an email address and password and you're done. Slack is also already widely used; there's a good chance a significant portion of developers looking to contribute to any given FOSS project are already using Slack elsewhere.
The second thing Slack offers is built-in support for attaching files and pasting code. While some IRC clients will follow links and pull in outside data like code snippets or images, some will not which means you can't rely on these features being present for everyone. With IRC you need to rely on a pastebin and file upload service to handle code and files.The other major advantage is persistent, searchable sessions. That makes it easy to see what you missed while you where away. It's possible to do this with IRC, but not easy.There are ongoing efforts to improve IRC, notably the IRCv3 project, but if you're looking for a solution right now, IRC comes up short.And there's no question that Slack is a very well designed, easy to use chat system. But it's closed source, which makes it a questionable choice for open-source projects. Still, if good old IRC really isn't working any more - and I would suggest your project take some time to really evaluate that question before proceeding - there are open-source Slack imitators that can also solve some of the problems with IRC, but are self-hosted and FOSS licensed.