Open Source Ethics and Values Part 2: Economically Responsible

The PTFS Europe story

PTFS Europe was created in 2007 by Nick Dimant and Jonathan Field, who had both worked for a proprietary library systems business. They believed that the open source concept matched the ethos of libraries; and that a support company for these open source solutions should be available to libraries in the UK. 

Open source software is free to use so, quite unusually in this field of library software, there are no licence fees. Instead of being an “owner” of the software, PTFS Europe is a support company for open source. Customers pay an annual fee for:

• Secure cloud hosting
• Daily checks on server performance; blocking threats and bots, etc.
• Migration project management
• Adding integrations
• Upgrades
• Training
• Support – not just for problems, but also with help/advice to manage their systems
• Development – PTFS Europe is a leader in pushing Koha developments for example so our customers’ wish lists are more likely to happen.

We started PTFS Europe with the view to “Make a living”, NOT “Make a fortune”. You can always strive to make more and more, and tech companies are very bad at doing this to the detriment of staff and customers. To me it means making a living for myself, for my staff to make a good living out of their work and for our customers to get a lot of value for money out of the service they pay us for. For me this means being frugal but not mean. Just as my parents taught me! – Jonathan Field: Managing Director

Cost-effective infrastructure management

All our open source software is cloud hosted and requires hosting providers. There is the potential for ethical concerns when selecting hosting providers; for example social inequity in locations of the server factories or pollution. PTFS Europe only selects hosting providers who can prove they are based in the UK or Europe (to match our data security and GDPR requirements), and have reliable security certifications and environmental commitments which match our ethical values. Once those hosting providers are selected we work hard to ensure we:

• Select appropriate and competitively priced server specifications
• Regularly monitor, review and optimise server resources
• Price our annual fees not on what the market will bear, but on the pressure and needs of the servers for that library.

Our Corporate Social Responsibility policy also ensures we have a sustainable hosting practice as part of all our procurement.  For example, not every customer needs the power of a dedicated server. After understanding a customer’s needs, we’ll happily offer a cheaper, more energy-efficient virtual server if appropriate. Our systems are lightweight in terms of server pressure and therefore more energy efficient than alternatives. The web interface easily adapts to a mobile device format without the need for any additional applications. Mobile computing supports users who may not have access to another kind of device or may find it difficult to navigate other operating systems. The software does not need to be downloaded to local PCs which means less frequent upgrades and replacement of hardware – which saves money for our customers and library users. We never bulk out specifications with expensive, overpowered servers.

We ensure that the choices for our server specs are appropriate for the task, but also competitively priced. We also regularly check to see if any servers are in urgent need of decommission or down-speccing, so they aren’t costing more than they need to.

Community-focused development

We gather wish list developments from our customers and use our community knowledge to line these up with other bugs and development requests around the world. We can then work with other support companies and developers to plan and gather funding for those developments. When some funding is secured, we will also volunteer our developers’ time to ensure these enhancements are developed, tested, verified and available to the whole community in the next version of the software. 

The economic viability of a development is always considered part of this process – it is vital in open source that individual institutions do not have too much power in guiding development. We always avoid being paid for customisations too – this would lead to a “branching off” of the software and weaken the product for the community.

• Steering developments to benefit the entire open-source community
• Investing in community tools and projects 
• Balancing customer needs with wider community benefits
• Accurate time estimation and quoting for development projects
• Seeking sponsorship for bug fixes when appropriate

Ensuring that we are quoting for the correct number of hours for a given specification is vital. We also have (largely unpaid) responsibilities to the community, but finding sponsorship is within our wheelhouse to both boost profitability for PTFS Europe and to ensure needed development is pushed for the global community.

We steer our developments in a way that benefits all of the open-source community, not just our particular customer/use case. We also invest our developers’ time in community tools and projects (koha-testing-docker, bugzilla, mattermost, plugin-store) for the same reason: we benefit from it, but so does the wider community.

Value for customers

There can be a large variation in the pricing for library systems in the UK. This is in part due to proprietary systems using code that is power/data hungry (requiring much more server space to function) and in part due to those proprietary companies deciding what certain sectors of libraries can afford.

We are all too aware of the economic stress, continued pressures and cuts to library services across the UK. It is a time when economic disparity is widening across our country. We do not want to be part of increasing those pressures for libraries.

At PTFS Europe we are confident our software is as efficient as it can be. All developments are tested to ensure they do not add undue pressure to the system. We work hard to select the most value in hosting (but not at the expense of ethical concerns) and we keep costs down across the business, by being a virtual/remote company to ensure best value prices.

Work such as development, adding integrations and training which is “extra” to an implementation is charged at a daily rate and is the same for all customers.

Support fees for customers are priced according to the server load and needs. There are no higher levels that can be paid for, because we believe all our customers have the same importance to us. All support is triaged according to severity.

We also work to ensure public procurements are fair and good value. This often means addressing concerns with procuring councils and also contacting Ministers to try to achieve better value for the public purse. We always strive to provide excellent support and services for our open source solutions by:

• Keeping costs low
• Fair and open pricing
• Educating customers on the balance between cost and quality
• Ensuring responsible spending of public money on systems

Conclusion

It is sometimes difficult to equate economics with ethics but we strive to get the best value for customers because our goal is to widen availability of open source software to all library sectors, whilst ensuring the continued profitability of our company. Instead of constantly striving for better profit and cutting corners we are content with our reasonable profit margin. Anything beyond that point we give back to our communities in terms of open source and charitable donations.

I feel that wellbeing is prioritised over financial benefit which is very refreshing having worked in organisations where it felt like this was not the case.

PTFS Europe believes that business can and should be sustainable, and successful, without compromising ethical values. Our commitment to these values helps ensure that our contributions are not just technically sound, but also ethically grounded and, as individuals, that makes us proud of the work we do. It is important to us to be good people as well as doing good business. 

At PTFS Europe we believe the Future for Libraries is …Open!