Special Report: Open Source Vision

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Special Report: Open Source Vision

6/26/2006

By Matt Villano

Control. Money issues aside, there are other reasons why open source has so many fans. For one thing, many campus technologists and administrators see open source as a way to have better control over their own software application destiny. Furthermore, open source developers claim that a broad group of programmers produces a more useful and more bugfree product; through an informal peer-review process, a greater number of individuals (directly connected to the application users) are constantly reviewing the code. This process is an important safeguard against poorly written code, and a virtual guarantee that all bugs or glitches will be ironed out quickly.

'Open source has been hyped to the point
that some people are moving in that direction
without respect for the factors that might make
an institution stay with commercial software.'
—John Bucher, Oberlin College

Security. Another benefit of peer review is more secure software. Because open source applications are refined by hundreds of programmers every month, the likelihood of a security vulnerability going undetected is slim to none. Abel at IMS says that on the infrastructure side, one of the big drivers for Linuxbased solutions from vendors such as Novell and Sun Microsystems is that they are viewed as more secure than some of the commercial alternatives. Abel says this perception has carried over to the open source application realm, too.

“It seems counterintuitive: You’d think that if something is open source, it must be easier to exploit,” he says. “That’s not the case, though. Open source solutions have proven to be some of the safest out there today, and this has become a huge selling point that has convinced higher education to embrace them.”

Challenges: Cost, Skills, Sustainability, Interfaces

Cost perception, skills. Open source may boast myriad benefits, but that d'esn’t mean there is no downside. Perhaps the biggest challenge to open source apps in higher education is the misconception that the technology is free. Yes, the price is zero. Yes, licensing fees are zero. But the cost of the project is far from zero. In some cases, it takes special skills to be able to get into open source code and tinker around, and these skills are quite different from those that most programmers possess when they move into a basic programming job. Most schools embracing open source find that they must spend money to hire specialists to build and maintain open source offerings, or at least pay to send current programmers to special training programs.

Last year, John Norman, director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (UK), conducted an informal study of US institutions to determine how many full-time programmers were required in a standard higher ed IT department to complete day-to-day programming tasks. He found that each school needs at least two technical support people for every 20,000 users. According to the IMS study, however, out of approximately 4,000 leading institutions in the US, only the top 300 have the human resources necessary to implement software; the other 3,700 need help.

“Open source is less expensive than closed source, but it’s not nearly as inexpensive as people think it can be,” says Siddall, the technologist at Denison. “The bottom line is: No matter how you look at it, open source has a cost.”

‘New model’ anxiety; sustainability. Another potential problem for open source is that it is a new model. While some schools have embraced the technology enthusiastically, others have been apprehensive. The laggards express some fear and anxiety about where open source fits into their IT environments: Because the technology is still fairly new, skeptics quite legitimately wonder if open source is a sustainable model for the long haul.