Special Report: Open Source Vision

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Special Report: Open Source Vision

6/26/2006

By Matt Villano

John Bucher, CTO at Oberlin College (OH), is one of the skeptics. While Bucher has embraced open source on the infrastructure level, he says there’s too much at stake for his school to rely on unproven open source applications that could falter at any moment. The school has been using a learning management system from Blackboard since 2000, and just re-upped its long-standing contract. In describing his reliance on Blackboard, Bucher swears by the cliché, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He explains, “Since we have a six-year history with Blackboard, I put some value on the lack of a need to migrate to a different product,” he says. “I’m not a critic of open source, but it seems to me that it’s been hyped to the point that some people are moving in that direction perhaps without total respect for the factors that might make an institution stay with commercial software.”

Advocating Glasnost

FOR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIESinterested in learning more about open source, fear not: There is an organization to help. It is JA-SIG, an international consortium of higher education institutions focused on promoting and sponsoring open source projects that serve colleges and universities. Its four-fold mission:

To provide education and research in the applied use of open technology architectures and systems in higher education.
To develop a global academic community of interest among practitioners and institutions, and to inform that community of international activities, projects, and opportunities in the field of open technology architectures and systems in higher education.
To educate by coaching, collaborating, and sharing good practices, and disseminating the results of innovative approaches in this field.
To create, through its various activities — including conferences, projects, and outreach— an atmosphere of trust, goodwill, and mutual respect among all participants.

On top of these activist goals, the group also is credited with launching the uPortal initiative earlier this decade; it also now oversees open source applications, including HyperContent and the Central Authentication Service, or CAS. The organization’s annual summer conference was held June 4-6 in Vancouver.

Poor interfaces. Finally, some academic technologists assail open source for shoddy interfaces—a flaw that could scare off technology coordinators at smaller schools who are familiar with the comfy click-and-go functionality of Microsoft Windows and Apple applications. Bucher, in particular, insists that the applications are not even close to equal, and that until open source interfaces are as easy to navigate as the interfaces on market software, he d'esn’t see the technology achieving mainstream adoption in higher education at all.

The Future

New strides. Improvements to shortcomings in the area of open source application interfaces already are underway. Drupal, a new and improved spin on the UPortal content management platform, is revolutionizing the way schools aggregate and access content, offering a more intuitive graphical user interface than any of the open source applications before it. OpenOffice, an open source project through which Sun Microsystems is releasing and coordinating the technology for the popular StarOffice suite, has made great strides in improving its interface in recent months. Even Chandler, the Open Source Applications Foundation’s new application for managing personal information, has emphasized the graphical user interface (GUI) as a priority.