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It’s ‘Open’ Season
Open Source
2/1/2008
From a financial standpoint, open source applications offer reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), but they offer even greater intrinsic value.
HIGHER EDUCATION IS adopting open source applications-and not just in areas such as web servers. According to the 2005 Educause core data survey, 14.4 percent of surveyed BA (four-year liberal arts) institutions reported open source course management systems (CMS) in place. And across all the higher ed segments surveyed, open source software emerged as the web portal of choice for 12.5 percent of the respondents. (Survey respondents comprised 933 colleges and universities worldwide.)
Last year, Brad Wheeler, Indiana University CIO, stated in an industry publication, "Although there has been no mass exodus from commercial applications software…there is a growing base of adoption of open source applications among a broad array of institutions."
Financial considerations help drive that adoption, but not in the way that one might expect. Open source, particularly in its early days, had been associated with "freeware"-a line of thinking that emphasized lack of cost as the primary benefit. But "free" in the open source sense has more to do with the ability to possess and modify a program's source code as one desires. Indeed, large organizations adopting open source purchase support contracts and, naturally, running any software in an enterprise will involve operations and maintenance costs. That said, open source does provide a cost reduction opportunity.
"The primary cost savings benefit for open source software stems from its zero cost of licensing compared to proprietary, enterprise-class software, which has substantial licensing and maintenance fees for each and every year it is in use," says John Blakley, chief executive of Unicon, a company that provides consulting, training, and commercial support for the open source Sakai CMS. The total cost of ownership is most notable after the initial deployment phase, says Blakley. "In both open source and commercial software, you still have implementation, integration, training, and support costs during the first year," he explains. "But after the first year, TCO for open source software drops dramatically, while proprietary software costs remain fairly high and fixed for ongoing licensing and maintenance."
Unicon cites lower TCO as an advantage Georgia Tech will derive from its Sakai implementation. The school selected Unicon to help it migrate from the WebCT Learning Management System to Sakai. In Blakley's view, open source also contributes to TCO savings in that users "have control of their environment" and are no longer at the mercy of a commercial software vendor. "They upgrade Sakai when they want to upgrade Sakai, not when a commercial vendor wants them to," he says. If an institution wants to remain on the same version of Sakai for 15 years, it can do so, he adds. That brand of flexibility has been lacking in the education space; particularly in sectors where competition among commercial software vendors is minimal.
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