A Return to Openness: Apereo Examines Sustainability in Open Source

A Q&A with Patrick Masson and Josh Baron

• By Mary Grush
• 07/14/25

Many of us remember a time when open source advocacy was predominant in adoption decisions for everything from learning platforms, to educational resources, to administrative systems, and much more. Those were the early days of what we dubbed "the open source movement".

Over time, since moving out of the early 2000s, open strategies have enjoyed high adoption rates and open source software (OSS) has gained the kind of ubiquity that quietly ensures its core values but doesn't keep it in the limelight.

Still, moving effortlessly into acceptance is really not enough. OSS, while established and time tested on so many levels, no longer takes center stage in discussions of adoption. Why is that a problem?

Because surprisingly, on many of our campuses, even the IT leadership responsible for the lion's share of technology deployments doesn't realize the extent to which the institution is dependent on open source. And that lack of awareness can be a threat to campuses.

Here, for a roundtable discussion on sustainability of open source, CT calls on two seasoned thought leaders in open source: The Apereo Foundation's Executive Director Patrick Masson and Development Officer Josh Baron. With nearly 50 years of experience in open source between them, the two offer their perspectives on sustainability in open source, what can be done to achieve it, and the opportunity for higher education to maximize its benefits.

Mary Grush: Can we talk about what sustainability means for open source in higher education?

Patrick Masson: Yes, but first I'd introduce an important preamble, if you will. I think the sustainability issue is actually the second point of awareness to be raised with campuses. Because, if campuses aren't first aware of their dependencies on open source, it's going to be difficult to develop a sustainability model or to become sustainable.

If campuses aren't first aware of their dependencies on open source, it's going to be difficult to develop a sustainability model or to become sustainable.

In order for us to build a community or coalition or interest in sustainability for open source projects, campuses need to understand how much they already depend on open source.

For example, a campus CIO or IT director might say, "Yes, we use open source. We use Drupal for our campus CMS". And that's easily discoverable. But what's more difficult to understand, sometimes even for a CIO or IT director, are the open source dependencies that exist because, for example, the institution is using Salesforce and Salesforce relies on open source libraries and integrated components and tools and infrastructure.

People typically think of open source software deployment in terms of the more visible "open source applications" like Opencast or Moodle or Linux or Kubernetes… What they don't realize is how integrated open source is — creating more but less obvious dependencies.

In fact, you'll find open source dependencies in just about everything that you're running. And if higher ed's trusted ed tech vendors rely on open source (which they do), higher ed relies on open source. Do you run Adobe, Cisco, Salesforce, SAP, Workday, or ORACLE? With these and many others, you might not be aware of it, but you're dependent on open source.

If higher ed's trusted ed tech vendors rely on open source (which they do), higher ed relies on open source.

So that's the first message that I think campuses need to become aware of. Hopefully people will then ask, How are we ensuring that these dependencies are being sustained so that the core services we rely on are available?

That's the pre-argument before you get to sustainability.

Grush: Is this advice only about technology deployments of open source?

Masson: No, I would say that it's not just about open source technology. I would offer the same advice to anyone looking for digital transformation or to build communities of practice in some form. It's about understanding the open ethos.

How do campuses interact in a culture of openness where the expectation is co-creation through collaboration, rather than simply a pay-for-service?

There's a whole different approach needed to engage with projects and communities with open source values. And that's just as important a consideration as sustainability of deployed technology, because if you can't foster a cooperative community of practice, then the project is going to fall apart.

Grush: Let's dip into sustainability now. Is sustainability in open source mostly a focus on funding? I'm guessing you're defining it more broadly.

Josh Baron: Right, it's a lot more than just trying to go after grants and funding. At Apereo, when we talk about sustainability for open source and for openness in general, it's about long-term sustainability. It has to include models that go far beyond funding — although grants can provide seed capital and initial funding, which are clearly important considerations, along with a viable revenue model. Sustainability is most important when your grant money goes away, which it will at some point. That's when we see aspects of sustainability in a broader sense.

Sustainability is most important when your grant money goes away, which it will.

One of the things that we've been observing over time at Apereo — it's been more than 10 years since Sakai and Jsig, each of which go back 25 years, merged to form Apereo — is that higher education, starting in about 2010, was heading down a very strategic path, with the notion of openness reaching across almost all elements of the education system (for example OERs, Open Access, Open Science, and so forth).

In higher education, of course we still see open source deployments in various areas — like LINUX in IT shops as well as learning system software like Sakai and Moodle on the academic-facing side. And of course, as Patrick was saying, open source is so ubiquitous that many IT leaders don't even recognize all the open source dependencies they have. We do see really huge initiatives around open education resources (OERs) as well as open education, open science, and open access in general.

What we are not seeing in higher education models is a strong continuation of a systemic approach to openness as institutions tend to focus on one or two areas but not the entire "system of openness" that could be leveraged. It's really necessary to deploy open source values across the whole education system in order to maximize the benefits of openness, and that's one reason Apereo is working so closely at the intersection of sustainability and openness.

What we are not seeing in higher education models is a strong continuation of a systemic approach to openness as institutions tend to focus on one or two areas but not the entire "system of openness" that could be leveraged.

Grush: Does Apereo help by monitoring and providing stats that can show people what higher education's use of open source is?

Masson: Yes. One of the scans we did was with a tool called BuiltWith, which is an online service. It was used by Harvard Business School in a study that found the global estimated value of OSS to be $8.8 trillion. We found that scanning 348,708 sites revealed 5,259 .edu domains. And I'll just note that it scanned .edu domains, which, of course, isn't every university in the world. But nonetheless, of those 5,259, 89 percent run at least one open source technology. And by that technology, I mean a platform like Drupal or WordPress. It did not look at things like Linux or Postgres or MySQL or those kinds of tools.

And 4,682 campuses are using at least one open source application. The most popular was jQuery with 4,329 campuses running jQuery. The next most popular was WordPress. Then Apache, a variety of Apache web server, Tomcat, things like that. Nginx was next, PHP, and then React.js.

Reviewing all of those 4,682 campuses running open source, the total number of open source installations across those campuses was 26,306. And we detected 76 different open source applications — somewhat limited by BuiltWith's indexing and what the tool could look up, but I think that's a pretty significant set of details.

Reviewing all of those 4,682 campuses running open source, the total number of open source installations across those campuses was 26,306.

Baron: I'll jump in with an observation: Having now been working with Apereo and Patrick for more than 25 years in the higher education open source space, I think it's been interesting that in the past decade, or maybe 15 years, we've seen open source tools become ubiquitous throughout all of higher education and mainstreamed in a way that 15 years ago wasn't the case.

But those tools have gotten so mainstream that people may have lost sight of how dependent they are on open source tools for all of their operations. And therefore, they also may have lost sight of how important it is to be working to sustain all this that they're relying on.

At the same time, we had a new cadre of CIOs, CTOs, and directors of distance education coming to leadership roles. During that period when things were very quiet and happening behind the scenes, the new leadership coming in just didn't have the same awareness of both how much they relied on open source as well as different ways that they could contribute to and sustain it.

Masson: I'll add, as a former CIO and CTO at this time, everyone was shifting from locally hosted data centers to cloud computing where campuses leverage external resources (for example, hosting WordPress on AWS) and remote services where campus vendors provide services (think Blackboard or MS365). These cloud/remote providers all rely on OSS to run a campus environment, so again, the campuses rely on OSS, but they may not see it directly.

Grush: It seems that while higher education leaders may have lacked some awareness in recent years of their true use of open source, higher education is just the place for research and projects that could adjust those perceptions.

Baron: Certainly true, and I'll just offer one of those unique aspects of higher education. Because we're learning institutions, there's an awesome opportunity that can help students learn while at the same time helping to sustain an open source project. Students in a computer science program could be contributing to some infrastructure projects with guidance, helping to maintain a codebase while also learning critical workforce skills.

And then you could even have your marketing students come in and help project leaders, for example, grow the adoption of their open source projects — a critical component, I think, to sustaining that software over time. This lowers costs and provides students with unique and authentic learning experiences. Compared to other industries, higher education is pretty unique in being able to benefit from open source and sustain it at the same time.

Grush: And Apereo is in that space, too, as a helpful focus in the industry and the community.

Baron: Yes, Apereo is really unique as a nonprofit international organization that's been in higher education open source for 25 years — working kind of quietly, a bit behind the scenes. We are trying now to make a very strategic effort to engage with higher education, to build more awareness, not only of the dependencies on open source, but about the benefits and the value proposition. We're trying to engage with some of the new organizations that are starting to come into this space by offering our 25 years of experience to the new folks and the new initiatives that are being launched.

There's a track record we have that demonstrates we have knowledge here, and we're interested in trying to broaden awareness of open source, openness, and the strategies worth sustaining across higher education.

We're interested in trying to broaden awareness of open source, openness, and the strategies worth sustaining across higher education.

Masson: When open source began in ed tech, in the early 2000s, the focus was on developing enterprise-scale, industry-class options: Think LMS, CSM, portals, and so forth. This is where Apereo started, providing support for the development of these software systems. Over this same period of time, the technology requirements and support for open source projects have shifted. Emerging projects no longer need a foundation to provide technical support — code repositories, bug trackers, server space, communications and community tools, and the like — those are all now available freely on the Internet. Today, projects need organizational support — for example, governance models, community development/management, IP and tech transfer, funding and development. Interestingly, if you look at Gartner's 2007 OSS Hype Cycle, the references are about technologies and software applications. Looking at the 2024 OSS Hype Cycle, investments and development are in policies and practices like assessment and procurement, InnerSource, Open Source Program Offices, Software Bill of Materials — the activities and processes that make open source work, not the tools and technologies.

We have mature open source products in production. But now we need to sustain them.

We've been successful. We — not only Apereo, but also higher education IT — have mature open source products in production. But now we need to sustain them. We welcome all of higher education around the world to join us in our journey to sustain and maximize the benefits of open source and openness.