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Opinion
Open Source Software: Should You Bet Your Career On It?
7/18/2006
By Stephen R. Acker, The Ohio State University, and Peter E. Murray, OhioLINK
At any point in time, there is a college IT director trying to determine whether to upgrade, migrate away from, or stay the course with some software package that the faculty and students rely on to meet their instructional needs. A campus may have outgrown the basic CMS, and the Enterprise version is now needed to bring system performance back to an acceptable level. The CMS provider may have changed code base, requiring major staff retraining to follow the migration path. Costs could be up, service could be down, and new third party tools may not easily integrate. Yet even faced with all of these potential reasons to change, making the decision to do so is never easy. User communities hate change, hate training, and hate repurposing earlier content to work in a new environment.
For most universities, a decision to introduce new software should be made with the expectation that the choice will hold for three to seven years – until the campus again finds its groove. So change is not taken lightly, and the risk of change must be projected over time and discounted back to the present. Then just when you’re about to make your decision – having done focus groups, cost analyses, technical stress tests, and due diligence – someone mentions “open source software,” and new dimensions of system adoption and environmental risk are brought into the mix.
What is the value to your organization of being able to separate software support from software licensing? What is the value, if any, of being able to customize at your discretion the underlying code that runs your campus eLearning system? What could it mean to your campus to join a software cooperative – a community that shares software development and support costs, training resources, and possibly hardware infrastructure? And if some of what you’ve been reading about open source sounds encouraging, should you “bet your career” on this promise and potentiality? Maybe and maybe not. Read on for some background on open source, or just skip to the last section and enter the debate.
A Backgrounder on Open Source
Open source software, software that is obtainable without licensing fees and freely modifiable by the organization using it, has earned a place in the IT infrastructure of the vast majority of educational and commercial institutions. The open source Apache Web server, PERL programming language, MySQL database, Firefox Web browser, and Linux operating system almost certainly have played some role in making this Viewpoint readable on your screen. However, if you are within the ranks of the end users of information and learning technologies – faculty, the majority of students, an administrator who ultimately approves requests from your IT support unit – none of these names probably resonate with the familiarity of Windows XP,
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