In Gear for Open Source?
Higher education hasn’t yet made a big shift toward open source applications.
Open source infrastructure software, such as
operating
systems, authentication systems, and
web servers—software
likely to be used directly
by the IT department—shows 57
percent adoption
in the higher ed institutions represented in
A-HEC’s study, versus the 34 percent adoption of
open
source software applications for more general
use, such as
course management systems,
portals, and a range of desktop
applications.
Source: A-HEC Higher Education Open Source Study 2006.
IN CLASSIC MODELS of open source adoption—
such as Linux and Apache
—a grassroots, lower-end market rallied around a variety of
well-known and widely shared causes among software developers:
innovation, customization, cost control, and security.
None of these values are foreign to higher education. Still,
though IT leaders in higher ed have expressed a lot of interest,
it looks like open source adoption in higher education
application areas may still be in somewhat of a low gear.
The first study in a series from the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness and IMS, Best Practices in Open Source in
Higher Education Study: The State of Open Source Software
(2006), by IMS CEO Rob Abel, attempts to characterize
attitudes toward open source in higher ed and provide
insight into adoption by surveying approximately 200
CIOs (or IT leaders in similar positions) across all Carnegie
classes. A brief look at data selected from the more than
40 charts in this detailed study may offer a little perspective
on the cautious adoption of open source applications within
higher ed.
Infrastructure vs. Applications
A-HEC’s study reported that open source infrastructure
software (implemented and used mostly by the IT department) was adopted at some level in more than half of
the responding institutions. In contrast, open source
application software (used more generally throughout
the institution) was adopted at only about one-third of
the institutions surveyed, and only about 25 percent of
institutions implemented any of the short list of leading
open source applications identified by the A-HEC
researchers.