“an initiative to increase collaboration, sharing, and openness at the level of higher education”

Where IT is being used for the business of an institution there is often no choice – sorry, not practical affordable or existing choice except to use proprietry software. Many of the business management systems used in HE only exist in HE, have a very small market, and lack the general community which is vital for OSS to be practical. So, while an institution could initiate writing their own OSS solutions, unless many of them contributed, it would rapidly become unsustainable.

I would extend that to software used for the business of the institution further too and include infrastructure, office products etc too – while OSS alternatives do exist, the skills to implement, support, and maintain tend to attract much higher salaries as they are less common in the Market place, thus making proprietry choices the only pragmatic ones for most institutions.

However, this does not need to affect the teaching and learning activities or research conducted….although, often research relies on proprietry equipment and software too simply because that’s the only source available in some niche fields.

Then there the openess of the Internet – which I hope wouldn’t include expectations to compromise security and resiliance in the drive for ‘open’ access? Clearly, one persons ‘openess’ is smothers opportunity to exploit…so systems need to be designed to protect themselves and the users, while also leaving things as open as practically possible. I just hope it’s realised just how un-’open’ to some uses things have to be though.

So, while this is an admirable aspiration and any compromises need to be justified when institutions take them, I’m not actually sure how practical it would be to get very close. We shall see I suppose.

(type on phone so not spel chekd etc)

ttfn

Open Source Education for the 21st Century

Best,

Joe Brewer
Director, Cognitive Policy Works