6.1 Barriers to the adoption of open source: personal and professional  (Page 4/13)

The insignificance of OSS adoption within the data center as an influence on more visible applications became evident to me when, as part of my research, I surveyed campus administrators. Respondents came from a variety of fields, including technology providers (CIO’s, IT staff, etc.) and end-users (faculty, non-IT administrators, etc.), and a clear division was evident. Open source software appeared to be a credible option within the data center for technical services but apparently not for systems that end-users touched. One respondent attested, “[my campus] seldom if ever adopts open source software.” However the figures provided by Netcraft indicated that all of that campus’ servers ran Linux and 23 of the 27 servers ran Apache. In fact, they where “soaking in it.”

This raises an interesting issue: how aware are campus administrators, who may be working with commercial providers such as SunGard’s Banner student information system and their portal Luminis, that they are actually relying on OSS? Is the confidence derived from a commercial provider (SunGard) diminished by the fact that Luminis is built upon an open source project, uPortal? Or availability for the entire suite of student services may be dependent on OSS within the campus data center? If so, shouldn’t Student Affairs, Enrollment, Finance, The Alumni Foundation, etc. be part of the governance (decision-making) for their complete “solution” from the SIS all the way down the software stack, and not just those applications they work directly with? Unless they are, the “stack approach” plays no part in the adoption of open source on campuses.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Working in this “just make it work” environment, where more and more folks want more and more things to work, it’s understandable that the tenets of Free and Open Source Software would become standard operating practices within IT departments. For example, the ability to run software for any purpose allows the scope of services to expand, unhindered by licensing. This is a great resource as you deploy more instances of Linux through out the data center to support that growing set of departmental systems (Remember the fuel, housing and veterinary management systems?). Additionally, the ability to study how the software works and adapt it to an institution’s needs, provides for rapid development and quality assurance. These technical benefits have been the basis for those advocating the use of OSS. However, in my opinion, as long as open source is addressed as a technology issue it will never move into the status of commercial software. Consider a common topic on campuses today, Learning Management Systems. Should faculty be debating .NET, PHP and Java, or, SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle, or, Windows, Linux and Solaris, or, the waterfall method, Spiral techniques and eXtreme Programming, or, Angel, Moodle and Blackboard? That’s the goal, a debate over an application’s features, not a technology debate.