For Universities, Open Source Is Always an Elective

By Alex Handy

August 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
College isn’t just for beer and toga parties anymore. With more and more software being written inside universities around the world, the open-source world and the education industry are moving closer together. The street goes both ways, too, as many universities turn to open-source solutions for enterprise problems.

Paul Courant, professor of economics and former provost at the University of Michigan, led a study in 2006 that examined the ramifications of open-source software use and creation in universities. The study proposed that open-source software fill many gaps that exist between commercial software and actual educational requirements.

Courant wrote in the report, “A very important question is why the existing competitive software market is not better able to meet the needs of this sector. One theory is that the problem lies in the distance between the software producers and users—developers working in the commercial world do not have a nuanced appreciation of the ways in which software is used in higher education.” Indeed, wrote Courant, “This disjuncture between developers and users is common to many industries.”

Regardless of the motives behind its use, open-source software is slowly becoming the de facto standard in many colleges, where the costly alternatives must first beat out free competitors.
The Open Source Software Advisory Service found, in 2006, that 77 percent of U.K. universities considered open-source software when making purchasing decisions.

Josh Ward, network security engineer at the University of Oregon, said that the Ducks’ network team still uses commercial solutions, but that open source is always on the table as an option when making decisions.

Ward said that the University of Oregon hosts two open-source projects of its own, one of which, NetDoT, is a powerful network documentation utility. Ward said that open-source tools work alongside closed-source ones in many of the University’s systems.

“We use RANCID for configuration management on routers and firewalls,” said Ward, describing one of the open-source tools the network team at the University of Oregon uses. “It will go out and collect configurations from your routers, firewalls and switches, and it will perform a diff … It’s incredibly useful, and it's free.”

Related Search Term(s): networking, open-source development, systems management

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