A rather peculiar article at Inside Higher Ed examines a report published by IMS about open source software adoption in higher education. The article asserts that while interest in open source software is increasing, "it's not quite ready for prime time." A claim like that is certainly provocative, and in the context that it is expressed in the Higher Ed article, it really isn't defensible. What is not immediately apparent when one reads the article is that those quotations only address software specifically designed for higher education, not open source software in general.
In reality, the report itself found that open source software is being used on a massive scale by universities. According to the study results, 57 percent of all American higher education institutions are using open source software products somewhere within their infrastructure. 53 percent of all American higher education institutions use Apache, 51 percent use Linux, 38 percent use MySQL, and 35 percent use Firefox. Those numbers clearly show that open source software is widely used by American universities.
So what is the article referring to when it talks about open source software that isn't "ready for prime time?" The report found that open source software applications designed specifically for use in higher education are not being widely adopted by American universities. According to the report, the most popular open source application designed specifically for that market is uPortal, which is only used by 7 percent of all higher education institutions in America. Surprisingly, the open source Sakai content management system, which was originally designed by the University of Michigan and Indiana University, is only used by 4 percent of all American colleges and universities.
Despite the fact that adoption of open source software for higher education is lagging, solutions like Sakai seem capable of competing with proprietary alternatives. At the University of Michigan, Sakai supports over 35,000 users, and it has already been deployed at Indiana University where it is running in parallel with the existing solution and actively supports over 90,000 users. According to information at the Sakai web site, pilot programs for the open source education platform are underway at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Rutgers, Yale, and a number of foreign universities as well.
The report also examines reasons why some education institutions have not yet seriously considered migration to open source solutions for services specific to education. The primary reasons include lack of resources to implement new open source solutions, satisfaction with current proprietary products, and the ambiguity of migration and operation costs. Universities that have made the switch cite cost efficacy and flexibility as the primary reasons, but they say that the costs don't evaporate entirely. The cost of acquiring proprietary software is often replaced with the cost of hiring the IT staff required to deploy and manage new open source software technologies.
Despite the fact that open source software designed for the educational market is not yet widely used at universities, popular open source technologies like Linux and Apache are used at more than half of all American higher education institutions. Specialized applications like Sakai are slowly gaining popularity and may begin to replace proprietary alternatives at many prominent universities in the near future.
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