Fit of Open Source to Higher Education

In some ways open source appears to be a great fit for higher education. In others it is a paradox. Our quick survey indicated a strong belief in a cultural bias towards open source in higher education (approximately two-thirds of the respondents believed that there is a strong cultural preference for open source software in higher education - see http://www.a-hec.org/research/surveys/osqp0505.html). Our interpretation is that higher education is an attractive “greenhouse” for growing open source projects for the following reasons:

- Higher education is a niche market that does not get adequate attention from the major software companies. There is an opportunity to create products to serve the interest of the industry that are better than those being developed by the software companies. Specialty applications like course management systems, student portfolios, and student information systems are small markets that require intimate knowledge of higher education, making them less attractive to multi-billion dollar software companies.

- Higher education represents a potentially strong community for collaborative effort in developing these products. As a largely nonprofit industry of fairly limited competition, higher education tends to be more collaborative than most industries. In addition, few schools would see the software tools they use as a provider of competitive advantage. Third, higher education is an industry that has more stability and longer time horizons than most.

We feel that the combination of these factors makes for a fertile incubator for combining efforts across institutions to produce what could be more effective, focused products that are more stable and reliable than those produced by software vendors.

However, open source faces different challenges in higher education than in the larger market that has embraced products such as Linux, Apache, and MySQL.

- The major open source successes have been driven from the “little guy” and the “market”. That is, the big successes have emerged from a set of users trying to solve a technical problem that was better solved collaboratively. Perhaps more importantly, the value was clear enough that capitalization and grant incentives were not required to bring products to fruition. In this sense the large grants behind many of the higher education open source initiatives present untested waters. This arbitrary centralization of authority could create a dynamic where the leadership is potentially more authoritative, coming from the sources or managers of the funding rather than the most capable or most dedicated developers. Clearly, as far as uPortal and Sakai are concerned there is a dominance of larger, better-resourced institutions in the mix. While this would all seem to make sense in achieving results, it is counter to the open source phenomena that has arisen and succeeded in the non-higher education world. Interestingly, Moodle looks more like the type of initiative that has succeeded previously in terms of the funding and management structure.

- Another factor that is untested lies in the user base. In the big successes so far, the users and the software developers were largely one in the same. That is, the developers of Linux, Apache, and MySQL are also largely the users of the products. CMSs, ePortfolios, and even student information systems have non-technical users. This creates a more complicated development dynamic because, in theory, the users need to be the drivers in order to create a better product. uPortal is a “framework” and is more like the prior successes in this regard. The others are more like some of the emerging and yet to succeed open source desktop office applications that have struggled against the incumbent competition.

- A third issue is in the niche nature of the higher education market where there is a lack of widely deployed standards to leverage in creating compatible open source initiatives. Because of this, there is a plethora of standards work going on in higher education, both within the open source initiatives and in separate supporting standards bodies. Linux leveraged the wide availability and support of Unix. Apache leveraged a whole set of widely used Internet standards. MySQL and other open source database products are leveraging the widely accepted SQL standard. In addition, most of these standards were created defacto (in significant use) before they were formalized as standards. Having to create and coordinate standards as you develop adds an additional risk. This appears to be the case in higher education open source

It should be noted that several of the new initiatives are referring to the development process they are using as “community source” as opposed to open source. This terminology reflects a model that reduces the risk of a project faltering in its early stages by requiring a sufficient number of institutions to contribute some funds and resources to show viability and may be better culturally suited to higher education [6]. However, we maintain that the approach is still unproven, which makes it challenging, exciting, and interesting as an alternate model of open source development.