Tracking Higher Education Open Source

As we have discussed open source does not mean nonprofit or non-market-driven. The growth in open source-based solutions will create new opportunities for some and diminished opportunities for others. In one sense, the more unfinished or incomplete an open source product is the more opportunity it presents for service or support providers. In the wider world, market share is king. In higher education, adoption of open source solutions may limit the market for non-compatible proprietary products. An adoption of Sakai by a major institution, this eliminating that school from a possible deployment of a proprietary CMS, is noteworthy. However, even more noteworthy is the adoption of Sakai by a mid-tier or small institution that would have a natural tendency to go with a more mature and more completely packaged proprietary product. Thus, tracking and understanding the tale of two cities in higher education is particularly important in understanding the maturity of open source. As such, the following metrics bear watching:

1. The number of institutions deploying an open source product as their primary solution.

2. The number of middle-tier or small institutions implementing open source solutions.

3. The number of solution providers or other providers of complementary technology supporting a specific open source product.

4. The extent and growth rate of the collaborative community supporting a specific open source product.

We do not have viable estimates on the above metrics at this point. One of the by-products of the SCT complementary product strategy with uPortal is that it creates a win-win between the open source community and the software product vendor. As a result of this, we would venture to guess that the combination of the uPortal adopters with the Luminis adopters might have already created a clear market share leader in higher education portals (a rough estimate is around 500 institutions). There are also viable case studies, such as San Juan College in New Mexico (see profile on the A-HEC forums http://www.a-hec.org/forums/index.php?c=3) of mid-tier institutions successfully implementing uPortal. And, although it is difficult to tell how vibrant and productive it is, we are preliminarily impressed by the extent and growth rate of the Moodle collaborative community.