OSS Not Ready for Prime Time in Education?

cel4145 writes "Inside Higher Ed reports that the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness has released a new study, The State of Open Source Software. Is it true that open source is 'not quite ready for prime time' in education? Or, as I suspect, is the study just another proprietary software vendor funded report for discouraging the adoption of open source software?" From the article: "Lack of vendor support is one of the largest hurdles limiting the adoption of open source in higher education, Abel said. 'The biggest thing is it takes more physical labor to implement open source because it isn't pre-packaged,' Abel said. "You have to have software developers that can make this stuff work.'" Are the staffing issues associated with OSS enough to outweigh the benefits?

Comments

Re:*sigh*

[qkslvrwolf]

So, lets see, I should leave out the cruelty and violence, the intolerence, the contradictions, the injustice, and the absurdities.

What does that leave, exactly?

Or, I could just, you know, decide for myself what is right, based on my experiences and readings, and believe in reality, rather than thousands of year old mythologies because hank told me to.

As someone using a lot of OSS in higher ed

[edremy]

The answer is "maybe". It completely depends on the application and how technical your people are. Hiring someone who can manage an OSS course management system is going to cost more than a Blackboard support person. Will you make it up in not paying Blackboard? Maybe. Can you get a replacement person when the OSS guy gets hit by a bus or gets offered more money? Maybe.

The latter one is worrying my boss. I support an OS CMS (Dokeos), OS electronic porfolio (OSPI), OS image management system (MDID) and a few others. I'm the only guy here who understands them- everything else here is Windows/IIS other than the portal. What happens when I leave? You put out an ad for "Academic technology person: Blackboard experience" and you'll get dozens of applications. Put one out for Sakai, Moodle or the even more obscure Dokeos and you'll be lucky to get one. You need to get someone who can program, who isn't afraid of unfamiliar code and who can still do the rest of the job.

Can you buy support from someone like RedHat? Sometimes, but a lot of academic stuff is pretty obscure, not used by more than a few dozen schools and highly specialized. We have support for our OSS portal (uPortal) but frankly it sucks- the latest upgrade was a nightmare, managed by paid support people who could barely understand the system. We're still trying to figure out all the details in various places because a key person left suddenly.

At least with a company you have someone to blame. It may not help (I'm fighting a commercial company with utterly worthless support and a badly broken product right now) but I can point the finger at them and say "It's their fault, not ours!"