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How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source?
exmoron writes "I work at a small university (5,500 students) and am in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions. I use a number of FOSS solutions at home (OpenOffice.org, Zotero, GIMP, VirtualBox). My university, on the other hand, is a Microsoft and proprietary software groupie (Vista boxes running MS Office 2007, Exchange email server, Endnote, Photoshop, Blackboard, etc.). I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money and think through a gradual transition process to open source software (starting small, with something like replacing Endnote with Zotero, then MS Office with OpenOffice.org, and so on). Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers? In short, what's the skinny on moving to open source? How much money could a university like mine save? Additionally, what other benefits are there to moving to open source that I could try to sell the university on? And what are the drawbacks (other than people whining about change)?"
You won't be able to win this with the money argument. Microsoft will swarm all over you, giving free stuff away. They have a fund just to give away free licenses to anyone who's even thinking about trying open source.
No, since you're a university, the way to approach this is to let the undergrads explore. Sell it as a learning experience. Why is OSS so popular nowadays? Maybe the University itself, as a place of learning, should offer this? Don't limit it to just OSS, bring up OSX as well, to be fair. Let the students explore.
Now, how to get everything work well together? Why, we depend on open standards of course! The entire Internet is built on open standards, RFCs and so on. All the software must be open interfaces (exchange has imap, for example, and AD has ldap). Keep doing this. Get in touch with the contracting office, and ask them to consider putting language in for their RFPs and RFIs to include "must work with appropriate open standards".
Slowly, but surely, things will get better.
Go for the two easy wins first.
Cut your costs on licensing. Get ALL of the decison makers together and get them to put out a 100% unified front. Announce a total conversion to open source for the 2011-2012 year so as to be plausible. Then wait for your Microsoft rep to show up and offer the incentives. Take them.
Now you are a hero to everyone in the university who is in on the con you just pulled. This will be useful to you as you slowly do the real conversion.
The other easy win is to cut the costs to your students. Office and Blackboard.Mandate ODF for any document that crosses the barrier between the school and the students. This relieves them of the requirement to obtain Office and YOU the cost of buying that big site license out of the student fees that is the real reason the students get those low low prices in the bookstore.
You of course continue to offer Office Student at the regular student rates for those who want it because your Microsoft rep is sniffing around. You also be sure to have OpenOffice.org 3.1 DVDs hanging at the register for $5. Be fuzzy about just where those came from, but heck in this economy it sure does save the students money. It's just too popular to pull off the counter.
Blackboard is a never ending cause of cross platform pain (at least it was a couple of years ago) so ditch it. It not being a Microsoft product you can probably get away with it while running the con above. You tell them that will be your token (picked because it IS no visible) conversion to be able to 'claim victory' on your previous grandious project.
After this step students should be able to use whatever the heck they want. Many will probably be using netbooks in this down economy, thus they can buy the really cheap Linux ones. The college bookstore can be encouraged to stock with this in mind. Linux and open source would then be in a position to bubble up.
Democrat delenda est
if you don't know how much your site licenses cost, then you aren't in a position to influence future software purchasing decisions.
A university is supposed to educate a child as to the world of software
Really? Maybe you are thinking of trade schools. A university is supposed to provide a well-rounded education. Indoctrinating into the world of Microsoft might be helpful in getting a white-collar-grunt job, but it is not in any way vital to a liberal arts education.
And anyway, a large percentage of universities use *nix and/or Macs. Are they all failing in their educational mission as well?
You can do it by paying attention to what your users need, not just what you want. OpenOffice.org may be an acceptable substitute for MS Office apps in your organization. Or, you may hobble the faculty because they're required to submit Word documents for various publications, using Word templates. It's bad enough having to suffer through this in Word, but having to manage this with another layer of indirection sounds utterly intolerable. That situation sucks, but you aren't going to change it by unilateral decree.
Likewise, using the GIMP vs. Photoshop may be great for some of your users. But if they're using features daily in Photoshop that aren't supported in GIMP, soon they'll be GIMP'ing up dartboards with your face on it.
Simply put, users care about applications that meet their needs and organizations should too. If you are truly in a position to influence these decisions, then your responsibility is to understand and meet those needs, not serve your own ideology. Working contrary to users' needs is a terrible way to promote the OSS software cause; you'll make more enemies for OSS than friends.
In most organizations, it takes only a small group of whiners to transition the whole of an IT focus to something else. Trust me, I've been through this battle.
Make changes where it *makes sense*. Microsoft Office currently is best of breed, no offense meant to OpenOffice but seriously... it's not even in the same realm. Windows on the desktop obviously goes side by side with this.
Where you can make arguments are on the backend where users don't really have a say. Say you want to launch some web servers -- go *Nix and Apache instead of MS and IIS. Want a database cluster? Go *nix and MySQL. These are changes that *can* happen.
I have seen far too often that 'techies' get involved and just because the technology is more superior (in some way) they totally discount the business benefit from having it set up that way. What is your roadmap for the future of IT? What paths are you looking to cross? Say the CIO wants to invest some money into Sharepoint, or wants to use WIM (standard image format) for deployments, or wants to lock down users better (AD Policies). These things are *windows specific*. You can make the argument, but if you can't look at it from a business perspective, then you are already on the path to failing at your argument.
Usually the cost of changing everything, retraining users, and getting them to be AS PRODUCTIVE as they were before is far more expensive than to keep technology the same and use branches into other things to accomplish business tasks.
And don't say you're an educational facility... you're a business first, and any good business is in the *business* of making money or showing results. That's what you call an organizational unit :)
Good luck to you, but make sure you have your ducks in a row before you go making arguments of vast change, because if you don't know what the future holds or what the goals are, you will just look like an idiot.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Bes
http://osor.eu/case_studies/declaration-of-independence-the-limux-project-in-munich
Nah, too political and the political process takes too long.
No, what you have to do is the following:
1. Shoot all Windows admins. I know, it sounds brutal but trust me, it'll be better for everyone on the long run. It's no more than what they deserve after all. I mean, they freely chose to support the Evil Empire.
2. Send all the brainwashed Windows users to the appropriate re-education camp to have them deprogrammed. Now, some might say that this is no better than what Microsoft has done all these years, and I'd agree, but sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.
3. Send in the LPTs (Linux Proselytization Teams) to spread the Word amongst all those who didn't get the message the first time around. After all, there are always some for whom the deprogramming process doesn't work perfectly, or who managed to escape the initial roundup. It's necessary to root them out so they can be given proper guidance. Really, it's for their own good.
This may be hard for some of you stomach, I understand, but just think how free we'll all feel when Microsoft is gone forever.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I tried CinePaint back when they still called it Film Gimp. It was a lot better than the Gimp in its core features, but it inherited its predecessor's shit UI and shit workflow. I haven't heard anything to suggest that that's changed, so I haven't spent any time with it. If I were going to be using nothing but Film Gimp I might consider it, but I actually use my tools in a novel (to OSS, anyway): in concert. I expect my tools to benefit my workflow, not hinder it by switching up everything and anything when I jump from (say) Photoshop to Illustrator.
Inkscape - meh. Yes, it's the SVG reference implementation for all intents and purposes--good for it, I don't care about its features if it sucks at presenting them. It's a clunky tool with a poor UI and--surprise surprise!--little to speak of in terms of horizontal integration. It'd be fine if I could do everything in Inkscape without any other tools, but that's a very rare occurrence.
Blender - eew. Internally it's not bad. The feature set is nice and it's a solid program. But...again...shit UI, shit workflow. No horizontal integration to speak of. I mean, hell. For example: I can modify a texture in Photoshop and see its effects propagate right to my textured 3D model in Maya. It's easy there. Such integration needs to be the standard with open source apps if they want to be taken seriously and it simply is not.
The capabilities of these programs are fine (CinePaint is head-and-shoulders better than the GIMP, which is probably praising with faint damns), it's just that their workflows all suck enormous amounts of donkey cock and I don't see their workflows improving anytime soon. Don't get me wrong: it's not that I can't do what I want with the open source tools, it's that doing it sucks with the open source tools. It takes longer and is more of a hassle. And, for burgeoning professionals in a university environment, having them not use industry-standard tools is mindfuckingly stupid. People always trot out CinePaint as "oh, look, people are using this IN INDUSTRY!"--great, go CinePaint, may you someday have all the success there is. But a hell of a lot more professionals are using ProTools, Premiere, After Effects, and other proprietary software packages, so it's pretty stupid not to teach what's actually used.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I am an assistant professor. If you came to my office and told me to use anything, I'd kick your IT-fiddle-monkey-ass to the door.
Here's something I really want university IT guys to get through their thick skulls:
You work for us. Not the other way around.
If I want to use a Windows machine, you need to figure out how to let me. If I want to use a Mac (which I do), you need to make sure I can get to my servers. If I want to use Linux (which I hope to be doing one day--when the software I need to do my research is available on the platform), I expect your support there, too.
In the specific case of what you're proposing--moving to OSS for all everyday tasks, I have to be totally clear and honest here: You are wholly unqualified to make that call. It's not your job; it's not your responsibility; it's none of your damned business. You don't even know what I do; how could you know what I need?
Finally, let me say this: My first jobs in academia were in IT support, and I, too, got drunk on the power. I, too, was young and full of myself, and I, too, ran around telling people what they should do, instead of listening to what it is that they needed to do, and helping them do it. Now that I'm on the other side (and older and less full of myself), I see why I pissed people off so much in those days. I sucked at my job.
If you try to meddle in your customers' business, you suck at your job, too.