October 12, 2006
A Marriage of Open-Source and Commercial Software
Can open-source and commercial software peacefully coexist at the same college? Two officials from Virginia Tech University seem to think so. During a session at the Educause conference in Dallas on Wednesday, Jeshua Pacifici, assistant director for the university’s Graduate Education Development Institute, and Kim Gausepohl, a learning systems manager, talked about how they had brought in Sakai, an open-source course-management software, after the campus had been using Blackboard software almost exclusively.
Mr. Pacifici said that when Virginia Tech began having trouble with recent versions of Blackboard, technology officials bemoaned that they did not have access to the commercial software’s computer code to fix the problems. Bringing in open source, however, made them nervous. For one thing, the buck would stop with them. If something went wrong, he said, they didn’t have a vendor to blame.
But once Sakai was up and running, he said, it helped solve some of the problems the university had with software causing servers to crash. At the same time, they still used Blackboard to make up for Sakai’s shortcomings, such as some of its testing tools that were not ready for broad implementation at a large university.
One fallacy that people have about open source, Mr. Pacifici said, is that it’s free. Sure, the license is free, but that’s a small portion of the cost of running a course-management system, which also includes support and upkeep. That comment prompted an audience member to yell out that open source is “free like a puppy.” —Dan Carnevale
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