CSG Workshop on Buy/Build/Open Source

The first talk is on the new UK Advisory Service on Free and Open Source Software by Sebastian Rahtz, who manages the service. This service (known as OSS Watch) was funded on a national basis by JISC (a joint committee that coordinates educational IT structures in the UK) for two years starting this past July. Their job is to advise educational institutions in the UK about the issues around using open source software in their institutions. The most interesting thing about this talk to me is the fact that there is a national effort to coordinate these things - it points out the difference in higher education structures between the UK and the US. One of the topics they want to look at is whether people will actually adopt open source software on the desktop.

Sebastian noted, in passing, that Oxford has an open source help desk software package written in Perl, and they are implementing the Bodington Virtual Learning Environment this year. Bodington is an open source package written at the University of Leeds.

One interesting point Sebastian made (citing Paul David's NSF-funded research) is that programmers work on open source projects tend to be young, "apprentice" programmers who use the opportunity to work alongside more experienced programmers and use it as an on-the-job learning experience.

He also pointed out, in talking about concerns about software support and citing the example of UPortal, that what really matters is the larger community of people using the product that can contribute to the larger community of best practice.