The "Merit" of Open Source Panel at SUNY Delhi

Last month I made my way down to SUNY Delphi for the "2-3-98 Conference" and sat on a panel of folks that had been involved in open source in education to discuss the "Meritocracy of Open Source" with Martin Knott, CEO of Moodlerooms and Mike Zackrison, VP of Marketing & Strategy at rSmart. This was the smallest conference I have been to in quite a while and I really enjoyed it's laid back feel.

When I heard the title of the panel discussion I thought we were going to be talking about how open source projects often are led by those who have the initiative, resources and ability to make changes happen. It turned out that Patrick Masson set the discussion up with questions to discuss and dispel some myths around open source projects. While most of the attendees were very interested in Moodle (which is approaching a 2.0 release), the topics we discussed were useful to anyone considering an open source project for their school or university.

Some of the questions Patrick posed were:

Support: "Who do you call at 2:00 in the morning when something goes down?"
Quality: "How good can it be if it is free?"
Continuity: "What happens if the project fails?"
Total cost of ownership: "Open source isn't really free."
Governance: "How does one manage services and systems they do not control?"

At least the first three of these questions sort of imply that open source projects are ephemeral hobby projects that you probably shouldn't take too seriously. As if a single personin his basement wrote it in his spare time. The panel did a great job of describing that while there are certainly a lot of examples of open source projects that never grew wings and took off, you could tell a lot about the quality, usefulness and sustainability of an open source project by its community. The projects presented at that conference (Bedework, Drupal, Moodle, Mahara, Sakai and ESUP-Helpdesk) have (or are in the process of developing) vibrant, free communities of users and developers, commercial support vendors and governance organizations. These will not vanish overnight, but even if they did, the software would still be viable and supportable locally. There is no license to worry about and you could run it forever if you wanted to.

The second two questions dealt with the cost of running and managing a system based on an open-source solution. For many in the room (this was primarily a Moodlemoot, so there lots of Moodlers there) it seemed to be a question of cost savings. High costs of commercial offerings were causing them to reconsider their options and they were looking for the less expensive option to meet the needs of their faculty's mostly conservative use of technology in the classroom.  They wanted to consume a commodity and they wanted assurance that the quality of the service that they offer with this software was going to be solid.

While is seems almost second nature to many of us used to open source software on our campuses, it comes as some surprise to newcomers that there is a market for awesome support around these "free" solutions. In my opinion, the decoupling of the software "product" from its "support" can be a huge advantage to the deploying school. If your school doesn't like the support it's receiving from company X, you have an option to get better support from companies Y and Z without switching products. You also have the long term option of building your in-house expertise to the point that you no longer need outsourced help. Heck, you might even be able to become a source of support for other schools, turning the model completely on it's head!

I enjoyed my time at SUNY Delhi and will probably put it on my schedule of local conferences to ensure I attend next year.