Universities spar over open-source benefits
OStatic reports on academic debate (literally) around the value of open source at the recent Educause conference. Apparently Adrian Sannier, university technology officer at Arizona State University, stirred the pot by claiming that license cost savings from open-source software will be eaten up by the consulting fees allegedly required to make it work.
Aside from being silly, ignorant, and wrong, it's a valid point. :-)
I work with a range of system integrators that work with both open-source and proprietary software. From these I hear over and over again that it costs less to deploy an open-source system because of open standards, open APIs, and, yes, open source. It turns out that the more you know about a system, the easier it is to tailor it to a university's (or to an enterprise's) needs.
Indeed, it's not truly cost savings that should drive university buying decisions between open source and proprietary software, given that universities tend to get excellent discounts from vendors in both camps. Instead, universities should be looking to buy software that maximizes their freedom to tinker and tailor, two things that I've found many of my Higher Education customers have in common.
Regardless, this whole thing is a bit of a canard, anyway. Years ago we left behind the world where customers had to give up on functionality or stability when going to open source. That was true 10 years ago. It is emphatically false today. Most categories of software now have viable, even superior, open-source products.
Universities, therefore, should buy into the software that works best, and that enables them to tailor to their needs. More often than not, these days that software is open source.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Open source community developers exchange information with each other but don't do a good job of communicating with the ultimate customer (institutional executives).That means CIOs have to learn how to communicate effectively with the excutives and explain the benefits of OS solutions --- something that does not happen today!
Most importantly, CIOs aren't giving the executives what they are seeking. These involved executives want more than a review or highlighting of technical and functional features (such as openness and customization). College and university executives are seeking a concise, jargon-free, factual analysis of the business and financial value proposition in the form of a White Paper.
Open source application projects operate under the illusion that sales and marketing are unneccessary functions and as way to reduce costs -- then they wonder why adoption rates are slow?