EDUCAUSE | Open Source Policy

EDUCAUSE Involvement Opportunity: New Openness Constituent Group

cluckett — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:05:19 -0500

EDUCAUSE has launched the new Openness Constituent Group, which focuses on the emergence and adoption of open technologies, practices, policies, and initiatives, and how they affect the delivery and support of education. Join group coleader Patrick Masson, CIO, SUNY College of Technology at Delhi, for the Openness Discussion Session at EDUCAUSE 2008 in Orlando, October 30, from 4:55 to 6:10 p.m.

Oblinger and Lombardi Contribute Chapter to New MIT Book on Openness

cluckett — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:02:11 -0500

EDUCAUSE President Diana Oblinger and Marilyn Lombardi, Director, Duke University’s Renaissance Computing Institute Center, contributed a chapter, "Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education," to a new book published by The MIT Press. Read the free, publicly accessible e-book, Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge.

Important Announcement: EDUCAUSE-Sakai Statement on Blackboard Patent Pledge

cluckett — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:31:55 -0600

Since early November 2006, EDUCAUSE has been engaged in ongoing discussions with Blackboard regarding their assertion of patent rights and the concerns raised in a letter to the Blackboard leadership [PDF 38.9 KB] EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins sent in October on behalf of the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors. Other groups, including The Sakai Foundation, have also been engaged in discussions on this matter.

Today, February 1, 2007, Blackboard announced a non-assertion pledge that directly emanates from these discussions. The boards of directors of EDUCAUSE and The Sakai Foundation have agreed to and have issued a joint statement [PDF 41.2 KB] about this pledge.

Open Source in the military

StuartYeates — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 04:31:29 -0500

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics recently published the "Open Technology Development Roadmap Plan", another step towards moving the military to open standards, if not open source. This is going to be a long road, given that they can't even publish their own objectives in an open standard. The document makes the business case for open source: it argues how the DoD can do it's job better using open source. To quote from the report:

[Open source software] and open source development methodologies are important to the National Security and National Interest of the U.S. for the following reasons:

Enhances agility of IT industries to more rapidly adapt and change to user needed capabilities.
Strengthens the industrial base by not protecting industry from competition.
Makes industry more likely to compete on ideas and execution versus product lock-in.
Adoption recognizes a change in our position with regard to balance of trade1 of IT.
Enables DoD to secure the infrastructure and increase security by understanding what is actually in the source code of software installed in DoD networks.
Rapidly respond to adversary actions as well as rapid changes in the technology industrial base.

It also mentions that China wants to become an open source leader. Are they hoping that military types who won't respond to issues of effectiveness, cost and fitness for purpose will be motivated by "us and them" competition?

...and there lies the key problem with open source in the military, the fact that by releasing software as open source you enable it's use by your potential future enemies. This makes open source a very tough sell in this environment. I'm convinced that the sale can be made, based purely on technical grounds.

OSS Watch Sustainability Conference Day 1

StuartYeates — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 03:09:48 -0500

Candlelit table
Originally uploaded by Stuart Yeates.

Day one of the OSS Watch went very well, rihgt up to the conference in the dining hall at Exeter College, which dates from 1618. The dark, wood-panelled part you can see at the far end of the hall is the choir gallery, dating from when all the Oxford colleges were primarily religious rather than primarily academic institutions.

Whatever drawbacks Oxford may have as a place to live, a place to work or a place to hold events, there is not lack of history and no lack of architecture.

An Interview with UNC's José-Marie Griffiths

mpasiewicz — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 17:54:00 -0600

In this 29 minute recording, we'll hear from José-Marie Griffiths, Dean and Professor of the UNC School of Information and Library Sciences. She's also the principal investigator of The Future of Librarians in the Workforce study and we'll hear about her activities on that front. We'll also learn about her session at CNI's Fall Task Force meeting about a recent report from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

See also:

The Louis Round Wilson Academy
- a very interesting group represented there
ibiblio

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

Developing University Policies That Engage With Open Source Software

StuartYeates — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:03:58 -0600

A slightly updated version of my presentation for the SIGOSSEE conference is on the web.

The gist of the talk is that we are forging ahead with open source in education in the UK on the basis of consensus, and that the differences between the parties (institutions, educators, researchers, funders, big businesses, small developers, etc) are played up by extremes for their own ends but we all share more common ground than most people realise.

This presentation was cut from whole cloth for SIGOSSEE, so it'll be new even if you've seen one of our presentations before. It has been written about positively by both Stephen Downes and Sean Mehan.

Off to the Open Source for Education in Europe Conference

StuartYeates — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 10:30:08 -0600

I'm about to leave for the Open Source for Education in Europe Conference in Heerlen.

I hope to be able to blog more from there, depending on network connectivity.

OSS Watch has a new website

StuartYeates — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 05:13:12 -0600

OSS Watch has a new website. The previous website was built around what we thought OSS Watch would become, the new website is built around what OSS Watch is. So if you're looking for balanced and authoritative advice on open source in post-compulsory education in the UK, look no further.

On the technical side, the new website is a new set of XSLT stylesheets and navigational documents around the previous content, plus some new content and branding. Since the textual content is all in TEI XML, repurposing the documents was little or no hassle whatsoever.

The site has been live for a couple of days.

Brazil keeps up the push for open source

StuartYeates — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 11:42:11 -0600

Gilberto Gil, the serving culture minister of Brazil, has been in London talking about open source and intellectual property. In an interview with the Guardian, he talks about music, politics and IPR.

The kernel of the issue is that in less developed countries the economics of software production are completely altered by the significantly lower costs of labour, which is made significantly worse by the move to selling software as a service and licensing it on a per-individual basis. Coupled with this are the facts that very little of the money is spent locally and that local independent companies are frequently caught in the cross fire by incumbent monopolies' efforts to strengthen their monopolies using closed formats and limited interoperability.

As a result, Brazil and Peru but have policies supporting open source, and Ubuntu has exploded out of Africa.