• http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/01/open

Inside Higher Education gives a good digest of "The State of Open Source Software," a report recently published by Rob Abel for the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC). Abel's report draws on a survey of more than 200 higher education officials  responsible for software selection at a range of  institutions. According to the report, two-thirds said they have "considered or are actively considering" using open source products; only about a quarter of institutions are implementing higher education-specific open source software. Inside Higher Education quotes Kenneth Green,  founding director of the Campus Computing Project, as calling the mindset toward open source "affirmative ambivalence."

We hope to have more discussion of the Open Source report in Academic Commons, but check out the comments to the Inside Higher Ed piece. Charlie Lowe at Purdue points out a posting in KairosNews raising questions about the sponsorship of the report and calling attention to Abel's role in IMS Global Learning, which actually published the report. Abel responds, defending the objectivity of the report; he points out that "the contributing members of IMS include a dozen higher education institutions, many who are leaders in open source, such as Michigan, Stanford, MIT, Indiana, and Open University" and that the actual sponsors of the report, Sun Microsystems, Unicon, and Sungard Higher Ed (formerly SCT), had no editorial input. A group manager at Microsoft also weighs in with a "Microsoft perspective:"  "Open source software fills a niche in the marketplace and it will be around for a long time to come. So will commercial software."

 Interesting reading!