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Open source gains momentum in UK education

UK colleges and universities are starting to embrace OSS, but they still need educating further according to OSS Watch

By Maggie Holland, 10 Aug 2006 at 11:35

Open source software is gaining popularity in academia, with more than three quarters (77 per cent) of UK colleges and universities routinely considering it as viable option.

But the number giving something back to the open source community remains relatively low, according a report from The Open Source Software Advisory Service (OSS Watch).

Six out of 10 (62 per cent) institutions favour open source for their database servers. The findings also showed that 59 per cent and 56 per cent of those surveyed are using alternatives to proprietary software for their web servers and operating systems respectively.

But there still remains a large pool of non-believers who need to be convinced. "In general, there seems to be a fear that using OSS will require human resources and skills that institutions do not have," said the report.

"However those institutions that do use OSS do not indicate that they do so because they have in-house skills, instead they are using OSS for economic reasons. This is an important finding, which could give hints in terms of how to help those institutions that would like to start using OSS. "

The argument to use open source goes beyond the proprietary argument of cost savings, according to the report.

"This group of institutions is probably more convinced by technical support arguments or offers for training in OSS than they will be by arguments that focus on the possibilities of saving money."

Despite the growing usage of OSS and its inclusion in many institutions' potential shopping lists, there is still work to be done. OSS gets a mention in just a quarter of institutional policies and only 16 per cent of academia know whether of not staff members are submitting patches or code to OSS projects.

More worryingly, of those that do know whether their staff are involved or not, just 14 per cent are actually actively involved in the continued success of the open source community.

Last week, the Fedora Project put out a call to get more women involved in open source programming to help evolve the operating system.