“The wizard? But nobody can see the great Oz. Nobody’s ever seen the great Oz … Even I’ve never seen him!” – Guardian of the Emerald City Gates, The Wizard of Oz (Langley, 1939)
Just as Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow held misconceptions of Oz’s Wizard, there are many misconceptions about open source and free software. Some of the most common of these are
- freely sourced programs have no costs;
- freely sourced programs are of low quality; and
- freely sourced programs can’t compete with proprietary commercial applications.
Misconception 1: No Cost
As a point of clarification, source code is free in open source and free software applications. Chances are, though, you will still need someone or several people with technical know-how to install them, run them, tweak them, update them, etc. Sometimes the original developers provide this kind of support for a price. One example of this is ATutor (http://www.atutor.ca), a Canadian open source content management system for course delivery developed at the University of Toronto and licensed under GNU’s GPL (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, 2006). ATutor claims to be, “the first inclusive LCMS complying with … accessibility specifications at the AA+ level, allowing access to all potential learners, instructors, and administrators, including those with disabilities” (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, 2006). ATutor also complies with “W3C XHTML 1.0 specifications” so it is “presented consistently in any standards compliant technology” (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, 2006). It allows for content portability by compliance with “IMS/SCORM Content Packaging specifications, allowing content developers to create reusable content that can be swapped between different e-learning systems” (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, 2006). If you need help with the technical end of things, you can purchase varying levels of ATutor support, from one-time installation to course hosting and individualized consulting.
Recent mergers of commercial proprietary businesses have made it difficult to accurately reflect current fees for similar proprietary commercial service provision. Actual amounts vary based on enrollment volume as well as bargaining power of a purchaser. Available information can give us a rough idea of current price points. A posting by Michael Penney (July 29, 2005), Learning Management System Project Manager for California State University, Humboldt, cited basic Blackboard institution costs as follows for 7,500 course enrollments: a base fee of approximately $7,000 US, $4,000 US for encryption, and $0.75 US per enrollment for MSSQL ($5,625 US/7,500 enrollments). This would total approximately $16,625 for 7,500 course enrollments—exclusive of any content or course development. Blackboard can provide some economies of scale compared to other commercial proprietary platforms like eCollege (www.ecollege .com). During the same period, eCollege reportedly charged between $70 and $100 US per course enrollment per term for a fully hosted solution (Wright, August 2, 2005). Unfortunately, for smaller institutions or pilot projects—economies of scale don’t apply. While exclusive Blackboard or eCollege licences may be too costly, pooling with other small users could make costs manageable. In some instances, this has lead to the creation of licence brokerage/consolidation. One example of this is Open School’s (2006) Online Consortium in British Columbia, Canada. This consortium brokers WebCT licences for its members. Even with brokers, licensing can still be expensive for a small pilot. An institution or group’s return on investment can be much more promising using a comparable freely sourced product like Moodle, Sakai Project, or ATutor, especially when leveraging in-house technological expertise.
In addition to up-front costs, and unlike proprietary commercial competitors, freely sourced learning platforms have no charges for upgrades other than the resources already committed—no new licences to buy or renew from year to year. While a certain amount of technological knowledge and skill is necessary to deploy a freely sourced option, that is just one component necessary for successful adoption. Appropriate hardware capable of running the programs, as well as appropriate connectivity, or access to it, are also necessary. So, while you may not pay for the program, you may pay for the necessary hardware (computer, server, etc.), and possible Internet service upgrades (depending on what you are planning to do), as well as the technical expertise to leverage it.
Many times, these key elements of technological experience and hardware are already present in your school or institution. Maybe you’re a programmer yourself. In that case, you are able to leverage the power of open source and free software right now. If you have the hardware and Internet services necessary to run the programs, you are even farther ahead. Schools and institutions without these advantages will need technical support to deal with program source code. Most organizations like public schools, post-secondary institutions or small to medium-sized private schools have at least one technology employee with programming experience already working for, or contracted to them. Generally, people with programming experience are already converts to open source and free software thinking. The issue then becomes how much of the employee’s time can be assigned to a freely sourced project.
If you are thinking about seriously investigating freely sourced options, your best bet is to have a technology expert from your organization, and some potential end-users (known early adopters of technology) review possible alternatives for considerations such as ease of installation, implementation, data conversion, and use. Keep in mind that freely sourced technologies are evolving rapidly. (This is one of the major problems, and worthy of a little more discussion). Be sure to revisit open source and free software as alternatives for your software/application needs periodically, and consider making freely sourced options a standard element of your regular software reviews. As for existing hardware needs, those will be based on the type of programs you want to run, who will access them, and how. If you determine that freely sourced software will work for you, and you will be moving people from proprietary commercial platforms to open source and free software options, you will need a change management plan. This is one of the key strategies for lasting conversion. The topic of change management is beyond the scope of this chapter, however. For this aspect of migration, I strongly recommend John P. Kotter’s Leading Change (1996). Ultimately, open source and free software programs are low cost, rather than no cost, alternatives to proprietary commercial products.
Misconceptions 2 and 3: Low Quality and Inability to Compete with Proprietary Commercial Products
Quality assurance in open source and free software is primitive and rudimentary: if people like it, they will download it, use it, develop it and redistribute it; if they don’t like it, they’ll ignore it or pan it in reviews. In this arena only the fittest survive. Freely sourced programs and applications are usually a labour of love. People develop them because they like to. In fact, many freely sourced applications are quickly approaching the ease of use and status of proprietary commercial products: evidence the increasing adoption of GNU/Linux (“Linux”) as an operating system. Paul Graham (2005), a premier online developer and writer, compared the infiltration of freely sourced software into the market as “the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18”. According to Graham (2005), freely sourced software can teach business three main lessons:
- that people work harder on stuff they like,
- that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and
- that bottom-up often works better than top-down
A sure harbinger of increasing quality is the notice commercial proprietary developers are paying to open source and free software programs. A review of the rise of the Free Software and Open Source Movements demonstrates that viable freely sourced software is possible.
Theoretically, freely sourced applications are “disruptive technologies” ala Clayton Christensen’s model (2000). Christensen (2000) theorized that established businesses focus their efforts on sustaining and extending the lifespan of existing innovations. These established competitors focus their capital on the most profitable products and target markets while disruptive technologies attract low end or new markets, usually by creating less expensive, more user friendly versions of existing products (Christensen, 2000). Christensen revealed that established organizations “are almost always motivated to go up-market rather than to defend these new or low-end markets, and ultimately the disruptive innovation improves, steals more market share, and replaces the reigning product” (“A Conversation with Clay Christensen”, n.d.). By the time the established competitor realizes the strategic error, it is too late: the disruptive technology emerges the winner.
The disruptive innovation model suggests that the strategic timing for disruption is when the target market demands for increased technology performance outstrip the established business’s commitment to additional development (Christensen, 2000). Innovative competitors must be more nimble and responsive than established competitors (Christensen, 2000). Freely sourced software is, by definition, highly responsive to user needs, both current and emergent, and extremely nimble in responding to them. If we were examining it from the perspective of purely commercial competition, freely sourced software might be hampered by slow profit return, but freely sourced software is not generally in the business of profit, or at least not from the program code itself. The area in which it is weakest is in the ease of deployment. That said, development of freely sourced educational software continues at a rapid rate, making it easier for non-specialists to deploy. Moodle provides an example of a disruptive educational technology leader. In early 2004, Moodle (2007a) sites numbered less than 1,000. By August 2006, the number of sites approached 15,000 (Moodle, 2007a). In 2005, the Moodle community developed its own ezine, Moodlezine (playpen .monte.nsw.edu.au/newsletter/index.php). In 2006, William Rice (2006) published the book, Moodle E-Learning Course Development. Moodle (2007b) currently claims a registered user-base of 24,966 sites in 176 countries. For comparison, in 2007 Blackboard claimed a global user base of more than 3,650 clients spread across 60 countries and 2,200 institutions (Blackboard Inc., 2007a, 2007b).
The appeal of freely sourced software reaches beyond the budget constraints of academia. DotNetNuke is used by the New York Stock Exchange’s NYSEData.com, the Utah Humane Society, the National Rugby League of Australia, and the British Columbia Soccer Association (Canada) (DotNetNuke, 2006b). The Magnolia Content Management Suite (http://www.magnolia.info) is used by private companies, the Spanish Ministry for Public Administration, the Open Web Application Security Project, as well as the University of Basel, Switzerland (Magnolia International Ltd., 2006). In the future, expect open source and free software applications to give commercial proprietary players a race for your money. For a migration framework, read on.
