Open Source vs. Proprietary: Implications for Schools
The fast pace of change in the area of educational technology has given nearly everyone the “bleeding edge” experience of adopting software that was incompatible with existing programs, failed to function as planned, or became obsolete overnight. Much of this was due to the proliferation of proprietary programs and operating systems that appeared to deliberately create barriers to the exchange of information between systems and applications.
To be fair, software developers are pressed between contradictory requirements. They must be able to make a profit while taking advantage of the latest hardware, providing seamless data exchange between suites of applications, maintaining backward and forward compatibility, and managing releases that are timely, feature-significant and bug-free.
Major software companies have traditionally considered their un-compiled “source code” top secret and highly confidential. Therefore, they have had to cover all the expenses of development, testing, and debugging via maintenance fees from customers and through internal funding. Proprietary software development encourages very efficient, tightly controlled, and high quality products that work optimally within a single vendor’s suite. And yet, even with these controls, there can still be internal compatibility problems.
The open source software movement evolved as a philosophical and practical rebellion to the closed architecture of proprietary software systems. Open source software is constructed from applications and source code libraries, which are available at no charge and are continually being tested, expanded, and improved by a diverse community of volunteer and industry supported programmers.
Open source software is often distributed under an agreement such as the GNU Public License (GPL) to keep development in the public domain. (GNU stands for “GNUs not Unix, a project of the Free Software Foundation-1.) Open source developers pool their resources and share underlying technologies that they would otherwise have to reinvent individually. Ideally, this drives the products to differentiate themselves in the market by superior support and integration.
The popularity of the Linux operating system demonstrates how ready the market is for open source software. Although Linux is freely available in many different flavors, many developers and users still purchase it from companies such as RedHat or Novell in order to get full product support and regular updates. Other open source projects such as MySQL, Perl, and PHP have equally devoted groups of developers.
School districts usually do not have the technical depth or budget to invent their own applications and systems internally. Instead, they buy pre-packaged solutions from vendors with service and maintenance agreements. The underlying technology, whether it is open or closed, is often transparent to the technology buyer. School technology planners always have to consider Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when choosing any software. An initial low purchase cost for a system can be offset easily by higher installation, training, maintenance, and support costs.
Predicting maintenance costs of a new software implementation is very difficult regardless of whether the software is open source or proprietary. Many schools that have ventured into Linux computing have experienced a steep learning curve but were eventually satisfied with the reliability and inherent cost savings. Some schools may find it cost-effective to use open source software but pay for professional support and systems integration. This also protects schools from being crippled by the loss of key IS staff who know the system.
