Open Source and the Classroom

I'm excited this week to hear a speaker on using open source in the classroom. I was also excited to see that included in the article sent out this week is a list of many open source applications, their purpose and commercial counterparts which might be used in the classroom. This list includes Nvu something I discussed here just last week. Other software from the list has been mentioned on my personal blog over the years.

Obviously I'm a big proponent of open source software, but I am not just a user. I am also a developer. Although much of the software I write is of limited use to others I do attempt to release it under an open source license when I am able to and this has allowed me to meet many interesting people and help people in ways that, even I, have not expected. In fact you can see one of my more popular contributions to the open source community on this SourceForge project.

This is not to say that I don't think there are any problems with open source software. As evidenced by these recent articles posted by popular computer pundit John C. Dvorak there are some who believe that there are significant problems with open source software. I encourage you to read through some of the comments to those postings yourself and come up with your own questions and conclusions. As for my part, I think you'll see in my comments there that I generally believe open source software can and does work but that people such as Marc make unfair and unequal comparisons with some commercial software and support. Below I will include one of my comments as an example:

Marc, I still think you’re missing points and inaccurately comparing open source and commercial software.

First, I think you’re generally comparing open source server type applications e.g. Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. with commercial end-user applications e.g. MS Office. This is a misleading comparison because many Windows server applications are at last as confusing and difficult to get running as Linux ones. I’ve done a fair amount of work in Windows data centers and have to say that many commercial applications used by corporate IT are a complete bear to work with. Thus I think this is an unfair and misleading argument, most commercial software, at least when compared to open source software that does the same thing and when talking about server type services is NOT just a point and click install.

Second, I think you continue to berate the support and documentation available for open source software and while there is a problem with free support and documentation of open source software there are alternatives if you’re willing to spend a little money. For example, you can easily hire developers to add features or fix bugs. There are also lots of consulting companies, mine included, which can and do write documentation for open source software and/or troubleshoot and provide solutions just as any technical support from a commercial software vendor might do. The faslehood here is that you can get something for nothing. If you intend to use open source software in a company or other critical environment you should either hire a developer on staff who knows the software and can support it or look into purchasing a support contract for the software from an outside company. Many people who use open source software “because it’s free” end up disappointed in many cases and I would argue that’s because they selected it for the wrong reason or didn’t understand what they were getting into. Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean you won’t have to spend any money on it if you want to run it at peak performance in a mission critical environment.