6.1 Barriers to the adoption of open source: personal and professional  (Page 6/13)

I suspect he knew what personal computing was on his campus, and while he did not know any of the technical issues involved with deploying and administering Vista, he knew the IT staff on his campus would have to make it happen, automagicaly!

If this person happened to be a decision maker on campus, SUSE as a desktop operating system would be dismissed because of open source issues (apples), not issues related to the actual functionality and usability (oranges). I would ask, does your Student Services or the Alumni Office really care if their business systems are running on AIX, Linux, OpenSolaris, Unix or Windows? I would wager no, they really only care that they can enroll students, assess fees and contact students and alumni. So, why then, would the office staff care if they where running SLED, OSX or Vista if all they really want to do is manage spreadsheets, write emails, store files, print and browse the web? They only would if OSS proponents bring it up. Enterprise level OSS is mature enough that it should be assessed just as commercial software is, based on business needs, functionality, features and usability.

So let’s embrace the automagic! Let’s let our colleagues live in peace, they don’t care about the technology issues low in the software stack (OS, servers, databases), they just want their applications up and running. So they shouldn’t care about the technology issues with the applications they can touch (LMS’s, SIS’s, desktop OS’s), they just want their applications up and running. To turn things around, I don’t really care if my campus uses Angel, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, Sakai or nothing! That’s the on-line learning folks decision, and my job as CIO should be to make it work. And, I hope the faculty don’t care if we run OpenVM, Linux, Apache or MySQL, that’s how I’ll make their applications work, automagicaly.

Open source software goes to eleven