Comparing open source vs. proprietary software is like comparing apples and oranges. It’s a comparison that just doesn’t make sense for anything other than the basic comparison of licensing rights.

There are great variations among open source options, and among proprietary options. Yet many conversations about open source software tend to use very broad generalizations and treat each of these (open or proprietary) as a distinct thing. I’m involved in a lot of conversations about adopting open source software and I’m always struck by the black & white view of proprietary vs. open.

At the highest level organizations and even governments are adopting an ideological disposition that favors “open” vs. “closed.” In the education community there is often an affinity toward openness because of the alignment with core values and the mission of the academy. This is a good and healthy way to set strategy.

When it comes to making a decision about a particular need though, many people and organizations are looking for a pragmatic approach to making decisions about their options. Even those who have an established strategy that considers open source need to make specific decisions about the options for a particular need. This is where the simple open source vs. proprietary discussion breaks down. The general distinctions between open source and proprietary provide almost no useful information to inform a choice between X open source product, and Y proprietary product. In fact, most often, the choice isn’t really between X and Y, it’s between W, X, Y, and Z, where the other options represent the new choices afforded by open licensing.

Colleges, universities, K-12 schools and districts, have more choice today than ever when it comes to enterprise software. Despite a great deal of consolidation in the proprietary software vendor space, the emergence of community-developed, open licensed software, and SaaS services have more than filled the competitive void. I work in the Kuali and Sakai communities that together produce some of the most mission-critical enterprise systems for schools: eLearning Platform, Financials, Research, Student, Business Continuity, and more.

Some of the most important questions an institution can ask when considering the various options aren’t those that appear in an RFP with a feature matrix. They are introspective questions about institutional culture and capabilities–where the institution is today, and where it would like to be. And also, of course, what are the goals for the new system?

I spend a lot of time talking to people considering open source “alternatives” to the proprietary eLearning and ERP systems. I’ve recently begun to use a tool in those conversations that helps facilitate the conversation. If I’m near a whiteboard I’ll use that, otherwise the iPad makes a good mobile whiteboard alternative. Here’s a snapshot from a recent conversation:

This simple visual has been a very effective way of elaborating the choices for these software needs and comparing them on two dimensions. The two I’ve focused on have been cost and control. I typically talk about 5 different sourcing options:

• Licensed proprietary software
• “Home grown” software developed at the institution
• “DIY” (do-it-yourself) open source software (OSS)
• Commercial OSS
• Software as a Service (SaaS) OSS

Among the various choices it’s fairly easy to paint a picture of the options relative to cost and control tradeoffs. These aren’t the only dimensions to consider, but they are two that should be central to the decision. I should also note that control can directly relate to risk, strategic fit, and institutional capabilities (both current and desired future). One of the other reasons I’ve often focused on cost / control is because one of the most often cited reasons for looking at open source eLearning or ERP options is greater control.

You might be looking at the diagram, thinking… “He’s nuts. That green dot should be lower (or higher) or further to the right.” Good thinking. There isn’t one right way to paint this picture. It’s a conversational tool that needs to be adapted to fit the specific situation you’re talking about. I believe that there’s some “rough general truth” to the relative positions I’ve indicated, but the real usefulness is in the conversation & thinking that this tool facilitates, not where I’ve placed the data points.

As a starting point I’ll use this to understand current institutional culture and capabilities. How are systems generally sourced today? In some cases economics or new institutional leadership are driving a cultural change. The diagram can be a useful tool to understand how the various options support that desired change. It’s also interesting to note that the culture around things like eLearning or Research might be very different than the culture around Financials.

One of the most interesting conversations is about the various open source options. Ok, this is probably most interesting because it’s where I’ve focused for the past 8 years or so. Most people assume that to consider open source they have to hire software engineers and generally have to support it differently than the proprietary system they are replacing (the “DIY OSS” option). By the way most research and media coverage makes the same assumption. The visual helps to clarify that option relative to other options. There are good reasons an institution might move from proprietary or home grown to DIY OSS. There may be a strong institutional culture driving it. Often though, institutions believe that to leverage something like the Sakai eLearning platform they have to move to DIY OSS. And if that’s not a match to the institutional culture, or they don’t have the resources and don’t want to build the necessary capacity, the analysis stops. Most institutions, in fact, adopt open source software in the very same way they adopt proprietary software. But the options aren’t widely understood.

If you are involved in sourcing a replacement system, or a new capability for your institution. You have lots of options. Consider them all. You may find that’s it’s a useful exercise to compare the characteristics of each that are important to your institution. This should be a very strategic discussion that starts by determining the characteristics that are important to your institution: cost, risk, capabilities, control of future capabilities, alignment of values, future potential, opportunities for staff development, opportunities to align with peer institutions, etc.  From there it’s a much simpler comparison exercise to understand how each option supports your goals.

“… the LMS decision is now more about choosing a PATH than PRODUCT if we conclude that products have similar base functionality at any point in time and have similar trajectories for improvements that matter.  The paths differ greatly in cost, being a member of a type of educational community, the unbundling of software license fees/support fees (if required), and compulsory upgrades or even product withdrawals from the market.”

Back in 2007 Luke Fernandez wrote a thought-provoking piece that uses a metaphor that likens choosing a new learning platform to choosing a place to live. From my perspective it hits on the same idea that Path Matters.

Nearly all of my professional energy for the past 8 years has been focused on creating a sustainable capacity in higher education to develop enterprise-class software applications. The lion’s share of that focus has been on Sakai, Kuali, and rSmart.

From my own experience, more than anything else, from my work with friends and colleagues in these communities is that Brad and Luke are right–Path Matters.

In Patrick’s message this morning he suggests some new evaluation criteria in the spirit of starting a conversation. Admittedly Luke’s criteria are pretty technical:

1. Identity management
2. Integration & interoperability
3. Use of open standards

Brad suggests aspects of path like:

1. Cost
2. Community participation (think of Luke’s metaphor)
3. Unbundling of services
4. Risk (product withdrawals)

I spend a lot of time talking to schools who have adopted community developed software like Sakai and Kuali. More than anything else they talk about the value of the relationships, the collaboration, the input they have, the intangible staff development opportunities, the ways in which they are transforming business practices through the collaboration among their staff and the staff who perform similar functions at other institutions.

In a world where Sakai, Moodle, Desire2Learn, and Blackboard are all on par in terms of the capabilities they enable for learning and scholarly collaboration, we need, as Patrick suggests, better selection criteria. I know from my own experience that, when Brad says “it’s about choosing PATH”, he’s right. So how can we capture these path intangibles in a better decision-making model? As Luke says in his response today:

“… steering a campus to give due consideration to PATH conversations is [not] an easy thing to do.”

I hope, for education’s sake, more campuses find ways to consider such important strategic aspects of the decision.

The Chronicle headline last Sunday was “A Small Company, Promising Major Savings on Vital Software, Lures Colleges.” The issue highlighted in the story:

Cost-conscious colleges are caught in the cross-fire of a legal battle between Rimini Street, the low-cost maintenance provider, and Oracle, a software powerhouse that serves hundreds of higher-education customers. In January, Oracle sued Rimini Street for running what Oracle calls an “illegal” and “corrupt” business model.

Rimini Street offers colleges and universities 3rd party support at half the cost of their current ERP maintenance contract. It’s not for everyone, but for schools that want to “freeze” their current ERP it seems like a great deal. Some schools intend to “stay put” with their current system for many years. They don’t want to go through required upgrades, they just need to stay current with fixes and regulatory updates, and they need someone who can help when issues come up. Other institutions intend to move from their current solution to something else. A transition like this is often a costly, multi-year endeavor. Because these institutions simply need to maintain & support what they have during the transition, Rimini Street is a great option because half of what they were paying the vendor for support can be applied to the cost of the transition.

This battle may stretch out for several years like the Blackboard patent dispute. If it does, Colleges and Universities will lose in the process. Like the Blackboard dispute, which was ultimately settled favorably (the patent was invalidated), it’s easy to get drawn into the gory details of the dispute. Why? Because it has potentially dramatic consequences for all of us who care about getting more value out of IT for the good of education.

There’s no question that, like the Blackboard patent battle, the consequences are very real for the companies involved, and their customers. A lot of money will be spent that doesn’t do anything to create real value, and that money ultimately comes from colleges and universities. In these hard economic times it’s difficult to stomach.

But rather than focusing on the details of this dispute, our time is better spent working toward the evolution toward more community developed software and educational resources. Initiatives like Kuali and Sakai are providing alternatives that make it easy to un-bundle software and services. For colleges and universities that means disputes like the one between Oracle and Rimini Street won’t limit competitive services. A few interesting things are happening:

• A lot more value is being created through collaborations that result in open educational resources. There is a growing amount of commodity software, and software core to the business of Education that is substantially driven by, if not fully, open source. The same goes for other open educational resources (OER). If you haven’t been following Brad Wheeler’s “Collaboration IS Strategy” it’s worth catching up on.
  • Community developed software like Kuali, Sakai, and Moodle.
  • Open textbooks
  • Open content, journals, etc.
• Entirely new companies have emerged with new business models to fill the void where the evolution of community driven resources have advanced faster than the incumbent vendors’ ability to adapt. And they are growing rapidly.
  • rSmart
  • Flat World Knowledge
  • Rimini Street
  • MoodleRooms
• A lot of IT services that have been historically been delivered by individual institutions’ IT departments are moving “Above Campus.” Email, office applications, eLearning, content, and even ERP applications are being crowd-sourced and cloud-sourced.

What do these things have in common? From my perspective they are all market-driven forces that are challenging the status quo because the status quo isn’t delivering enough value. Educational institutions need to get more value from IT if they are going to live up to the potential of education to help us address some really big challenges affecting us all.

There’s a conversation underway today on the EDUCAUSE CIO list about whether one could look to open source applications like Moodle (or Sakai) as a way to deal with the enormous financial pressure today and the severe budget cuts many are experiencing.

It’s disappointing that the conversation is a simplistic comparison of license cost vs. hiring developers. The reality that open source can be easily aquired and supported with the help of companies that specialize in supporting open source is entirely missing. Yet most institutions who adopt open source do so with help from a company that supports it. The Mellon Foundation who supports a lot of open source projects in Education estimated that most of the software they’ve helped develop is adopted this way. I think it was ~ 70%. And there can be considerable savings. rSmart did a simple comparison last year between Sakai and Blackboard, for example.

As a community there’s still a lot of education that needs to take place. Many just don’t fully understand the options they have. And while there are many benefits to the open source path beyond cost savings, there can be significant cost savings. And it’s an important time to understand how to benefit from them.

I think he’s right. In my own experience with the Sakai project I’ve seen boxers like Blackboard stung repeatedly as the education market, led by the education open source community, swarmed against them for their predatory behavior using bogus patents. Recently we’re seeing signs of a similar swarm related to the Thomson-Zotero suit.

Yet the stinging power of the open source community (at least legally) has been uncertain–until recently. In August the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued it’s ruling in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case. This was the first substantial legal test of the open source license in a reasonably high US court. The ruling sounds to me like the most important legal victory for open source–ever.

The Jacobsen v. Katzer case is between a model train hobbyist and open source software developer named Bob Jacobsen and Matthew Katzer, the owner of a proprietary model train software company. The district court hearing the case issued a potentially disastrous ruling that the open source license terms were contractual covenents. Based on that ruling Jacobsen may be entitled to monetary damages for breach of contract, if in fact there was a legitimate contract. He would not, however, be entitled to more substantial copyright infringement remedies like injunctive relief (court enforced compliance with the license terms).

As I understand it, the substance of this ruling has to do with whether a judge interprets the terms of an open source license as a contract that requires both parties to agree, or a license that does not have such a requirement. This determination between contract and license determines the extent to which the license can be enforced, and the kind of remedies available when the terms are violated.

In August, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the lower court’s earlier decision. We’re very fortunate that legal experts and others seized this opportunity and donated their time and money to help defend Jacobsen and set a precedent for all open source communities. Without such help it may have been cost prohibitive. According to Mark Radcliffe the decision sets forth the basic rule very clearly:

“Copyright licenses are designed to support the right to exclude: monetary damages alone do not support or enforce that right. The choice to exact consideration in the form of compliance with the open source requirements of disclosure and explanation of changes rather than as a dollar-denominated fee, is entitled to no less legal recognition.”

One effect of this ruling is that our communities can be confident in the terms of our licenses and in our ability to defend them. Because the ruling interpreted the open source license terms as conditions on the scope of the copyright license, copyright law remedies such as injunctive releif, attorneys fees, actual damages, and statutory damages may be applicable.

Boxing with a beehive doesn’t seem like a good idea in the first place but the new ruling makes it even more reckless and dangerous for the would-be boxer. The open source bees have been africanized!

The post constrasts key concepts driving open source business and adoption such as the primary driver for adoption, the driver for os business creation, dual licensing, sales models, etc. In the US, for example, we adopt open source primarily for the cost benefit. In Europe the primary driver is freedom from vendor lock-in. I suspect this varies a bit by industry sector. In Education (my world) I see the freedom from vendor lock-in as a much more significant driver than cost here in the US.

Check out Larry’s post. It’s a short and very worthwhile read.

Here is me linking to the ten billion times I’ve written that there is no more corporate ladder and you should stop thinking that someone will take care of you and tell you where to go next and give you a gold watch when finally you retire at 65. Evenstill, when I tell people that no ladder means instead that you can be lost while you find your own path, the most fearful of self-discovery balk at being lost and instead go to law school.

Everyone used to think law school was safe, but in fact, it’s not. And it’s not unsafe just because more than 50% of lawyers would not recommend that you become a lawyer because they don’t like it. It’s not safe because you will work really hard in your early career and then get de-equitized in your later career which is the law career equivalent of having the ladder pulled out from under you.

So the last bastion of the fast track to safe money and job security used to be finance. And now, that one’s gone, too. There are officially no more safe paths to money. You have to make your own path. This is a stark, big-bang broadcast that the end of the safe career is here. And that’s great. Because the quest for a safe, beaten path that will work for your own life is an empty quest. We are in a new era of work, and you get to make your own path. It’s exciting. Even in a down market.

I followed the new era of work link as well. Also a good read.

Bb and D2L have been fighting over the venue for the next round of the battle, with Blackboard asking the USPTO not to complete the re-examination process (despite having earlier said that a re-exam would only make their patent stronger) and D2L asking the US Court of Appeals not to hear Blackboard’s case until the USPTO issues a final ruling. D2L has won the first of these two battles.

Attendees at these community events often remark that they need a forum to engage campus leaders who don’t typically attend the community events.

I’m really pleased to see and support a new event with this in mind. Mark your calendars for The OPEN Forum. It takes place December 7-9 in Palm Springs, CA.

From the event website:

The OPEN Forum provides an opportunity for leaders and decision makers from colleges and universities to come together to enhance their understanding and vision for openness across higher education.

The vision for The OPEN Forum is lofty. We seek to increase the strategic benefit of technology in higher education. We believe that this can be done by bringing together a diverse group of great minds and investing time to understand and to evaluate the intricacies of this new open environment.

To this end, the forum will be centered on A DIALOGUE, fed by insightful keynotes and facilitated to allow for talking, listening, debating, sharing, building, debunking and learning. We believe that the dialogue must ADDRESS THE OPPORTUNITIES AND COMPLEXITIES of openness that often require a fundamentally different approach to defining and evaluating options with a broader scope of impact.

The participants include HIGHER EDUCATION EXECUTIVES who have the ability to affect change, as well as the insight of corporate colleagues who have grappled with similar issues.

Yesterday I updated my iPhone with the 2.0 software which wiped out all my music. Somehow the only audio that made it through the upgrade and restore was Ira Fuchs’ speech from the 2008 JASIC summer conference. It’s well worth a listen if you haven’t already heard it. Since I’ve got a couple hours to kill on the plane I took some notes from the recording. Hopefully they’ll inspire you to listen for yourself.

Ira Fuchs directs a program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that has been instrumental as a catalyst to launch some of the most important open source projects in Education by providing seed funding. Kuali, Sakai, and OSP are the ones I care most about but there is a long list of other important projects like Fluid, Bamboo, and Zotero that are making a real difference in education.

Ira’s talk this past summer was focused on the impediments to widespread acceptance of open source software in education. He recognizes that virtually every campus is using Linux and other infrastructure software but some of the education specific applications that have the greatest potential to offer institutions greater strategic agility and more control over their own destiny.

Why doesn’t every campus in global higher education use open source software applications? Ira characterizes the impediments in terms of legal, economic, organizational, and psychological factors. He urges the participants at the conference to understand why campuses choose to participate and why many, beyond the community source subculture don’t.

Why should we care about adoption? "Communities are living things. Like all living things when they stop growing they start to die." says ira. He notes that not all growth measured in adoption but for now, more adoption is important. The network effect arising from growth driven by adoption leads to : higher quality software (given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow); more feedback from higher usage; greater capacity as a community to develop and to support each other; more peer users who help each other and reduce support costs. He also notes that investors (like Mellon) find greater social returns and that adoption attracts more commercial involvement.

The obstacles

Legal obstacles – The good news is that campus leaders don’t seem to be overly concerned about insurmountable legal obstacles. However, open source software and projects are held to higher standards. It’s an irrational position notes Ira. Campuses routinely take far greater risks than anything yet demonstrated from open source software. He credits software foundations like Sakai and Kuali who hold IP and have strong IP management practices for reducing risk.

Economic, organizational, and perceptual obstacles…

Ira notes that overall IT capacity in higher education will continue to decline as many institutions outsource more IT functions. Given this:

"If there’s anyone here that still believes that vendors are unimportant to the long-term success of our projects, then it’s time to lose that delusion. Vendors are essential even for big institutions, and essential for small ones."

I really identify with Ira when he says "it’s startling when a senior leader at a higher institution believes that his/her institution needs to have substantial IT capacity even to consider participating."

He cites that many of the institutional adoptions of Mellon-funded software over the past couple of years were vendor supported. For projects like Kuali he says the number is "virtually 100%." He doesn’t mention rSmart specifically but I believe rSmart has worked with nearly every institution considering or implementing Kuali applications to-date.

He encourages participants to note that statistic:

"That’s a statistic that should be on everyone’s tongue’s when we’re talking with institutional leaders. Many of the institutions had the capacity to implement on their own, but chose to work with vendors in order to mitigate the risks of going it alone. That’s a strategy we can expect to see much more often as time goes by."

There’s a real lack of understanding what the real total cost of ownership is for these open source applications. Ira calls for better empirical data about the real costs and notes that this is critically important if we are to compete with what proprietary vendors insinuate about costs. It’s an obstacle, he says, that we need to get past in order to get to the more strategic benefits of open source: Greater strategic agility and greater control of destiny. He notes a statement Brad Wheeler, the CIO at Indiana University made about the need for pragmatic arguments:

"If tomorrow I got a new provost who wanted to know who are all these people taking my paychecks and siting in my offices but reporting to people at Cornel and Michigan and producing software that IU doesn’t own. I can’t then respond by talking about the virtues of altruism or the glory of open source. I need to have a spreadsheet that shows exactly how it’s in our institutional interests."

Many institutional leaders still see open source as anti commercial or unprofessional… they don’t trust it. They don’t realize that developers are just as professional as counterparts at proprietary software companies, and that these projects are highly organized with strong engineering practices.

He concludes the first part of his talk with a call to action: Produce more and better marketing materials. He notes that most people outside the community source subculture still judge the risks of open source as higher and the benefits as lower than proprietary alternatives. "Some of this misperception," he says "is rooted in simple ignorance, though proprietary vendors, seeking to preserve their market position, nurture of of it too." (Ira was being kind. Many proprietary vendors use their full marketing arsenal to support these misperceptions.)

The only way to overcome these widespread misperceptions, Ira says, is through clear consistent communication. He notes that everyone involved must "communicate the value over and over again, understandably and effectively until a more accurate perception settles in."

He uses Zotero as a positive example how end users can be empowered to do a projects "selling" on campus. He talks about how essential it is for community members to develop screencasts, online demos, podcasts, and good marketing materials to help end users in their efforts to overcome institutional objections.

These self-help selling tools require a significant investment. I know because for the Sakai and Kuali communities rSmart is probably the organization investing most heavily in developing these things. Ira has some great suggestions for leveraging institutions’ significant marketing resources so that the responsibility doesn’t fall entirely on professional open source companies like rSmart. I think he’s right on and I’ll be doing my part to encourage that kind of collaboration to build on the development collaboration that’s already working so well.