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Coding Open – The Benefits of Free and Open-Source Software in Academia

So let’s be clear. When I say open-source software, I’m talking about any piece of code, however small or large, that has been freely and openly released for public consumption by the code’s author. This means that anyone is free to download and use the software “as-is,” or to make changes and additions to the code and redistribute it (depending on the specific license the code was released under).

Now, this is not meant to be a stab at closed-source (or proprietary software), which has proven a reliable solution to many problems that businesses face. Rather, it’s meant to examine some of the less obvious benefits to deploying open-source software, especially at academic institutions.

Cost

Systems built on open-source software are cheap. Especially in Academia, where money (and fundraising) is always an issue, small departments can stand to save thousands of dollars if they plan ahead and hire a capable sysadmin or developer. Let’s look at some numbers.

A new quad-core Xserve from Apple will set you back $2,999.00 dollars. You can put together a comparable quad-core server that runs Unix or Linux from Newegg for a mere $938.95. That’s ¹⁄₃ the price of the Xserve! Plus you get more memory and a redundant hard drive in case one fails (not all that unlikely).

You could spend the $2,000 you saved on a battery backup solution, a couple redundant servers, or even more staff! Load up that commodity server with PHP, MySQL and (everyone’s favorite) the Apache web server. Now you’ve gotten all this great software for free and you can run almost any modern web application on the cheap.

Now, granted, part of what you’re paying for with the Xserve is Apple’s suite of remote-management software, which makes many daily maintenance tasks a breeze. However, if you took my advice and hired a smart sysadmin, then she should have no problem maintaining this system for you. And you’ll be better off having a full-time sysadmin, instead of springing for the Xserve and having to hire a part-time sysadmin who doesn’t know what cron is. You could even hire a couple geeky students to run your server for you on the cheap. So long as you’re not storing any confidential information, there is no reason they can’t take care of this.

But let’s think a little bigger. Now multiply that $2,000 by 50. If you have 50 departments all running one webserver (or 25 departments running 2) you’ve now saved $100,000. That money could employ three people, full-time, for one year. That’s money that could have been wasted on unnecessary equipment. Make one of those positions a floating sysadmin and you’ve already come out ahead.

Community

When you choose to go with a mature open-source solution, you gain access to a huge community of dedicated contributors whose collective knowledge is available to assist you. Like in academia, the goal of open-source projects is to take one person’s idea and grow that idea into something better. Taking the contributions of hundreds or thousands of people and building something amazing.

It’s important to realize that this community is not just made up of lone programmers working in their off-hours. Many huge corporations are major contributors to open-source projects (especially when Linux is concerned).

Security

One of the biggest complaints about open-source software always seems to be over security. There is a legitimate concern that having your code open for all the world to see can make it insecure. That is in fact true. The more information black hat programmers have about your software, the less work they have to do to find holes.

However, having your source code open also allows white hats (the good guys) to peruse the code and submit patches for security holes. Proprietary software developers typically have large teams of debuggers looking over code, but how can you say no to more help for free? Anyone can miss a potential problem, and in this case the issue is simply if it’s better to have more people crawling your code for problems, or less.

This process of peer-reviewing code greatly contributes to the learning opportunities that open-source software provides.

Learning Outcomes

I think that open-source software presents an amazing opportunity for student learning. Going open-source encourages students to reach out to the community and helps them understand the underlying technologies of the software.

While proprietary software manufacturers provide solutions that “just work” (or are at least supposed to), they actively prevent you from poking around the code. This means that you’re at the mercy of the manufacturer to provide patches, updates and improvements. Many times a problem one person is facing requires a custom solution, one that doesn’t merit the attention of the software’s goliath publisher.

Open-source software allows for the knowledgeable developer to make this improvements herself, and submit them back to the community at large. Students who are working with open-source software are encouraged to think critically and troubleshoot problems themselves. This process makes them expert problem-solvers, instead of having to waste their time on the phone with tech-support.

Open-Source Software We Use Every Day

• Wordpress
• Drupal
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• OpenOffice.org
• Darwin (The Soul of Mac OS X)
• FreeBSD
• Linux
• Apache
• PHP
• Python

The Federal Government’s website recovery.gov is built on the Drupal content management system (which is built on PHP and runs on LAMP servers worldwide), as are many other high-traffic websites.

The University of Oregon’s Office of the President runs Wordpress 2.7, the popular open-source blogging platform.

Licensing

The licensing of open-source software is a huge topic and worthy of its own post. Needless to say it’s worth mentioning here. Wikipedia has a good article on Free Software Licensing, which may be a good place to start. You should also look into the GNU Public License, which is the most widely used free software license.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Creative Commons, a wonderful organization that has made sharing your work online even easier.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization

We work to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.

Tags: Apache, Darwin, Drupal, Firefox, FOSS, FreeBSD, Linux, Open Source, PHP, Thunderbird, Wordpress