On the 18th of March we are running an event, Risk Management in Open Source Procurement, in association with the Open Source Consortium and Red Hat. This event provides an an opportunity for IT staff in UK HE and FE institutions to hear from and to talk directly with representatives of open source businesses in the UK, their academic customers and a number of specialist academic support organisations.
Why is such an event necessary?
In October 2007 JISC Inform ran an article on open source in HE and FE contained in that article you can read:
There is often a lack of understanding about how best to consider OSS as part of institutional IT procurement and development activities. Ross Gardler, manager of the HE and FE advisory service for open source software, believes such issues can be explained by difficulties surrounding evaluation techniques.
‘There often isn’t an established marketing department that will take you out for lunch and smooth talk you about the potential benefits, like there is with a commercial provider,’ he says.
and
An OSS Watch survey found that only 25 per cent of universities and colleges mention open source in their institutional policies, suggesting an important discrepancy between policy and practice. ‘Institutions need a policy that says they will evaluate open source solutions,’ says Gardler.
In a podcast that went along with the article we explore potential reasons for the lack of policies to consider open source. We discuss issues such as the lack of understanding about how open source is developed and supported by commercial providers and about how these commercial partners are only too happy to provide the kind of support found in any commercial software vendor.
It’s truly is a case of you get what you pay for. If you want to go the self or community support route open source allows you to do so. However, for institutional systems it is often necessary to reduce the risk by engaging with specialists to create and deploy the (nearest to perfect solution.
Ann Borda is quoted in the inform article as saying:
whatever final solution - open or closed source - is selected, it’s best to provide users with a choice of products. ‘It’s unlikely that a single set of software choices will meet everyone’s requirements, either technically or at the simple user-preference level,’ she says. ‘It’s highly desirable to allow users to choose their working preferences first and foremost.’
This is where open source has it’s strengths. You get a choice of experts to carry out this critical work, and you have the added security of being able to take ownership of whatever parts of the project you desire to.
What are OSS Watch doing to support the procurement of open source in HE and FE?
We provide one-to-one consultancy services to help people understand how to evaluate open source and open source providers using frameworks such as the Business Readiness Rating and the Open Source Maturity Model. These consultancies are great if you’ve already decided to evaluate an open source solution. But what if you are still unsure?
If you are are responsible for or influence software procurement we hope to see you at our Risk Management in Open Source Procurement event.
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