As a faculty member at a public research institution, director of
technology for a college, and manager of a distance education support
organization; I wanted to reflect on my experience making the jump from
Windows to Ubuntu Linux. I hope to assist other faculty and staff at
schools or universities to make the leap into a completely free(dom)
computing environment.
As I watch my institution wrestle with multi-million dollar budget cuts and the resulting losses to both personnel and infrastructure support, I can’t help but marvel at the strength of resistance that academics have to dropping unnecessary software licensing and embracing free(dom) software. My notation of “free(dom)” software is my own way of indicating that I care both about the cost (as in free beer) and the flexibility (as in free speech) offered by free/open-source (FOSS) software. As long as the funding for software comes from “other people’s money” (the departments, the university’s, a federal grant’s), then we (collectively) are content to spend that money and ignore the free(dom) alternatives. When it costs us something personally, whether financially or through restrictions on use, then some people begin to pay attention to alternatives.
In my view, public academic institutions have both a professional and moral obligation to leverage free/open-source software. If we can not afford to maintain our facilities or otherwise provide top-notch experiences to public students, how can we condone spending our strained institutional budgets on software that could easily be replaced by free(dom) alternatives? Every copy of Microsoft Office that’s paid from school budgets is an affront to me, because I know from personal experience that LibreOffice (and formerly OpenOffice) is more than sufficient for school use. Beyond the cost, LibreOffice promotes open standards and its commercial competition simply locks each new student into an upgrade treadmill that will cost them hundreds or thousands of dollars over a lifetime of use. LibreOffice also allows parents, peers, and faculty to use the latest version continuously – which has significant pedagogical benefits as well.
Taking this idea farther, there are few thing stopping academic institutions from adopting Ubuntu (or any other Linux) for everyday scholarly use. The first is resistance to change as exhibited by faculty and staff themselves. Without a personal (financial or other) incentive, it is easiest to simply stay with what we know and continue on the upgrade treadmill each time Microsoft and/or Apple decides it’s time to pay up again. The second is lack of Linux support for "industry standard" software. In my experience, the biggest problem here is Adobe’s Creative Suite products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc.)
The "resistance to change" issue requires advocates pressing the issue. Most users don’t actually use highly specialized software; and many/most "industry standard" software have excellent replacements in the F/OSS world. Whatever your motivation for reading this blog, I hope you’ll find some useful ideas on promoting FOSS in academia.
(modified from a 2010 blog post)
As I watch my institution wrestle with multi-million dollar budget cuts and the resulting losses to both personnel and infrastructure support, I can’t help but marvel at the strength of resistance that academics have to dropping unnecessary software licensing and embracing free(dom) software. My notation of “free(dom)” software is my own way of indicating that I care both about the cost (as in free beer) and the flexibility (as in free speech) offered by free/open-source (FOSS) software. As long as the funding for software comes from “other people’s money” (the departments, the university’s, a federal grant’s), then we (collectively) are content to spend that money and ignore the free(dom) alternatives. When it costs us something personally, whether financially or through restrictions on use, then some people begin to pay attention to alternatives.
In my view, public academic institutions have both a professional and moral obligation to leverage free/open-source software. If we can not afford to maintain our facilities or otherwise provide top-notch experiences to public students, how can we condone spending our strained institutional budgets on software that could easily be replaced by free(dom) alternatives? Every copy of Microsoft Office that’s paid from school budgets is an affront to me, because I know from personal experience that LibreOffice (and formerly OpenOffice) is more than sufficient for school use. Beyond the cost, LibreOffice promotes open standards and its commercial competition simply locks each new student into an upgrade treadmill that will cost them hundreds or thousands of dollars over a lifetime of use. LibreOffice also allows parents, peers, and faculty to use the latest version continuously – which has significant pedagogical benefits as well.
Taking this idea farther, there are few thing stopping academic institutions from adopting Ubuntu (or any other Linux) for everyday scholarly use. The first is resistance to change as exhibited by faculty and staff themselves. Without a personal (financial or other) incentive, it is easiest to simply stay with what we know and continue on the upgrade treadmill each time Microsoft and/or Apple decides it’s time to pay up again. The second is lack of Linux support for "industry standard" software. In my experience, the biggest problem here is Adobe’s Creative Suite products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc.)
The "resistance to change" issue requires advocates pressing the issue. Most users don’t actually use highly specialized software; and many/most "industry standard" software have excellent replacements in the F/OSS world. Whatever your motivation for reading this blog, I hope you’ll find some useful ideas on promoting FOSS in academia.
(modified from a 2010 blog post)
No comments:
Post a Comment