From the issue dated August 1, 2003 Copyright 2003 The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted with permission. Sharing the Code More colleges and universities see open-source software as an alternative to commercial products By FLORENCE OLSEN While open-source-code projects like Linux have long been in the public eye, colleges and universities are now beginning to consider collaboration on similar efforts as a relatively cheap, effective way to meet their specialized software and computing needs. Linux and the Apache Web-server software, another open-source example, are both well established, well supported, and frequently used in higher education. Linux and Apache are kept up to date by a loose network of programmers worldwide who communicate through e-mail lists, fix bugs, and write new code. Now, college open-sourcers are beginning to operate similarly. One of their software projects is uPortal, which colleges use to build campuswide Web portals. Another is Shibboleth, which lets colleges control outside access to information that they post on the Web. Many college administrators are leery of joining such software efforts -- "barn raisings," some call them -- preferring to deal with companies, which they can hold responsible for critical software on which their colleges rely. And even proponents of uPortal and similar projects acknowledge that the standardization of commercial software has made online business and academic exchanges between colleges much easier. But commercial software companies can raise prices without warning or stop supporting products altogether, and a growing number of campus computing officials believe the open-source projects can produce software that is better suited to colleges' needs than are the commercial alternatives. Colleges are in search of a new business model for developing and licensing software, and open-source-code projects are leading the way, says Richard N. Katz, a vice president of Educause, the higher-education technology consortium. Ironically, some experts who think the open-source efforts at colleges and universities The Chronicle of Higher Education 1 1 August 2003 may create good software say the programs' developers should ultimately involve commercial software providers in their efforts. That would give the projects the credibility they need to overcome many users' fears, those experts say. Whatever their outcome, such projects have started "a whole new kind of dialogue about how to develop software and how to do business," Mr. Katz says. Nearly Free? One attractive feature of noncommercial software is that it usually costs nothing to license, and it comes with source code. With the source code, a programmer can look under the program's hood and see how the software works, and even make changes in it. When colleges buy commercial software, they do not typically receive the source code. While many colleges can make a business case for using free open-source software, the "free" part is often misunderstood, says Carl W. Jacobson, director of management- information services at the University of Delaware. As with any software project, the largest portion of the cost of open-source software is spending on local expertise -- learning how to install it and then training people to use it. The open-source business model nonetheless appeals to administrators like Michael Sherer, director of information technology at Goshen College, who made the decision four years ago to use Linux and other free software, including OpenLDAP, for network- directory services, and Samba, for file and print services. He marvels that the value of open-source software keeps increasing as contributors, who act as peer reviewers of the software, fix bugs and add new features while the price stays the same. "Just look at where Linux was four years ago and where it is now," he says. "You're getting a lot more value, but it's still free." The decision to go with free and open-source alternatives to commercial software does not require Goshen to employ a large number of programmers, but it does require "a sophisticated programming staff," Mr. Sherer says. The college deliberately created a campus-computing infrastructure based on open-source software "in hopes of attracting people who were able to handle that complexity." That decision was "a gamble that has basically paid off," he says. Mr. Sherer also says he considers it "part of the educational mission of the institution to write code, and to use other people's code, and to modify it," which is the open-source approach. Interest in free open-source alternatives to commercial software has grown as more colleges cope with steep increases in fees to license commercial software, Mr. Sherer says. The open-source business model does away with licensing-fee increases that commercial The Chronicle of Higher Education 2 1 August 2003 software makers must charge to pay the salaries of their sales forces and marketing staffs, for example. "Sometimes I start to resent the fact that I'm paying for a sales force" by virtue of buying commercial software, Mr. Sherer says. Now a growing number of colleges are even exploring open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office. Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, which is offered free to education and research institutions, is based on open-source software, called OpenOffice, to which Sun has been a significant contributor. According to Sun, 14 colleges have distributed StarOffice to 322,000 students and 44,000 faculty members in the past eight months. 'As Yet Unproved' Unlike open-source projects that have a broad appeal, such as Linux or OpenOffice, there are still relatively few collaborative efforts to create open-source software specifically for higher education. "They're rather important experiments," says Mr. Katz, of Educause. But for the most part, he says, their effectiveness as models for software development and licensing is "as yet unproved." The uPortal project, one of the most popular, began two-and-a-half years ago with Princeton University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Delaware as its founders. At that time, the colleges were interested in using the Java programming language to develop new software that they could share. The group of colleges, which expanded to become the Java Architectures Special Interest Group, started with a steering committee and $770,000 in seed money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The rules it abides by are liberal, some say, even by open-source standards. The group puts no restrictions on the commercial use of the new software it creates, and it lets anyone who wants the software have it, simply by downloading it from the Internet. Takers can copy the software and modify it to suit their specific needs. They are not obligated to share their modifications with the rest of the higher-education Java group, but most of them do. UPortal, the group's first shared-software project, has become the third-most widely used portal software in the United States. More than 100 American colleges and seven companies use the software -- although those are still relatively small numbers compared with those of commercial rivals. The colleges and companies coordinate their work on uPortal through e-mail lists, meetings, and conferences. Hundreds of institutions subscribe to the e-mail lists, but not everyone has sufficient technical expertise to contribute code to the effort. Instead, a core group of 15 or 20 experts responds with bug repairs, answers to questions, and new features. University officials say they have been surprised by the amount of free technical help that The Chronicle of Higher Education 3 1 August 2003 they get from other colleges using uPortal. If a college is having a problem with some aspect of the software, for example, someone can post the problem on one of the uPortal e-mail lists, and in, say, 15 minutes, have responses from five different experts. If colleges choose carefully, participation in open-source software projects can be a cost- saving option even for small institutions. Denison University and Roanoke College, for example, with about 2,000 students each, are running their own uPortal Web sites. Help on the Way Still, many college officials remain wary of open-source software because, if it has no company backing, it seems too risky, says Mark Olson, the executive vice president of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. "They want the security of that corporate partner," he says. What reasonable college, they ask, would give responsibility for critical software to volunteer programmers who get their paychecks from another college? The officials question how the work on open-source projects can be coordinated and accomplished by dozens of far-flung programmers working at different institutions. Administrators also worry about getting their institutions involved in a major software effort, depending on it, and then seeing it collapse. Then what? For those and other reasons, Mr. Jacobson says, open-source-software projects in higher education must encourage software companies to get involved in helping develop the software; in packaging, marketing, and distributing the software; and in selling their technical expertise to colleges that need it. So far, that approach has worked for uPortal. Unicon Inc. and SCT, for example, now have commercial versions of uPortal, just as Red Hat Inc. and others have commercial versions of Linux. Colleges must be willing, after a certain point, "to pass the baton" to software companies, says Joe Hartley, a regional director of Sun Microsystems' global education and research division. Colleges should do "the jump-starting, the priming the pump," he says. But colleges are less well suited, he says, for "the continued maintenance" of the software. "At a certain point, they're not interested in it, it's not interesting to them, nor is it necessarily their core competency." "We do not have very much Java expertise here," says Linda L.