Open Source at Foothill - De Anza
Open Source at Foothill-De Anza Willie Pritchard Foothill-De Anza Community
College District September
12, 2006
Open source software refers to programs whose licenses allow
users to: 1) freely access, install, and run the software for any purpose; 2)
modify the original software; 3) redistribute copies of the original or
modified programs; and 4) share modifications with the community. This is in
sharp contrast to use of commercially developed software for which a licensing fee
is required and user modifications are not permitted. Open source should also not be confused with
"public domain," which refers to intellectual property (writing, art,
music, software, etc.) that can be freely distributed. Open source refers to a
development process, whereas public domain refers to the property rights in the
distribution of material.
Open Source Applications in use
at Foothill-De Anza
Foothill-De Anza is among the nation's leading community
colleges in the use of open source applications. We currently use a variety of open source
software and are exploring opportunities to use more. We make use of open
source for everything from our desktop browsers to the servers that support
some of the key operations of the district.
Linux –Linux is an open
source operating system based on UNIX and is a classic example of the success
of the open source movement. It is
popular because of its vendor independence (it can run on almost any server or
desktop computer), security, reliability, and, of course, its low cost. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: Linux provides us with a powerful, secure,
and robust operating environment that can scale to meet many of our needs. We would probably use it exclusively for our
servers if there weren't applications that run only on Windows or other
operating systems. We specify Linux as our preferred O/S for servers in all of
our bid documents and in conversations with vendors. Currently over a third of
the servers in our data center are Linux-based and we anticipate that
percentage will increase. The rest are a mix of Windows, Macintosh, Solaris,
and OpenVMS platforms. We prefer Linux to others for its robustness, its
security, and because it is open source.
Other operating systems have deficiencies or extra costs that raise the
total cost of ownership (TCO).
Sakai: Sakai is both an open source application and
the name of a community source consortium working to develop a new open source
Course Management System. In many ways
the announcement of the Sakai
effort three years ago served as a lightning rod for the open source movement
in higher education. Founded by four
universities ( MichiganState,
Indiana, Stanford, and MIT) and since expanded to over 80 partners, the goal is
to develop an enterprise course management system that is equal, or superior
to, commercial course management systems. At the current time they are on
version 2.0 and continue working to improve the product. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: We
were in the process of rewriting ETUDES, our home-grown course
management system, using the Microsoft proprietary .NET standard when the Sakai
Project was in its early stages of creation.
Joining the Sakai Project (with the support of the Hewlett Foundation) helped jumpstart the ETUDES
redevelopment effort by narrowing our focus to only a portion of the full
project, with other colleges and universities handling the development of the
rest of the package. An open source CMS
will not only save the district development time, but also saves hundreds of thousands
of dollars in licensing fees if we were to select a commercial application such
as WebCT or Blackboard. Combined with our portal project we can also more
tightly integrate the two (portal and CMS) and customize the user interface and
backend data to better meet the needs of our faculty and students.
Moodle
– Moodle is another open source course
management system, developed in Australia
in the late ‘90s, with a large user base (over 7,000 installed sites)
throughout the world. It uses other open
source technologies as a base for its operation, such as Linux and MySQL. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: De Anza recently adopted
Moodle as its standard course management system and has renamed/rebranded
Moodle to “Catalyst.” The college is actively moving forward with implementing
it on campus for full use in fall, 2007.
At this time it has been installed on servers in our data center and a
number of faculty have been trained on its use. Apache
– Apache is an open source web server application that dominates the
web server market. It is powerful, flexible, secure and scalable to meet almost
every need. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: We use Apache almost exclusively within the district for our web
servers.
CampusEAI
Portal – This is a community source project that encourages the
development of open source portlets for the Oracle portal product. Currently
there are over 100 U.S.
and international colleges and universities who are members of the consortium.
Each member institution is able to contribute to, and draw from, the
consortium's repository of open source portlets. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: Combined with the grant we received from CampusEAI, which allowed
us to become one of the founding members of the consortium, we are now able to
provide a new user experience to our users.
This will allow us to not only put a friendlier interface onto our
backend systems, but will also serve as a one-stop shop for a variety of
technology services in the district, including (but not limited to) student
registration, early alert system, email, calendaring, district and college
announcements, class rosters, forms processing, grade submittal, instant
polling, student elections, Student Educational Plans, and on and on. It will
also serve to provide better security through single sign-on capability and as
the front-end login for wireless access. In short, this application will be a
universal tool for many resources within the district.
MySQL – MySQL is an open source relational database
that is growing in popularity, but has so far been used for relatively small
applications (not enterprise-wide).
However, due to its open source, license-free nature it has been seeing
increasing popularity for larger and larger applications. The primary feature
that distinguishes it from many commercial database engines is the capability
to "scale out" rather than "scale up." Commercial data base
licenses generally are server-based (that is the vendor licenses a database to
be used on a single server) and if there is a need to increase speed and
capacity the licensee simply buys a more powerful server with greater disk
space to run it on. The result is the
continuing purchase of very powerful and very expensive high-end hardware that
is generally dedicated only to a single purpose. In a scale out model, which MySQL supports,
when more capacity is needed one simply buys an inexpensive commodity server
(generally a fast Intel processor running Linux with a high capacity hard
drive) and plugs it into the application. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: As MySQL becomes more popular for large enterprise applications its
feature set will become more robust and it will become a more viable
alternative for our enterprise-wide applications. It is currently being used in at least two
applications in the district; Foothill is using it for a curriculum tracking
application it is developing and the High Tech Center Training Unit of the
California Community Colleges is using it to maintain a database of alternate
media for students with disabilities. Both of these applications are very
valuable resources for the district, and, in the case of HTCTU alternate media
database, also very valuable throughout the state and country, as the resource
is made available to all via the web.
Mozilla
Firefox – Firefox is an open source browser that is gaining
increasing popularity, not just because is it free (most browsers are free),
but because it is not plagued by the problems of Microsoft's Internet
Explorer. Although no browser is
completely secure from attack Firefox has a reputation of being more secure
than others primarily because it does not support an embedded scripting
language (which I.E. does) that might allow control by an outside source. Because of its open source nature Firefox has
quickly become a very fast and robust browser. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: We have selected Firefox to
be one of the standard browsers for the district and install it on every
computer. Further, we actively encourage users to switch to Firefox over the
standard browsers that come with their computers (Internet Explorer and Safari)
even though a number of web sites are designed specifically for Internet
Explorer and don't display well in any other browser. In those cases users are
forced to use I.E., so we also include it on all computers. We have also found
Firefox to be more compatible with district-developed web-based applications
than the other browsers, thus easier to develop for and are encouraging our
users to use Firefox instead of other browsers.
Future Open Source Applications
at Foothill-De Anza
We believe in the viability of open source applications and
will seek out those open source applications that meet our needs. We further
believe the future will bring not only more open source applications, but also
more viable open source applications. The following summarizes those
applications that we are either planning to use, or envision using, in the
future.
Kuali
– modeled on the Sakai Project, Kuali is the first attempt in higher education
to address enterprise information systems with an open source solution. The Kuali Project focuses exclusively on
developing a Financial Records System and consists of the following members:
the University of Arizona, Cornell, the University
of Hawaii, Indiana
University, Michigan State, San Joaquin Delta Community College,
NACUBO and r-smart. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: If the Kuali Project is
successful on a timeline that meets ours, we will be able to use the product in
place of a commercial FR application, thus potentially saving the district over
$1 million.
ePortfolio –
an ePortfolio is a portfolio of students' work stored electronically for use by
the student, faculty, potential employers, or other higher ed
institutions. It can consist of images,
photographs, text documents, video, music, and other artwork – essentially
anything that can be created or converted to digital format. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: We have faculty who are
interested in creating an ePortfolio environment for their students and some
have even experimented with various applications on a limited scale. In our
planning for the future, a district-wide ePortfolio system will require a major
increase of high-storage-capacity servers as well as a major increase in staffing
to accomplish the project.
Mozilla
Thunderbird – Thunderbird is
a feature-rich open-source email client that is gaining increasing popularity. Significance to Foothill-De Anza: The district standards
committee considered it as a standard for email last academic year. For a variety of reasons it decided not to
approve it then, however, it will likely be considered again this year.
PKI – or
Public Key Infrastructure, provides security services in the form of
authentication, authorization and encryption protocols. It allows for secure transmission of data
between institutions Significance to Foothill-De Anza: Given the increasing security concerns we are
experiencing, PKI will likely be one of several protocols that we institute for
inter-institutional data transfer in the future.
Other "Open
Source-Like" Applications
We have other projects or applications in use in the
district that are often confused with open source, although in reality they are
not open source. Usually this confusion revolves around use of the term,
"public domain." As stated
earlier, however, public domain concerns the distribution of intellectual
property while open source refers to the ability to modify the original code in
software. The basis of this confusion may lie in the fact that for open source
to work effectively it must also be public domain. To further clarify, open source implies only
software while public domain can refer to any intellectual property (music,
art, literature, course materials, etc.), not just software code.
A good example of public domain course material is our Sofia
Project, which was funded by the Hewlett Foundation. Sofia was our first initiative to distribute
public domain content material. Through
Hewlett's support we put in place a clearinghouse and distribution mechanism
for soliciting, collecting, evaluating, revising (as appropriate) and
distributing course material developed by faculty in California Community
Colleges. Analogously, under the new board policy, we are also actively taking
steps to encourage faculty in the district to develop and share their course
materials, effectively putting it into the public domain. (Faculty may,
however, choose to put certain restrictions on the use of the material –
perhaps along the lines of a Creative Commons license.) Material created and
distributed in this way is often referred to as "open courseware."
Another, better known example is MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). MIT is
widely recognized as being the first institution to embark on enterprise-wide
effort to share course materials for all of their classes.
Finally, there is an initiative that blends the development
aspects of open source efforts with the distribution methods of public domain.
This is the increasingly popular set of Wiki projects. Initially, the effort was on creating an
"open" and "public domain" encyclopedia known as Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a web-based encyclopedia that is being written collaboratively by
contributors from all around the world. Managed and operated by the non-profit
Wikimedia Foundation, it is openly edited (using Wiki software) and freely
available to anyone in the world. Anyone can submit entries or modify
previously submissions. As a result the encyclopedia is an ever-evolving body
of work that is current and rich in content. The Wiki Foundation recently
announced that it will be moving beyond supporting an encyclopedia site to a
project encouraging the creation of textbooks for education, called Wikibooks.
Their goal is to foster the creation of online texts for use in K-20 education
using the Wiki collaborative software. Interestingly, Moodle (the course
management system) has a Wiki software component in it.
Benefits of Open Source for
Foothill-De Anza
- Open source often has the same
features as commercial software – commercially available technical
support, professional documentation, training classes, managed releases,
multiple platforms supported, and active user groups.
- Access to source code allows us to
customize the application as well as manage our migration to new versions.
As a result, we are able to migrate under our schedule, not the vendor's
schedule, thus providing more flexibility in work scheduling, job
assignments, etc.
- There is a growing cadre of developers
and technical support specialists for popular open source applications. As open source products become even more
accepted the pool of developers and tech support specialists will continue
to grow.
- Many open source applications come
with “built-in support.” These
are generally known as “community source” applications because there is a
community of developers who focus their efforts on a specific application,
such as <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Sakai</st1:place></st1:City>
for course management, uPortal and CampusEAI for portal environments, and
Kuali for a higher ed financial records application. Each application has
a functioning group who provides project management, technical direction,
feature prioritization, new versions, support, and delivery of software
updates.
- Total costs are generally lower than
commercial applications. Often there is the misconception that
"open source means free software." That is not the case. The Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) should be the guiding measure for what the cost of any
application is, not just the acquisition cost. Although there is little to no
acquisition cost for open source materials, one cannot ignore the costs
associated with installation, customization, maintenance, as well as the
hardware costs. So, although open
source rarely means, "free," it usually means, "lower total
costs."
- Decreases vendor lock-in. Vendors
want to keep their customers and not lose business. One way to do that is
to "lock in" customers to a long-term maintenance contract. With open source software the customer
and the open source community maintain the application, not the vendor. So
it provides more independence from vendor lock-in.
- Can increase the quality of the code
and increase security. With many eyes looking at the code, poor design
and poor coding practices are in plain view and will be corrected by the
open source community. The same holds true for security. Poorly
implemented security is found and corrected quickly. With proprietary software inefficient
code is more likely to be developed since many fewer eyes see it.
- Improvements to software are often
done more quickly and are often more reliable. Vendor developed software is constrained
by the resources available to do the coding. If corporate priorities are
not focused on the product in question then development time may increase,
or even stop altogether. With open source software, improvements are in
constant stages of development.
9. Open
source is even more market-driven than vendor developed software. Because
individuals from the market itself are doing the development, not an
independent corporate entity, the relationship between the desired feature set
and the actual product is almost perfect. Those who desire a new feature,
develop it.
Conclusion Although many people, even many who know a lot about open
source, often see open source advocates as evangelists, the open source model
is not a religion. It is a very pragmatic way of developing and evolving
software in a rapidly changing environment. The power of open source lies in
how it harnesses the collective wisdom, experiences, expertise and requirements
of users to ensure that their needs are rapidly met. There are many ways in which the district has
been taking advantage of open source technology, as reviewed in this document. Open source efforts are not likely to go
away. If anything there will be more open source efforts in the future. The district will continue to explore and
evaluate open source efforts for their applicability to our business, and
undoubtedly make even more use of open source as time goes on.
Popular higher education "open
source" projects and applications
- Kuali - an Open Source Financial Information System
- uPortal - portal and aggregator software
- OpenCourseWare (OCW) - free
online access to MIT course materials
- Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) - a set of open standards
for offering course materials over the Internet
- Moodle
– Course management system developed in 1999 in Australia
- Assignment and Assessment Manager (AAM) - Online testing
and assessment tool
- Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) - Annotation
software for digital materials
- Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) - Inter-institutional
authentication, authorization, and encryption services
- LionShare - A peer-to-peer client for academic exchange
- Westwood/Chandler - Email and calendar software for higher
education
- ePortfolio- Persistent, personal storage of digital
materials
- SAKAI - Course management system based on OKI standards.
- Sophie- Authoring tools and formats for media-rich
electronic documents
- CampusEAI -- community source
portal environment for higher ed institutions who use the Oracle portal
- Sofia
-- community college open courseware initiative, sponsored by Foothill -
De Anza Community College District
- Connexions
– a project at Rice University to
support the development and publishing of open courseware,
- Wikibooks -- based on the Wikipedia project, this is an
effort to get open source K-20 textbooks created through the Wiki model of
worldwide collaborative authorship
- Apache
Software – an open source web server application widely used
throughout the world in both corporations and higher education
- mySQL
– open source database software
- PHP
-- a scripting language for creating dynamic web pages; often used in
conjunction with Linux and MySQL
__________________
Willie Pritchard can be reached at pritchardwillie@fhda.edu <o:p></o:p>
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