Apereo Examines Sustainability in Open Source — Campus Technology

A Return to Openness: Apereo Examines Sustainability in Open Source

A Q&A with Patrick Masson and Josh Baron

Many of us remember a time when open source advocacy was predominant in adoption decisions for everything from learning platforms, to educational resources, to administrative systems, and much more. Those were the early days of what we dubbed “the open source movement”.

Over time, since moving out of the early 2000s, open strategies have enjoyed high adoption rates and open source software (OSS) has gained the kind of ubiquity that quietly ensures its core values but doesn’t keep it in the limelight.

Still, moving effortlessly into acceptance is really not enough. OSS, while established and time tested on so many levels, no longer takes center stage in discussions of adoption. Why is that a problem?

Because surprisingly, on many of our campuses, even the IT leadership responsible for the lion’s share of technology deployments doesn’t realize the extent to which the institution is dependent on open source. And that lack of awareness can be a threat to campuses.

Here, for a roundtable discussion on sustainability of open source, CT calls on two seasoned thought leaders in open source: The Apereo Foundation’s Executive Director Patrick Masson and Development Officer Josh Baron. With nearly 50 years of experience in open source between them, the two offer their perspectives on sustainability in open source, what can be done to achieve it, and the opportunity for higher education to maximize its benefits.

Mary Grush: Can we talk about what sustainability means for open source in higher education?

Patrick Masson: Yes, but first I’d introduce an important preamble, if you will. I think the sustainability issue is actually the second point of awareness to be raised with campuses. Because, if campuses aren’t first aware of their dependencies on open source, it’s going to be difficult to develop a sustainability model or to become sustainable.

If campuses aren’t first aware of their dependencies on open source, it’s going to be difficult to develop a sustainability model or to become sustainable.

In order for us to build a community or coalition or interest in sustainability for open source projects, campuses need to understand how much they already depend on open source.

For example, a campus CIO or IT director might say, “Yes, we use open source. We use Drupal for our campus CMS”. And that’s easily discoverable. But what’s more difficult to understand, sometimes even for a CIO or IT director, are the open source dependencies that exist because, for example, the institution is using Salesforce and Salesforce relies on open source libraries and integrated components and tools and infrastructure.

People typically think of open source software deployment in terms of the more visible “open source applications” like Opencast or Moodle or Linux or Kubernetes… What they don’t realize is how integrated open source is — creating more but less obvious dependencies.

In fact, you’ll find open source dependencies in just about everything that you’re running. And if higher ed’s trusted ed tech vendors rely on open source (which they do), higher ed relies on open source. Do you run Adobe, Cisco, Salesforce, SAP, Workday, or ORACLE? With these and many others, you might not be aware of it, but you’re dependent on open source.

If higher ed’s trusted ed tech vendors rely on open source (which they do), higher ed relies on open source.