Last week I taught a class at Rutgers for LIS students. I explained what open source was and why you’d want to use it versus the traditional proprietary options. Of course I talked about the community and visions behind open source software - I also dispelled some common myths people have.

When giving these talks I like to pull data from many different sources, that’s why it’s a shame I didn’t find this post before my talk. Matthew McCullough talks about why companies should ‘chose open source software in the current state of our industry.’

Open source is gaining momentum like never before in the most respected of institutions and enterprises. Originally, the choice to use open source was made only by smaller companies for strictly financial reasons. Those reasons still hold, but are now joined by a chorus of other great points in the current intellectual property, commercial vendor, and economic state that the business world is currently in.

Interoperability is strongest in the Open Source realm. Open Source enjoys the absence of financial motivations to close data inputs, and the existence of desire to have adopters join in and migrate from other open and closed platforms. You’ll find that there are numerous import & migration tools for your existing data, and you’ll discover that your data is stored in highly interoperable formats for future migration to any platform your business needs dictate.

Read the entire post here.

I recently gave a demo for a special library and they wanted to know what open source was being used by the government in order to convince their IT staff that open source was a viable option. This request upsets me on so many levels - the fact that professional information technology employees need to follow the government’s IT instead of just reading and learning that open source is a secure and viable option. But, that’s not the point of my post. I wanted to share a bit of governmental open source news with you.

A while back I wrote about the GSA choosing open source because of it’s transparency. Today I can tell you that our new president is interested in researching open source as an option for government systems.

Could the federal government be going open source? The BBC reports that President Obama has asked former Sun CEO Scott McNealy to report on the relative benefits of open source software. Imagine that: a president who has heard of open source software.

Also, and a bit more impressive to me is the fact that the Defense Department has set up a repository for their open source initiatives:

The dam holding back U.S. federal adoption of open source just burst with the introduction of the Defense Department’s Forge.mil.

Forge.mil is an open-source project repository built in the image of SourceForge.net, Federal Computer Week reported Friday.

Despite being based on SourceForge’s technology, Forge.mil has one significant difference: security. As David Mihelcic, chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency, told Federal Computer Week, the Department of Defense’s code repository has been “upgraded to meet DOD security requirements,” with smart cards used to provide log-in credentials.

There are only three open-source projects hosted at Forge.mil so far, and it’s initially restricted to the Defense Department’s technology community, but I suspect this number will soon increase as various federal agencies discover it and ask to collaborate on code through it.

All very promising news on the open source front!!

You should all know about OSS4Lib already - but today I found a new community focused on open source software for public libraries - Oss4pl:

Oss4pl has just officially launched and we invite you to join us and take part in growing this visionary public library community. We hope to foster communication between public libraries exploring open source software solutions, and to serve as a nexus for collaborative projects between libraries.

Pretty darn cool - I’m with you guys - just tell me how to help

I just finished reading a great article in EDUCAUSE Review titled Open Source: Narrowing the Divides between Education, Business, and Community. Jim Whitehurst has a great explanation for why we should be teaching our students on and about open source software (so great, I wish I had come up with it first )

We live in an increasingly global community. Gone are the days when working for a company in an office meant serving a small geographic area from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Today’s graduates will work in a matrix environment where projects cut across organizational and geographic boundaries, requiring cooperation and communication. Open source uses the power of collaboration to provide students with hands-on learning and to equip students with an expanded skill set that is very attractive to businesses.

Open source better prepares students for the business world by exposing them to real-world problems and encouraging learning through the completion of real tasks. Open source amplifies a “hands-on” approach to learning by connecting students to a community of users in an effort to solve problems. Open-source developers don’t rely on textbooks; they rely on the knowledge base of other developers with whom they connect through community forums, building off of one another’s ideas to create a solution that is eventually shared with all. To this extent, open source better prepares students for future job experiences and allows them to complete, while they’re still in school, work that’s being used by the global open-source community.

Open source also teaches students useful skills that can be applied across other coursework and classes. Students have the opportunity to work with many more code bases in open source than are found in traditional student projects. This strengthens skills in collaboration, project management, and testing and encourages a well-rounded computer science education, making students more marketable in the business world.

Make sure you read the entire article and send it on to the decision makers in your institution. Jim touches on many points that are right in line with my ideals and the ideals of libraries in general.