One of the big “Fear Uncertainty and Doubt” questions I often get asked as someone who spends a fair bit of time looking at the course management system landscape is “But are open source systems really ready for use as enterprise systems?” (Up until recently one might have done well to ask the same questions of the commercial systems that alleged to be ‘enteprise ready’!)
I don’t know what better way to respond than to simply point to where these systems are being used, so as some initial examples:
- sites running Moodle
- sites running Atutor (scroll down the page to see the list)
- case studies on 16 institutions representing over 60k users running .LRN
There are lots of fears held by Directors of IT, EdTech and others (some justified, others extremely unfounded) that need to be addressed before it becomes easy to adopt open source for ‘enterprise’ needs. This should be an easy one, though – any open source project that seriously wants to be adopted and that doesn’t actively solicit information on who is using it and share this back with potential users is clearly overworked or missing something. Better yet, segment your responses (k-12/colleges/universities/corporate training” might be a start for the education sector) so that people can point to a peer group and say ‘look who else has adopted this software!’ You’d be amazed how effective an argument this can be, especially as we move along the famous curve of innovation adopters (e.g. early and late majorities are like that for a reason.) – SWL
Just to add to your list…
Heard of Interact? Excellent CMS system that uses MySQL and PHP. I haven’t been using it for long, but Interact has a “component” approach that’s a great fit with admins and users.
http://cce-interact.sourceforge.net/
I dont want to start another holly world but me for one I simply cannot see the benefit of open source enterprise applications… From what I understood the very meaning of open source is to strengthen our professional community. Building our own OS, our own development tools or development frameworks is a great way to ensure progress, but building an open source ERP or course management system I doubt is of any use. Not to mention damage for business. Me for one I would be very happy if one of my developers would work in the Linux kernel or like, but I would fire and sue him in a second if I would hear he just started an open source implementation of the project he’s working on during day time…
Oh. I see.
Let me get this straight – You’re all for OSS when you get GPLed software for free(beer), but it’s a public menace otherwise?
Yeesh.