8 Reasons to Use Open-Source Software in Education

1. FLEXIBILITY

IT leaders must provide flexibility and agility for their school. If you can’t compete on agility, you’re going to get left behind by the competition. Open source enables technology agility, typically offering multiple ways to solve problems. Open source helps keep your IT organization from getting blocked because a particular capability isn’t available from a vendor. Instead of waiting for the vendor to deliver that capability, you can create it yourself.

2. SPEED

Your school will soon be competing on speed, if it isn’t already. A great advantage of open source is the ability to take the community versions, get started, understand whether they can solve your problem, and begin to deliver value right away. Once you make that determination, professional support and services are increasingly available for open source products, especially those supported by Rockpile.

This allows you to get the best of both worlds — flexibility, agility, and the ability to get started quickly and inexpensively, with the ability to mature to a large scale, fully supported, quality implementation, and you don’t have to go over proprietary licensing hurdles to get there.

3. COST-EFFECTIVENESS

Open source is generally much more cost-effective than a proprietary solution. Not only are open source solutions typically much more inexpensive in an education environment for equivalent or superior capability, but they also give schools the ability to start small and scale (more on that coming up). Given that education institutions are often budget challenged, it just makes financial sense to explore open source solutions.

4. ABILITY TO START SMALL

With open source, you can start small and quickly with community versions, and then migrate to a commercially-supported solution as your business requirements drive you there. If the project doesn’t require support, you can continue on the community version indefinitely. You have the option to try the various alternatives, pick the one that’s going to work, and then scale up.  

5. SOLID INFORMATION SECURITY

Commercial open source has a solid information security record in a dangerous world. Obviously, it’s difficult to claim security superiority for any solution and it’s a challenging environment for all of us, but the responsiveness of the open source community and vendors relative to information security problems has been very good. The fact that we’ve had eyes on code that in some cases is decades old, and we were able to identify and fix problems when they became apparent, rather than have the code molder in a proprietary environment where few knew about the exposure but some were exploiting it, is an advantage of open source.

6. ATTRACT BETTER TALENT

Open source gives enterprises the ability to attract better talent. Most professional technologists are well aware of open source and many believe it’s where the industry is headed. Many enjoy creating their own projects and having the ability to interact with others outside their enterprise to develop solutions. Giving developers flexibility and freedom can be an important tool.

7. SHARE MAINTENANCE COSTS

You can solve your problems while effectively sharing some of the maintenance costs. One of the fundamental advantages of open source is community involvement. Rather than writing an application and having to sustain it yourself, you can share the cost of maintaining and sustaining applications among multiple parties.

8. THE FUTURE

Open source is the future. Web, mobile, and cloud solutions are increasingly built predominantly on open source infrastructure. Some data and analytic solutions are only available in open source.