[Edu-sig] open source admin in academia? (editorial)

[kirby urner]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 10:31 PM, Jarrod Millman <millman at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> There are several open source, community developed projects
> widely-used in higher ed.  For example, moodle is a widely-used course
> management system:
>  http://moodle.com/
> Sakai is another course management system for use in higher ed:
>  http://sakaiproject.org/
> The Jasig consortium provides several applications used in higher ed:
>  http://www.jasig.org/
>
> The following, while not specifically focused on higher ed, are also
> widely deployed in higher ed environments:
>  http://roundcube.net/
>  http://squirrelmail.org/
>  http://www.list.org/
>  http://www.isc.org/software/bind
>
> Best,
> Jarrod

Thank you Jarrod, exactly the kind of doorway into this topic
I was looking for.  You've saved me some time.

Here's a random example of a commercial vendor and all
with a list of features I'm wondering if some universities
supply themselves (in-house), and/or what's out there
that's open source (perhaps with support services).

http://www.verdexsoft.net/university-software.htm

I'm seeing dribs and drabs.

I notice Yale invented Centralized Authentication Service (CAS)
and that Princeton is involved somehow.  Berkeley DB is from
Berkeley, used in OpenLDAP (originally from Umich).

These kinds of things.  Maybe there's a whole literature
I've yet to unearth.

I like to see universities taking the lead in some way...
(they call it "non-commercial"), eating their own dog food.

Same thing with hospitals.  They seem to not want to
develop much inhouse, even for research -- or maybe
I've not been inside the right hospitals?   You'd think
the open source ethic and health care would be more
hand in glove.

Then you get a bevy of commercial companies offering
expertise with these open source tools, e.g.:

http://www.unicon.net/company/about#Domain_Expertise

Note: Oracle now owns Berkeley DB and has put the Sqlite3 API
in front of it (as an option).  Costs big bucks looks like.

Kirby

PS:  I came across this useful discussion on Dr. Chuck's blog
(he posts here sometimes -- we met at Pycon2009 in
Chicago).

Reading:
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=opensource