Impediments to OS on Campus

Lack of Marketing
Upper management has a tough time finding information
Lack of follow through in projects
Lack of exposure (presence and mindshare) at the forums that count
E.g., Lack of organized presence at EDUCAUSE
Misconceptions still exist, especially at the executive level (complicated, difficult to support)
No understanding that successful OS implementations are actually OS (Redhat, Apache)
Need to counter the FUD
"It doesn't cost money" - but it really does cost
There is no good cost analysis published
Lack of published business cases
"There is no support"
"Implementation is more difficult"
Sharing of institution's contributions may be resisted by the institution
Need to convince people that collaborating and sharing is in their best interest
Share code may result in ability to share support and share in others code
"Why should we give this investment away for free? Can't we make lots-o-money selling it?"
But you then would lose the opportunity to share effort; others might stop giving.
Enlightened self interest
We (i.e., technologists or OS community) need to stop saying "'They' are too ignorant to get it." Stop the brow-beating
procurement, marketing, road maps
we have too many license types - need to normalize
Need to clearly state risks (and lack of)
We need to compete on value and ROI
The current procurement process shifts response expense to the vendors ($30-50K); the licensing money covers sales and marketing; the OS Community lacks the capacity to respond.
We are likely to see resistance to special considerations of OS during the procurement process. We need to come up with an alternative process that can be generally applied. Openess, audit-ability, ...
The procurement process is not our problem to solve. The institution needs to solve it.
"What about support?"
"Who do I turn to?"

What can we do? What do we need to do?

Stanford set up "TASK"?? ; a place where management can go to get information regarding open source
The Executive Directors from a number of Community OS projects are putting together a panel at EDUCAUSE
Universities (e.g., Oregon State Universities, RPI, some UK/JISC group) have open source labs that get funding from some external sources (e.g., google); establishing these connections can be beneficial towards our shared goals
JASIG Web Presence Redesign is improving marketing
Can we pool resources to help create/fund/support entities that can help fill the gap in procurement/support?
Can we make a boiler plate RFP response? "Build your own RFP"; would need to be kept up to date.
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/procurement08.xml

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