Wide open campuses

Vendors selling proprietary software applications face a tough task when it comes to getting their products deployed on campuses as IT heads in this sector are whole-heartedly behind Open Source software By N Geetha

Indira Ghosh, Dean, Schools of Information Technology, JNU

Most campuses are vibrant adopters, users and contributors of Open Source software. Most campuses, be it premier institutions, business schools or universities, are large scale users of Open Source offerings from Moodle, Project Wonderland, Apache Tomcat, DSpace Solutions etc. Linux distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu etc. are in vogue too.

The primary reason for this is to control cost and avoid the support-related ambiguities that proprietary software brings to the table. "We see a tremendous surge towards open source based solutions being deployed in campuses. We have customers who use Moodle, Sakai for Learning Management Systems, Project Wonderland and Darkstar for Immersive Education, Project Kuali for Campus Administrative Systems, VLC and the Red5 flash streaming server for e-learning Content Streaming and so on," said Krithi Neelakantan, Director, Education & Research LOB, Sun Microsystems India.

Neelakantan felt that this sector had widely adopted Open Source software such as OpenSolaris, Linux, VirtualBox virtualization software, Drupal for content managements and several Open Source tools for HPC deployments.

Faisal Paul, head-enterprise, HP India, has found that his customers at about 2,000 schools and institutions are using the DSpace open source platform.

V Shiv Kumar, head, computer centre, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), recommended using the Moodle content management system to share course material with students using authentication for some courses. TISS is also experimenting with Knowledge Tree, a software document management tool with most of its servers running on Linux (Red Hat and Fedora). IIT Mumbai is also an ardent user of Open Source software. Professor Sudarshan, head- enterprise software applications, IIT Mumbai, said, "While we develop applications on Open Source, for desktops we use Linux-based solutions from Fedora, Ubuntu and a few others, primarily to avoid virus attacks. The Linux user group provides the necessary support."

According to Prof. Sudarshan, Moodle is extensively used for the content management part of the online fees registration module.

The Jawaharlal Nehru University School of Information Technology and associated institutions believe in extensive use of the Linux OS and freeware for learning courses and practical examinations. Indira Ghosh, Dean, Schools of Information Technology, JNU, pointed out that the faculties are working jointly with CSI, on open source drug discovery projects supported by the European Commission on Open Source toxicity prediction.

Faculty and students at Goa University are allowed to publish their content and code. For this purpose, Kamat said that Moodle's learning management system had been deployed for this purpose. "We are evaluating MATLAB, a scientific tool for content management, and have sourced Adobe's e-learning suite. Open Source is the way to go across desktops, servers and applications which can give us optimum cost benefit considering the budget constraints that the universities face," said Kamat.

Cisco's Rajesh Shetty, VP - Sales, believes that campuses extensively used Open Source software.

ITM Business School, Bangalore uses Open Source software for all of its functions including its e-library. ITM uses CMIE Prowess, an online database on Industries, and EBSCO, which is an on-line database on e-Journals.

"We would also evolve ERP modules related to admission and examination results on Open Source platforms," said Dr. Srinivasa Rao, Director, ITM Business School.

Dr. Rao admits that while deploying these open source technologies, the management will see the viability of their usage. Discussing the evaluation process, Dr. Rao said, "Once we choose two or three products on a comparative basis, we will call for a technical demo and our faculty and staff will give some feedback based on the demo, based upon which we will take the decision." From a RoI and benefit perspective, Dr. Rao opined that it depends upon how end users are motivated and go about their tasks. According to him, at ITM, Open Source had been deployed depending on the requirement. Currently it is used for statistical analysis and the institute is exploring software such as SPSS, SYSTAT etc.

With regard to online payments, campuses are using Open Source environments. For instance, Prof. Sudarshan of IIT Mumbai said that his institute had developed an online payment module using J2EE and a payment gateway in collaboration with ICICI and SBI for fee payment or any other transaction.

According to Sun's Neelakantan, the company closely works with the education segment suggesting relevant open source solutions for administrative, academic and HPC solutions, while architecting open source solutions and help them deploy and manage their infrastructure.