Another contribution to the debate, this time from Peter Kemp of TeachFirst and the Open Education Disc.

Moodle has several major universities using it with massive budgets to throw behind the development and customisation of such a thing. Projects such as OpenOffice have Sun and IBM supporting them; universities have adopted/developed other projects such as Kent and Greenfoot. However, when it comes to the ‘minor’ projects such as Audacity, Freemind, infrarecorder, tuxtyping etc, major support is just not there and development can be sporadic or ill focused. Such projects have to rely on volunteers or the occasional philanthropic outpouring such as the Google Summer of Code. It is as if Eric Raymond’s Bazaar (The Cathedral and the Bazaar) has split into the multinational supermarkets which are hugely popular and successful and the niche butchers and bakers which are unresponsive; where you’re not even sure what products they will have on sale next week.

We have all used open source tools which we felt were inadequate at performing certain tasks or were very fiddly to install. A quick list might include Audacity and the Lame encoder and the unfinished feel to tuxtyping. These problems can all be fixed with some extra development, something that in a competitive commercial market would have to be done to stay afloat. However, you often find projects in limbo for long periods of time (camstudio is no longer being actively developed, Dia is rarely updated). True, the open source nature of these projects means that anyone can take them on and develop them in the ways that they want to, but relying on volunteers is in many cases not a sustainable way to further the projects. Even OpenOffice is only developed by a few people.

The reports talk of collaboration, and it is true that the web is leading to greater use of collaborative technologies in education. But where is the impetus for developing these features coming from and are teachers really being engaged with this development? Open source in Education is always running the risk of being outcoded if the current model is maintained. For anything below the major projects, sporadic bursts of coding cannot be guaranteed to compete on a level with financed development. The problem is that as a full spectrum of educational software we are talking about products that are inferior to their commercial peers. I still think the argument holds that it is about giving students access at home and at school, but in many cases schools can pick better products if they pay money for them. This isn’t good for education and I see it as helping to stifle the collaboration you talk about.

Tim Bateson puts forward a good case for the amount of money that might be saved if schools adopt open source technologies, but there are many issues around the training, competence of technical staff, functionality, interfaces and compatibility of open source products that need to be addressed before the argument can be accepted in its entirety. The point is that a lot of this software needs to be brought up to scratch, it needs development.

Rather than relying on the cost saving argument I’m starting to believe that a more interactive approach should be adopted. One of the key concepts of open source is that anyone can get involved. If we could foster a model in UK schools whereby a small amount of money is donated to a non-profit fund every time a school ‘acquires’ open source software products (say 10% of the closed source price), the schools themselves and the teachers, who know their own needs best, could then suggest and vote on how to spend this money, highlighting flaws and requesting new features. For a few hundred pounds the Audacity problem could be solved with code to automatically fetch and install the Lame encoder (the cost of this would probably equate to a site license cost for a proprietary competitor), camstudio could be brought up to date with tools such as screencorder, tuxtyping could have spelling lessons built into it etc. I recall reading a year or two ago that the amount of money spent by the NHS each year on Microsoft Office matches the entire development cost of Microsoft Office. Huge sums of money are changing hands to purchase proprietary educational software for schools and the profit margins can be astronomical. If a small proportion of this money could be funnelled into open source development, then there would follow a palpable impact on the quality end effectiveness of the software, making it more attractive to schools around the world.

How do we engender this philosophy of donating money when acquiring what is technically free? Obviously we can’t force people to pay for the software, but through the site or through another dedicated site we could host the installers or sell discs (the openeducationdisc for a start), taking a cut of the price, leaving the donation optional of course. When a teacher visits the site they could purchase 300 openeducationdiscs for their school, or 300 portableapps usb keys, a small fraction of the sale going to the fund. They would then earn the right to suggest features that the fund could be used to pay developers to build. A similar approach to the buskerware model of software development. This would be true collaboration, allowing teachers to specify what they are buying and become involved in the development of products. There are firms already selling the openeducationdisc, but offering schools the opportunity to buy professional looking discs/usb keys on a school wide basis isn’t something that has been tried before.