Open Source Software – How learning within your organisation can benefit

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has been around since the 70′s but has been gaining significant momentum in the last ten years thanks to a number of high profile success stories. These include the Mozilla Firefox web browser, the Apache web server, the Linux operating system and the OpenOffice productivity suite.

FOSS differs from proprietary software in two ways:

1. There are no license fees for using the software
2. The source code is freely available to users of the software

This confers a range of benefits on organisations using FOSS, namely:

Reduced cost: as there are no license fees, the project budget can be reduced, or diverted to customisation, integration, deployment / change management, or other project activities.
Control and flexibility: because the source code is available, organisations can customise and modify the software as they see fit to meet their business requirements. This means that organisations are not locking themselves into a single vendor, giving that vendor control of their software and thus their business.
A community working on the continued development of the product. While traditionally FOSS projects were run and developed by volunteers, it is increasingly common for commercial organisations and foundations to sponsor open source projects – for example, several of the main developers of the Firefox web browser are employed by Google (specifically for this purpose), and the Open University has made substantial financial contributions to the development of the Moodle open source LMS.
Open source products are generally (though not always) compliant with open standards and formats allowing organisations to be free of proprietary data formats.

Open Source and Learning

Learning Management Systems

The most visible face of FOSS in learning has been the proliferation of open source learning management systems (LMSs). Moodle (http://www.moodle.org) in particular is grabbing attention with its widespread deployment and high profile clients, particularly in education.

Like Moodle, other well know FOSS LMSs, such as OLAT (http://www.olat.org), ILIAS (http://www.ilias.de/ios/index-e.html) and SAKAI (http://www.sakaiproject.org/) have focused on, and largely been adopted by the education sector. This is partly a result of price sensitivity and a tradition of openness in education, but it is also somewhat self-perpetuating: the requirements of, and language used by academic institutions differs from those of training departments in commercial organisations. Consequently, projects that set out to meet the needs of education have tended to focus on that sector, rather than switching to, or including the commercial sector.

That said, we have used both Moodle and OLAT on a number of projects for businesses, charities and the defence sector. OpenElms, one of the new entrants in the open source LMS space, formerly a closed-source software vendor, boasts a number of large corporate clients (see http://www.openelms.org/AboutUs/clients.htm). We expect to see more Open Source products and activity in the corporate sphere over the next twelve months.

Content Development and Management

Although there are some Open Source authoring tools (e.g. the education-focused eXe – http://exelearning.org), we are not aware of any significant offerings that can be compared with the likes of Articulate or Mohive in the e-learning authoring tool / rapid development tool space. That said, a number of tools tackling content management and SCORM issues have gained prominence and widespread use. We regularly recommend the ‘Reload Editor (http://www.reload.ac.uk/) to clients as a SCORM packaging and test tool, and frequently use the ‘Diagnostic SCO for SCORM runtime’ (http://www.ostyn.com/standards/scorm/samples/proddingSCOwrap.htm ). This is an open source tool for simulating communication between a SCO (SCORM 1.2 or 2004) and an LMS – which picks up nicely where Saba’s ‘SCORM Detective’ (SCORM 1.2 only) leaves off.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that generally, commercial offerings are well ahead of Open Source offerings when it comes to SCORM 2004 support. Another area of weakness is with software documentation (this is a general – but not universal – problem with Open Source software, although awareness of the importance of good documentation is improving in Open Source development teams).

Web 2.0 and Collaborative Learning

An area where Open Source has really excelled in recent years is collaborative technologies, and the so-called ‘Web 2.0′ i.e. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, etc (For more information on Web 2.0 and learning, please see http://www.line.co.uk/news_views/pdf/papers/line_web2.pdf). The spontaneous and ‘user generated’ philosophy behind these meant that almost all of the tools in this area were developed as FOSS. For the most part, this has remained the case, as the quality and maturity of the FOSS offerings has inhibited the development of a large-scale proprietary software market.

Open Source LMSs, with a background in collaborative education are strong in collaborative learning area with products such as those mentioned earlier supporting Wikis, forums and other collaborative tools. There’s no need to limit yourself to learning-specific products, however. Web 2.0 FOSS tools abound: best of breed Blog software (e.g. WordPress http://www.wordpress.org), Wiki’s (e.g. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) and Podcasting tools (e.g. PodPress plugin for WordPress, http://www.podpress.org/), The Audacity sound recorder & editor (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) can be used alongside open source or commercial products.

The area of collaborative software where Open Source has had the least impact is probably live webcasting / web conferencing. Offerings using WebEx and Centra (acquired in 2006 by Saba) are being promoted heavily in the corporate learning space, but there has been limited activity in the Open Source space. This is perhaps something of a moot point, as these tools are normally delivered as a service hosted outside the firewall, rather than software to install – so the underlying software and its licensing model matters less to organisations.

Nevertheless, we are now seeing movement: in particular from the Open Source start-up dimdim (http://www.dimdim.com) who currently have an Alpha release of their web conferencing software, which has already been integrated with Moodle. In addition, Skype (http://www.skype.com) provides free VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) audio and video conferencing and integration with Unyte desktop sharing. VMukti (http://www.vmukti.com) is another open source collaboration platform, with plans to use a peer-to-peer (p2p) model in a forthcoming release, which may provide an interesting alternative to server-based platforms.

The downside of these products is that they are less well integrated with LMSs and student tools than their commercial counterparts.

Implementation

Incorporating FOSS within your learning organisation is largely like incorporating proprietary software. As with other software projects, good requirements analysis, product evaluation and robust project management are the key to a successful implementation. However there are some differences:

No sales people. Unlike proprietary software, there are no sales and pre-sales teams trying to sell you Open Source software. This is a mixed blessing, as during product evaluation, a pre-sales team is able to demonstrate software and answer functional and technical questions. However a wealth of information is available on the Internet, and demo sites are sometimes available. In addition it may be worth engaging a consultant with knowledge and experience of the various Open Source solutions in a given product area, who should also be able to provide you with unbiased advice on the best approach to meet your business requirements.

A different support and services model. With proprietary software, support is almost always provided by the software vendor (and often implementation, customisation and hosting services as well). This provides a convenient and easy to find one-stop-shop – and a lack of choice at the same time. The underlying support model for open source software is the community of developers and users of that software, who support each other through newsgroups, forums and wikis. If your IT department has the necessary capacity and skills, this gives you the opportunity to provide support in-house, which should mean that your support team have a very good understanding of your business. If that model doesn’t fit your organisation, most popular Open Source products (including the ones mentioned above) have spawned companies dedicated to enhancing, implementing, hosting and supporting them – and in most cases you have a choice of more than one.

Internal resistance to open source. We have seen some examples of internal resistance to open source software (as a matter of principal or policy) from IT departments, although fortunately this is no longer common. A more practical issue is that Open Source software is often designed to run on an Open Source ‘stack’ i.e. the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, and the MySQL database, rather than Microsoft Windows, IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, which may clash with the preferred server environment within your organisation. It’s worth considering this at the start of any project and engaging with your IT department to see if this will be an issue. External hosting or external support for the infrastructure (possibly from the same provider as the Open Source software support) are possible solutions.

Licensing

Confused by what you’ve heard about Open Source licensing?

Open Source licensing has been in the news recently, as Microsoft and Novell argue with the open source community about patents, and with community in-fighting surrounding the release of GPL (GNU General Public License) v3, it was all starting to look rather confusing and difficult. However, it is important to remember that FOSS license agreements are intended to protect your right to use the software rather than limit it – and that they are far less onerous than typical licenses for proprietary software. As stated at the start of this article, you can use the software without paying a license, modify it, and distribute it with very few restrictions.

Most Open Source Software uses a license which is certified by the OSI, the Open Source Initiative (http://www.osi.org) Broadly speaking, if you use software with an OSI certified license and don’t modify the software, you can just get on and use it (even if you do modify it, it may have very little impact – see below). There are some so-called ‘attribution’ licenses, which require you to give visual credit to the author of the software (usually through a logo on the application). Again, unless you modify the software, this is unlikely to have any impact on how you use it.

Modification, Distribution and Licenses

Open Source licenses fall into two main camps, which affects your obligations if you modify and distribute the software:

1. So-called ‘copyleft’ licenses, such as the GPL
2. ‘Do what you want’ licenses such as Apache and ‘Modified BSD’

The ‘copyleft’ licenses generally require that if you modify then distribute an open source product, you must make the modified source code available to all recipients. Many organisations will be happy to do this, and it is encouraged within the Open Source community. However, neither hosting a web application, nor giving software to your employees (or on-site contractors) is defined as ‘distribution’ under the GPL, so most organisations will not actually be affected by the distribution requirement in the normal course of events.

Licenses such as the Apache and BSD Licenses generally allow you to modify the original software without any source-code distribution obligations, although contributions back to the open source community are still encouraged.

Will Open Source software integrate with my existing systems?

As with any software, “It depends,” is probably the only safe answer.

Open Source software tends to use recognised and published ‘open’ standards, rather than proprietary protocols and formats. This generally facilitates integration with other systems – unless of course, your existing systems only support proprietary formats!

Proprietary systems are generally stronger when it comes to integrating with ERP systems, either through dedicated ‘connectors’ packaged with the software, or from proven experience in the field. We don’t expect this situation to change particularly quickly. However, the increased use of open standards in proprietary software, coupled with greater adoption of open source software in general, mean that we can expect integration with Open Source products to become easier, not harder.

Conclusion

In learning, as in most business areas, technology is not a panacea. Whether you are deploying Open Source software or proprietary software from a vendor, the use of technology must be driven by a well defined organisational learning strategy, or success – by any measure – is unlikely.

Proprietary software still has the upper hand in large scale corporate LMS and LCSM implementations, but Open Source is already strong in the academic / education sector, and is now starting to have an impact in the corporate sector as well.

Early Open Source projects tended to focus on Infrastructure software: operating systems, web servers, programming languages, and so on. More recently, the increased acceptance of Open Source by the business community, and the lack of remaining infrastructure ‘problems’ means that Open Source projects have moved up the value chain to produce more end-user and business software.

We believe that this trend will have an increasing impact on learning technologies in both corporate and education environments. Open Source software has great potential to reduce learning technology costs, increase the flexibility of solutions, and ultimately to focus attention back to learning, development and team performance – which is the point, after all.

About the authors

Ian Leader

Tel: +44 (0)7798-600-740
Ian is Director of Consulting at LINE communications. He has held a number of consulting and management positions in the City, e-commerce and e-learning, and was formerly LINE’s Technical Director.
Ian has long been an advocate of Open Source, but is looking forward to the day when it is accepted by large and small corporations to the point that advocacy is no longer required.

Paul Brown

Tel: + 44 (0)207-243-5110

Paul is a technical director at LINE Communications and passionately believes that there is a wealth of technology available to facilitate and motivate training. He is focused upon the overall technical solution rather than the particular approach (be it opensource or commercial).