At the Community Source reception cosponsored by JA-SIG, Sakai, Kuali it was uplifting to see the number of people participating. CIOs, managers, developers, vendors were all present in abundance. It was also clear from conversation at the reception that open-source in the Higher Ed is breaking into new areas. While there’s no question infrastructure and back-end systems, there’s increasing acknowledgment that open-source might has a role to play in end-user facing systems too. community driven open-source projects are being evaluated right along side best of breed solutions from vendors or ASP providers.
In fact, further than just being considered on par with packaged or commercial products, many, many people have indicated the message of “by Higher Education, for Higher Education” really resonates both within IT as well as with our end users. Ranging from solid support for integration with existing systems in uPortal, to teaching and learning as evidenced by the comment “It seems like EDUCAUSE is all Sakai” show a tremendous amount of attention and consideration being given for education build open-source solutions.