Adopting new software for a large group of people, like in an educational environment, is in general quite a big step. Like in any organisation, first the board and the managers should be convinced that it is a good idea to switch to new software. Then the users should be motivated and instructed. On both sides there might be resistance as with any change, but maybe with OS-Software even more. This is because the concept of Open Source is not always understood well and as such it might give raise to reluctance.

In this article we try to sketch a comparison with traditional software to have some arguments to convince the people in your organisation. And we give some necessary steps to assemble the necessary knowledge and skill (and support, internal or external) to start the innovation.

Preliminary research and starting a project

To our opinion there are two main phases (that should be split in more sub phases of course) to start using new (education) software in an organisation. The one that initiates the process of implementing OS-Software should have a good idea of what Open Source means, what its advantages (and disadvantages) are and know where to get it and how to value it. He becomes the initial Open Source expert and motivates the board to start a project which is in cooperation with the users (students, teachers). The goal of this project should be to define the requirements for the digitalised learning environment, to test possible candidates and to integrate them into the organisation.

The Open University of the Netherlands has done some research at the factors of success in implementing educational software which is available in a very large pdf-document  (http://www.surf.nl/download/Determinants_for_failure_and_success_2005.pdf|) on the net. We think that the conclusions are not that different from adopting any other end-user software system, but it might be worthy to look through the recommendations from page 23 to 26. Three main conclusions were: maintain communication all the way, involve the users from the beginning and make it a real project (with a project manager �not an organisation manager). We will not explore it further here.

Convincing your organisation

In the first phase, before starting the project, the users (and board) should be convinced that OS-Software might do the job to let the project succeed. Whereas we outline a few arguments below, this first preliminary is covered very well at other locations. See for example: [1] (http://www.nosi.net/node/26) or a definition of what open source is (http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php|) or chapter one of a study of the government of South Africa (http://www.oss.gov.za/docs/ossreportv2.pdf|) or a general introduction on OSS and considerations for choosing it (http://www.nosi.net/primer/NOSIPrimer.pdf|)

Open source: how does it work, where to find it?

Besides giving arguments why OS-Software is good to use, you should have done some research aforehand to find out if there is software that comes close to what you want so that you can show them. People want something visible to rely on. It might help as well to give some examples of successful OS-Software products like ‘Open Office’ or other successful implementations by other companies or institutions (Like Linux, Mozilla, Apache, Php, Mysql, etc �see for a description of those: Some well known OSS products (http://www.nosi.net/node/27)). You might convince yourself by installing and trying out one or two of them. Doing so, you get acquainted with how the OS-Community works and get convinced yourself too what quality is out there.

Next you should experiment a bit and therefore know where to find Open Source software. If you search on the Internet for ‘open source‘, you will find thousands of pages on the subject and some software resources. A good and well-known one is the site from SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/index.php|) with a huge number of open source software projects where you might find a product that suits your needs.

How to value all those software projects?

To value a certain software project, it’s important to see whether its product has evolved to a mature one or that it’s still very prototypical. You can see this easily from the version number (whether the first number before the dot is greater than zero and the number of digits behind it is no more than one or two) and the naming. An alpha-version is still in the beginning of its development, a beta-version is depending on the found bugs to be released with minor changes only.

Next, it is important to get some idea of the activity on the community around the software. (You can see that as a percentage right to the project description in SourceForge). Is it alive? If the website is mentioned in discussion groups or on other websites it might be a hint that the development on that product is going on.

Of course it is wise to look in the documentation and at the state of the project, the number of developers and so on, but the easiest way to get an impression is of course downloading one of the latest versions and install it and check it out. Because this is time consuming, you can’t do it with every project. So you should rely on the information supplied per project in most cases. For more information on how to get around in sourceForge and to value its projects, see What is SourceForge and what does it do?

Some misconceptions about OSS

Once you have found some OS-Software that meets the requirements (or comes close enough) of your organisation, you might get stuck in the project if there is too much resistance in the company to use OS-Software at all. As a precondition to implement it well in your organisation, you should try to get a full agreement on putting effort into integrating a solution by means of the OS-Community into the organisation.

What stands in the way are some misconceptions about what open source really is. These concern: costs, reliability/guarantees, safety and protection by law. We try to tackle them or give some references.

Open Source does not mean the same as Free Software. It needn’t be the case that software from the Open Source Community is free to use. For sure you are free to see and change the software, but the license may state that you have to pay for the software.

Some people argue that Open Source software is unsafe: it may not do what it says it will and because of the availability of the source code, it may attract hackers to damage your computer(s). This might all be just as true as it holds for proprietary software. With respect to the openness of the code: that may be an advantage, because the community of experts around a software project is watching the code and tests it, it shouldn’t be less safe. It is the other way around: the code tends to be of a higher quality, well tested and in general very well protected. Important it is though to download the software from a trusted site. A dangerous copy could be easily distributed of course via other sites.

With respect to the rights and the guarantees, the same holds. Both Open Source as well proprietary software include in their licenses statements to leave the responsibility with the user. Still, the law gives some protection, but in the end you have about the same rights with both choices.