What is Holding Up Open Source in K-12?

I use MySQL to develop personal projects in my spare time. It is an easy database to install and manage and its performance is great. In fact, in some recent testing, MySQL outperformed Oracle. I was interested in the customer base for MySQL, so I checked out their customer page and was very impressed with the list of known clients across almost all industries.

I did some research and found a Forrester report on open source projects. Listed as the leading projects with clear development road maps, strong infrastructure and mature technology were MySQL, Eclipse. Apache HTTP Server. Apache Tomcat Application Server, LAMP and PHP. Most of these products are in critical application use around the world. Apache HTTP server runs about 2/3 of the world's web sites.

So why is K-12 education not adopting open source technologies? Look at the benefits:

• no license costs
• lower maintenance and support costs
• access to all the source code
• ability to be flexible with applications and make them specific to your needs
• open standards allow integration with other software
• the user is now in charge and not subject to recurring software upgrade cycles, which can also mean hardware upgrades

I often hear that "we don't have the skill sets", "our resources don't know these technologies", etc. What I don't hear is sound reasoning like "if I spend $5,000 and get this individual trained in these technologies, I can replace this application that costs me $5,000 in maintenance and support every year and requires me to do upgrades to get additional functionality further locking me into a proprietary model.

I would encourage districts and schools to "experiment" with small, non-critical applications to get their feet wet and explore the possibility of open source as an alternative. I think you will find that it definitely holds potential. Try a web-based form to collect some information, or a simple database application to try it out.

Open source is gaining in viability and those districts that do not begin to harness the potential will continue to spend valuable operating dollars that could be going to instructional resources.