Alexander.Trubin@sun.com wrote:
Hello all, I'm now preparing for a talk at Urals State Technical University (Russia) about OpenSource usage in Higher Education, so if anyone have some thoughts about what should be covered in this broad topic your help would be greatly appreciated.
It's *very* broad. Where there any particular aspects you had in mind? Desktop? Development? Infrastructure? Standards? (e.g. TCP/IP, OpenGL, Kerberos) Most everything in major use out there is or is derived from FOSS and developed at universities. Keberos+LDAP -> NDS -> (broken) AD -> Samba/Kerberos(Heimdal|MIT)/OpenLDAP NCSA httpd -> Apache -> various NCSA Mosaic -> MSIE/Mozilla -> Firefox BSD -> Cisco/Juniper BSD + SystemV -> Solaris BSD + GNU -> Darwin GNU Linux X Bind -> various Sendmail -> various SSH So for SSO at large institutions, you have Kerberos+OpenLDAP, for small insititutions, Samba For networked storage at large institutions you have OpenAFS, for small institutions, Samba. I'm not sure where ZFS fits, but it's quite interesting, too. For mail, even institutions afflicted with MS Exchange[1], usually run a FOSS server as a front end to mitigate damage from loss due to MS Exchange. Radmind is often used to manage large numbers of identical desktops. Apache almost goes without saying. But on top of that you often have Moodle, Plone, Drupal or any number of tools. There are also even open hardware specifications: http://www.sparc.org/aboutOverview.html Like anywhere else, you will find FOSS heavily used at most higher education institutions, regardless of whether the CTOs acknowledge or even know about it. or do you mean non-technical problems like graft, collusion, vendor retaliation and willful negligence? For example, I am apparently not the only one who constantly runs across illegal tenders: http://www.osor.eu/news/many-software-tenders-in-eu-illegal or management problems like stonewalling (run the academic clock out), denial of service (usually network or firewall), endless procurement meetings (except for certain vendors), passing the buck, mergers, re-orgs, etc. all to block technology? Regards -Lars PS. Is the matching grants program available in Europe? If so, it would be nice for more visibility at least for the Sparc-based hardware. [1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P5-TA-2001-0441+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN