18.1 Leading a university open source project

Like Forest Gump who found himself a shrimp boat captain, we find ourselves leaders of an open source software (OSS) project. It happens.

Our open source project is Bedework (pronounce it as you would beadwork), an open-source, enterprise calendar system for higher education designed to conform to current calendaring standards. The “we” are the Communications&Middleware Technologies unit at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of which I am the director.

Unlike some other contributors to this series, I am not a deep thinker on the topic of open source. Reviewing material for this posting, I came across a document I wrote four years ago for my management justifying our participation in the University of Washington’s UWCalendar project.

“Whereas many university people enjoy a spiritual affinity for open source software, our interest is more pragmatic. As a campus-wide development and support group, technologies and products which have no license or usage fees are critical to providing solutions which can be deployed and reconfigured with impunity. Our web development foundation is largely built atop products and technologies which have no usage fees whatsoever, allowing us to deploy as many instances, servers, CPU’s, etc as might prove to be necessary over time.”

Recognizing that I would feel more comfortable if I had only one foot firmly wedged in my mouth, I continued,

“We are anxious to contribute to the project (UWCalendar) because:

1. We feel our work will make the product more attractive to other universities, hopefully resulting in many more of them using and developing this software.

2. The University of Washington has done most of the work which we have benefited from. Reciprocating is the right thing to do.

3. Rensselaer relies heavily on and benefits mightily from open source software but seldom contributes to open source. We believe this contribution will enhance Rensselaer’s reputation in the area of software development.”

Our four year foray into the world of open source, two years working with the University of Washington, and the last two as leaders of the Bedework project, have had a profound impact on my views about open source. I agree with much of what Pat Masson and Rob Abel have said in this series. I have come to appreciate the message of the Mellon Foundation’s Chris Mackie on Cyber Infrastructure sustainability as well as the “fallacy of the field of dreams.”

The perspective I have to share on open source software in higher education is that of trying to build a modest open source project to sustainability. In the process, we have learned a lot about ourselves and our own university.