Best practices for using FOSS in universities

Since few years ago, the knowledge about free software and open source software has been extended to a bigger percentage of population. One of the groups that can obtain many benefits from this type of software is the university, due to its special characteristics.

The use of FOSS has many benefits compared with proprietary software, and it encourages some of the main higher education values. One of the most visible benefits of the free software is the very low or non-existent cost of the software purchase. Although some licenses allow collecting money for the software, it is unusual.

Also, the use of FOSS in higher education allows for devoting greater budgetary items to other areas such as Research and Development or to the improvement of the equipment of the laboratories.

FOSS lets us to analyse how a software program works and gives us the opportunity to adapt it to the needs of the university community and allows the study of the code by the students. Another advantage of the source code analysis is that any user can collaborate by analysing potential vulnerabilities as backdoors and programming security flaws. They can be detected and solved, thus obtaining systems more secure and stable than those offered by proprietary software.

On the other hand, employing FOSS reinforces the fundamental value of the University: “share the knowledge”; as one of the functions of the University is the generation of knowledge to benefit the whole society. The use of FOSS entails the creation of code from the University that will be shared worldwide.

Migration strategy to FOSS

In order to change from proprietary software to FOSS, studies have observed some non-written rules:

Configure the core network with FOSS. This step is probably the most complicated. Data servers, network management, security policies need to be re-programmed to the new configuration.

Change common applications in workstations to FOSS (Office, web browser, photo editor…), maintaining the operating system (OS) and specific applications.

Install a free/open source operating system, but maintaining the old one (dual boot). Advanced users will use FOSS OS immediately, but non-initiated users will appreciate the coexistence of both systems. If something gets wrong, they can switch to the other OS.

Install specific applications for the new OS.

Delete old OS and applications, so the migration has been completed.

Alternatives to proprietary software for Universities

There are many free software applications used in higher education. This section gives the most used in the universities.

Educational platforms

Moodle: is a course management system (CMS). It is a free Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles to help educators create effective online learning communities.

Sakai: is an online Collaboration and Learning Environment. It is deployed to support teaching and learning. It allows ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.

Office

OpenOffice.org: is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers and in several operative systems. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

LibreOffice: is a powerful office suite. Its clean interface and feature rich tools help you unleash creativity and enhance productivity. It includes several applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations , graphics, databases and more.

Mathematic software

GNU Octave: is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.

Maxima: allows to manipulate symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, polynomials, and so on.

YACAS: (the name is an acronym of Yet Another Computer Algebra System.) is an easy to use, general purpose Computer Algebra System. It is a program for symbolic manipulation of mathematical expressions. The system has a library of scripts that implement many of the symbolic algebra operations. New algorithms can be easily added to the library.

PSPP: is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It interprets commands in the SPSS language and produces tabular output in ASCII, PostScript, or HTML format. It is intended as a free replacement of the proprietary program, SPSS.

Editing image/audio/video

GIMP: is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for tasks such as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer or an image format converter.

Inkscape: is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Blender: is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. It has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Lightwave and Maya.

Kino: is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings.

Cinelerra: is a free and open source software nonlinear video editing system. It also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

Audacity: is a fast multi-track audio editor and recorder for Linux, BSD, Mac OS, and Windows. Supports WAV, AIFF, Ogg, and MP3 formats. Features include envelope editing, mixing, built-in effects and plug-ins.

Ardour: is a digital audio workstation. It can be used to record, edit and mix multi-track audio.

Electronics

gEDA: is a suite of collaborative software used for electronic design automation.

Kicad: is an open source (GPL) software for the creation of electronic schematic diagrams and printed circuit board artwork.