Re: [ossig] Use of FOSS in local universities

[Uwe Dippel <udippel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Khairil Yusof wrote:
> Does anybody know of any academic universities that use a fully FOSS
> system for their needs, eg. administrative, websites, network
> management, labs, email servers etc.

(What would be an 'unacademic' university ? ;))

Uniten is not, alas, doing what you summed up as above.
Far away from it.
The only thing we do have in place currently:
All the servers of the College of IT accessible from the outside are 
running OpenBSD. All the servers accessible from the outside of College 
of Engineering run FreeBSD.
That sounds much better than it is, still: COIT has three boxes, COE has 
two boxes. And, more important, these are not result of an official 
policy, but result of the grass-root responsible(s).

> The reason is that two universities one in the Philippines as well as
> University of South Pacific, Fiji are already/moving towards
> standardising on FOSS for their IT services. USP for example have
> approved migration workplan to migrate to completely use FOSS by 2008,
> including use of OpenOffice (since they now have Fijian Spellchecker
> also for OOo).

Maybe we should move to Fiji ? ;)
(I don't want to downtalk this, but Fiji these days has a good handful 
of problems. Maybe the free (beer) character of FOSS is what actually 
enticed them; instead of the free (political) character ?)

In a hierarchical, especially vertically organised society (traditional 
Asian) FOSS has a weak stand.

I do hope and wish you get a lot of positive responses. I am pretty sure 
that a map of Asean with the usage of FOSS in academia will be a good 
argument. Convinced or not, with plentiful of flags 'FOSS' on the map of 
varsities in SOA something else will creep in: kiasu, the fear to lose 
out. That might become a great argument ?

Uwe

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