The New York Times is running an interesting piece from IDG News on how administrators and IT chiefs for higher educational institutions are at odds over whether it makes sense to deploy open source software instead of proprietary products. The flap went on this week at the Educause conference in Florida. Within the argument that's going on, a number of surprising fallacies about open source are apparently cropping up. Here are the details.
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motters
15 years 47 weeks 6 days 6 hours ago
More education needed
Much of this FUD I think is just down to general nervousness about any kind of move away from software systems which are familiar. Certainly better education would help to overcome this hesitancy.
Probably everyone reading this doesn't need to be told that the worries about support and licenses are actually groundless. Support from companies selling proprietary software can often be very poor or non existent (i.e. we don't support this anymore - buy our latest product instead), and proprietary software licenses usually say little more than "the user of this software has no rights" (in more complicated legalistic language, obviously).