Linux and Open Source in the Academic Enterprise

Open Source Software (OSS) has made great strides toward mainstream acceptance over the past two years. However, many IT managers, both in business and academia, are still cautious about OSS. Is it reliable? Is there support? Will it last? Linux has further complicated the issue not only because its operating system is OSS, but because it runs on inexpensive commodity hardware. Often IT managers are hesitant to move from long trusted proprietary hardware and software and trust major projects to OSS and commodity hardware. Past SIGUCCS presentations by Virginia Commonwealth University have detailed our use of standards based email and directory services to replace legacy systems. That email migration put us on a path toward the implementation of a variety of Open Source Software and commodity hardware solutions. In 1997, the primary Open Source Software in use on our campus was Perl. In the past three years, we have implemented OSS solutions for email, webserving, webmail, software dev...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: SIGUCCS
• Authors: Mike Davis, Will O'Donovan, John Fritz, Carlisle Childress
• Keywords: Commodity Hardware, Commodity Hardware Solutions, Information Management, Open Source Software, SIGUCCS 2000