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Free/Open Source Software
Tan Wooi Tong
Asia-Paciﬁc Development Information Programme
e-Primers on Free/Open Source Software
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© United Nations Development Programme-Asia Paciﬁc Development
Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP) – 2004
This publication is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
For full details of the license, please refer to the following:
A division of
Reed Elsevier India Private Limited
17A/1, Lajpat Nagar IV,
Academic Press, Butterworth-Heinemann, Digital Press, Focal Press, Morgan
Kaufmann, North Holland, Pergamon are the Science and Technology imprints of
Printed and bound in India
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why FOSS for Education?
Reliability, Performance and Security
Build Long-term Capacity
Alternative to Illegal Copying
Possibility of Localization
Learning from Source Code
Requirements of Educational Institutions
File and Print Services
Other Server Software
Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)
Other Educational Software
Library Management Systems
Learning Management Systems
TEACHING IT WITH FOSS
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Public Library of Science
RESEARCH USING FOSS
TRAINING IN FOSS
Linux Professional Institute (LPI)
Red Hat Certiﬁed Engineer (RHCE)
Curricula in Schools
Curricula in Tertiary Institutions
Development of FOSS for Education
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Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is a recent phenomenon that has the potential to revolutionize the
software industry. It has already gained a strong foothold in the server software segment, with a leading
market share worldwide in some software categories. It is also gaining ground in desktop applications
and it has been predicted that its use on the desktop will become signiﬁcant in the near future.
Interest in FOSS is growing globally, particularly in developing countries. Governments are considering
policies to promote its use, businesses are recognizing its potential and various other sectors are giving
increasing attention to the opportunity for localization that it presents.
The impact of FOSS will be felt in many areas. In this primer we focus on FOSS in education and the role
it can play in schools, colleges and universities.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to improve the quality of
education. However, educational institutions are often faced with ﬁnancial constraints. Competing
demands for resources and the high costs of ICTs can be a major obstacle to providing ICT facilities in
educational institutions. FOSS has the potential to help lower the cost barrier by reducing the cost of
software, which is an important component of ICT facilities. Besides the cost beneﬁts, there are numerous
other advantages in using FOSS in education, including pedagogical beneﬁts.
This primer is intended to help policy-makers and decision-makers understand the potential use of FOSS
in education—where and how it can be used, why it should be used, and what issues are involved. In
particular, ofﬁcials in ministries of education, school and university administrators, academic staff and
researchers should ﬁnd this primer useful.
This primer is part of a series of primers on Free/Open Source Software brought to you by the
International Open Source Network (IOSN), an initiative of the UNDP’s Asia-Paciﬁc Development
Information Programme (APDIP).We would like to thank all those who have been involved in the creation
of this primer. We would also like to thank the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of
Canada for their generous ﬁnancial support without which this primer would not have been written.
Tan Wooi Tong
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The author would like to thank the reviewers of this primer, Dr M Sasikumar (India), Dr Nah Soo Hoe
(Malaysia) and Dr Onno Purbo (Indonesia), for their valuable comments and suggestions that have
contributed to the improvement of the primer. The author also thanks his colleagues at UNDP-
APDIP, Shahid Akhtar and Kenneth Wong, for their valuable inputs, and all others for their efforts
that have made the creation of this primer possible.
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Free/Open Source Software is software that is made available along with source code as a distinctive
feature. It is often available at no cost. Users can use and distribute the software. And if they so wish, they
can study the source code and modify it to suit their needs.The modiﬁed version of the software can also
be redistributed. In contrast, proprietary software is licensed to users for a fee and the source code is
usually closely guarded and not made available to users. It is illegal to make copies and distribute
proprietary software without paying additional licensing fees.
There is a ﬁne distinction between Free Software and Open Source Software. The Free Software
movement focuses on moral and ethical issues relating to the freedom of users to use, study, modify and
redistribute software. Open Source advocates take a more corporate approach, focusing on the
advantages of the Open Source software development method. For most purposes, Free Software and
Open Source Software can be considered to be the same and we refer to it as Free/Open Source Software
(FOSS). For more information on the general aspects of FOSS, please refer to the companion primer
Free/Open Source Software—A General Introduction1 which is available at www.iosn.net.
FOSS can play an important role in education, especially in developing countries.The reasons for this are
described below. In Chapter 2, we go into more detail on how FOSS can be used in setting up the ICT
infrastructure in educational institutions, the server software and desktop applications available, and the
potential cost savings resulting from the use of FOSS. Chapter 3 focuses on FOSS for the administration
of academic institutions, in particular the Library Management Systems and Learning Management
Systems available. Chapter 4 looks at how FOSS can be used in the teaching of Information Technology in
schools and universities. Open Content is described in Chapter 5. Although Open Content is not directly
related to FOSS, it results from the application of similar principles in the publication of content and is
important in education. The role of FOSS in research is covered in Chapter 6. Training and certiﬁcation in
FOSS is not normally a part of formal education but due to its importance in building human resource
capacity in FOSS, it is covered in Chapter 7. In the last chapter, we list policy issues for decision-makers to
consider in implementing FOSS in education.
Why FOSS for Education?
One of the main issues that policy-makers have to contend with in making decisions on the use of ICTs in
education is the cost. The cost of providing communication infrastructure, computing and networking
hardware, and the necessary software can be daunting not only for developing countries but also for
underprivileged sectors in the developed countries.
FOSS can lower the barriers to the access of ICTs by reducing the cost of software. The initial acquisition
cost of FOSS is negligible. Indeed, it is usually possible to download FOSS without any cost. If there is
limited bandwidth, it may be more convenient to get the software in a CD-ROM for a nominal fee. But
there is no licensing fee for each user or computer and it can be freely distributed once a copy is
downloaded or made available on a CD-ROM. Hence, the initial cost of acquiring FOSS is much lower than
the cost of acquiring proprietary software for which license fees have to be paid for each user or
computer. Upgrades of FOSS can usually be obtained in a similar way, making the upgrade costs
negligible as well. In contrast, proprietary software upgrades normally have to be paid for even though
the upgrade costs may be lower than the initial cost.
1 Wong, K. and Sayo, P., “Free/Open Source Software–A General Introduction”, UNDP-APDIP, 2003; available from www.iosn.net.
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FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION
Reliability, Performance and Security
Lower cost is not the only reason why the use of FOSS for servers is prevalent. FOSS is considered to have
better reliability, performance and security. The administrators of educational institutions should take
these into account when making decisions on the ICT infrastructure of their institutions.This is especially
important in the larger institutions.
The development methodology of FOSS tends to assure high quality of the software. Bugs are rapidly
removed with the help of large numbers of developers, and the resulting software is more reliable.This is
especially true of the more mature FOSS for servers. For example, in a quantitative analysis of database
software carried out by Reasoning Inc., it was found that the FOSS database MySQL has six times fewer
defects than proprietary databases.2
Some studies also suggest that FOSS performs better than the proprietary counterparts. For example,
performance tests for ﬁle servers were carried out by PC Magazine in 2001 and 2002 to compare Samba
running on GNU/Linux and Windows 2000. Samba is a FOSS ﬁle server that can run on the GNU/Linux
platform and work seamlessly with workstations running Windows. It was found that Samba signiﬁcantly
outperforms Windows 20003 by about 100% in the 2002 tests. Tests carried out by IT Week Labs in 2003
indicate that the later version of Samba has widened the performance gap when compared to Windows.4
More information on other performance comparison studies is available in the paper by Wheeler.3
It is very difﬁcult to make comparisons between the security of FOSS and that of proprietary software.
However, there have been attempts to do so and these are summarized by Wheeler.3 The comparisons
suggest that FOSS is often superior to proprietary software in terms of security. One of the reasons cited
is the availability of the source code, which allows vulnerabilities to be identiﬁed and resolved by third
parties. An independent audit of code is possible only with FOSS and not with proprietary software.
Build Long-term Capacity
There are clear indications that the use of FOSS in government, industry and other institutions is growing
and that there will be a need for graduates familiar with FOSS. Hence, concerted efforts should be made
to ensure the use of FOSS in the IT curriculum wherever possible. It is important that students are not
only exposed to the predominant proprietary software but also have the opportunity to use a wider
array of software, including FOSS.
Companies recognize the importance of the education market because the students of today are
tomorrow’s employees in the ICT sector. They will also be the users of technologies either on a personal
basis or in the workplace. Hence, if they are exposed to certain products during their education, they will
tend to continue to use them in the future. For this reason, companies will go out of their way to provide
incentives, such as hefty discounts, to capture the education market.
The open philosophy of FOSS is consistent with academic freedom and the open dissemination of
knowledge and information common in academia.“The advances in all of the arts and sciences, indeed
the sum total of human knowledge, is the result of the open sharing of ideas, theories, studies and
research. Yet throughout many school systems, the software in use on computers is closed and locked,
making educators partners in the censorship of the foundational information of this new age.”5
2 “How Open Source and Commercial Software Compare: MySQL 4.0.16”, Reasoning Inc. Whitepaper, 2003; available from
3 Wheeler, D. A., “Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!”, December 2003; available from
4 Howorth, R.,“Samba 3 extends lead over Win 2003”,Oct 2003, IT Week; available from www.itweek.co.uk/News/1144312.
5 Vessels,T.,“Why should open source software be used in schools?”,2001; available from edge-op.org/grouch/schools.html.
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Computer software is often used in research work and the use of proprietary software and operating
systems in such work is inconsistent with the principle of veriﬁability, as the computation of results by
closed-source software is not open to scrutiny.The validity of research ﬁndings, arrived at using FOSS can
be veriﬁed, because the source code is available for examination.
A great deal of innovation originates from universities and many of the FOSS were initially developed in
an academic environment. For example, in 1984 Richard Stallman started developing a free operating
system called GNU in the Artiﬁcial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). Linus Torvalds started the work that resulted in Linux in the University of Helsinki in Finland.
An academic environment where FOSS is prevalent will encourage staff and students to tinker and
experiment with, and participate in the development of FOSS that may eventually lead to innovative
Alternative to Illegal Copying
Educational institutions that cannot afford to pay for licensing fees may resort to using illegal copies of
the proprietary software. With FOSS, educational institutions can use as many copies of the software as
required, regardless of whether it is for academic or administrative purposes.
The use of FOSS also discourages piracy by students, many of whom can ill-afford the purchase of
licensed copies of proprietary software. If proprietary software was used for teaching, students would
have no choice but to use illegal copies of the software to do homework and assignments at home or on
their laptop computers. In contrast, there is no restriction against making copies of FOSS for use outside
Possibility of Localization
Educational institutions in non-English speaking countries may not be able to beneﬁt from the use of
FOSS as most of the original software is developed in English. However, the open nature of FOSS is such
that it can be localized. Such localization need not involve the original developer. With proprietary
products, localization is constrained by commercial interests. When the size of the market is too small,
there is no incentive for localizing proprietary products for that market.
Learning from Source Code
One of the main characteristics of FOSS is that the source code is available for users to examine and to
modify. This gives students the opportunity to learn from studying high quality real-life programmes. In
contrast, proprietary software is normally provided in binary form and the source code is seldom
released for users to study.
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Requirements of Educational Institutions
Different educational institutions have different ICT infrastructure requirements, depending on the level
of education, the nature of the courses they offer and the available funding. Invariably, however, there is
a need for computer laboratories in educational institutions for conducting basic computer classes,
allowing students to complete their assignments, conducting specialized ICT classes, providing access to
the library system, making available learning management systems and facilitating email commu-
nications. The number of computers required depends on the student population and the student-
computer ratio that the institution considers desirable.
Computers within laboratories are normally connected via a Local Area Network (LAN). In an education
environment most of the student users are “nomadic”and do not have designated computers. Hence, the
set-up must allow them to work from any of the computers on the network.
Ability to connect to the Internet is a basic requirement that educational institutions should strive to
provide as it allows both students and academic staff to access the numerous digital resources available
on the Web. It also enables the use of email, which has become an important means of communication.
For educational institutions, the Internet is a service that facilitates effective administration of the
institution and provides a channel of communication between educators and students that can lead to
more effective learning. It is also necessary for the implementation of e-learning and distance learning.
With Internet connectivity, an institution’s network is accessible from the Internet. Thus it is essential to
have a ﬁrewall to protect against intrusion by unauthorized users, especially if there is high-speed 24-
hour Internet access. User authentication is required to ensure that only authorized users can access the
There are often requirements, in an academic setting, for publishing information and providing access to
materials via the Web. These include teachers and lecturers providing course materials online, students
putting up Web pages, administrators publishing information on the intranet and the institution
maintaining a public website. All these require appropriate Web server hardware and software.
A main component of the ICT infrastructure of an organization is the servers that provide various
services such as email, ﬁle and print services. Appropriate software is required to provide these services.
FOSS have been found to be appropriate for this purpose. They compare favourably with the
proprietary equivalent in terms of features and, in certain cases, have a higher market share.3
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The provision of email services requires setting up an email server that controls sending and delivery of
messages. Once such a server is set up, it is expected to run continuously without any problems. An
interruption will affect communication and the work of many in the organization. Hence, reliability is a
major concern for email server software. Other concerns are security and performance. Several robust
FOSS email servers such as Sendmail (www.sendmail.org) and Postﬁx (www. postﬁx.org) are available
and are being deployed successfully in many organizations, including educational institutions. They
compare favourably with proprietary email servers such as Microsoft Exchange, are simpler to deploy
and require fewer computing resources.
File and Print Services
One characteristic of ICT usage in an educational institution is the “nomadic” user, that is, students who
use the network services from different computers. This requires a ﬁle server that would allow them to
save their work and conﬁgurations in a central server instead of in the local workstations. The possible
need to print from any workstation requires server software that allows this. Samba (www.samba.org) is
a FOSS ﬁle cum print server that runs on GNU/Linux and works seamlessly with workstations running
Windows at the same time.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is needed to translate domain names to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
The most widely used DNS server is BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), which is Free Software.
Every computer connected to a network needs to be assigned an IP address. This can be done manually
but it is most common to have the IP address assigned dynamically by a DHCP (Dynamic Host
Conﬁguration Protocol) server. Most GNU/Linux distributions include a DHCP server.
GNU/Linux has a utility called Iptables that can be used to implement ﬁrewalls to protect against security
intrusion. Some ready-made FOSS ﬁrewalls are also available, such as Shorewall (www. shorewall.net).
Intrusion detection tools are used to detect any security breach and one such FOSS is Snort
The most popular Web server is Apache (www.apache.org), which is Free/Open Source Software. It is
reputed to have a 67% share (April, 2004) of the total Web server market worldwide.6 It can be used to
host public websites for educational institutions and to host intranets within institutions. It is often used
with GNU/Linux as the operating system, MySQL as the database server and PHP as the scripting
language. All of these are FOSS.Their combination is often referred to as LAMP-Linux, Apache, MySQL and
PHP (alternatively Perl or Python).
Other Server Software
There are numerous other Free/Open Source server software that can be useful in an education environment,
such as database management systems, content management systems and mailing list servers.
The most well-known FOSS database management systems are MySQL (www.mysql.com) and
PostgreSQL (www.postgresql.org). As mentioned earlier, MySQL is often used for building dynamic
websites. It is suitable as a database management system for many other applications and is used in
business-critical enterprise applications and packaged software. Various educational applications such
as Learning Management Systems and Library Management Systems also use MySQL.
A Content Management System (CMS) facilitates the creation, publishing and management of Web
content by providing a platform that can be used by individuals without their having to be skilled in
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the underlying technologies. Examples of FOSS Content Management Systems are PostNuke
(www.postnuke.com) and Plone (plone.org). PostNuke is based on PHP and MySQL, while Plone is based
on the Zope application server, which is written using the Python programming language. In an
educational institution, the availability of such FOSS CMSs enables staff and students to develop Internet
and intranet websites for various purposes with relative ease.
The mailing list is an older application that enables online discussions and collaboration to take place.
When an email is addressed to a mailing list, it is broadcast to the individuals subscribed to the list by
email. Although newsgroups and Web-based discussion forums serve a similar function, the mailing list
may still be useful in the education environment, especially where Internet connectivity is still
rudimentary. The more popular FOSS mailing list servers are Majordomo (www.greatcircle.com/
majordomo) and Mailman (www.list.org).
These FOSS server applications make the development of a collaborative environment in educational
institutions at minimal cost possible. They allow academic staff, students, parents and administrators to
interact in a way that was not possible in the past.
Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)
Desktop applications such as a browser, an email client and a productivity suite are basic requirements in
education settings. Even a small computer laboratory will require these applications to be installed in all
computers.Instead of installing these applications on every workstation,it may be easier and less expensive
to use “thin clients”.These are computers with a network card, graphics card, monitor, keyboard and mouse,
but without hard disk, CD-ROM drive and operating system. The server handles all computing tasks,
including the running of applications, provision of storage space and management of ﬁles.This means that
cheaper hardware (or old and donated hardware) can be used for the clients. Only the server needs to be
installed with the necessary peripherals and software, which means maintenance will be easier.
The Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP—www.ltsp.org), started in 1999, provides the necessary software
to set up such a network of diskless workstations. It supports various GNU/Linux distributions and over
Example: Kerala, India
In 2002, a project to introduce computer facilities in schools in Kannur, Kerala was initiated by the
local Member of Parliament and the district administrators.To cut costs it was decided that a Linux
Terminal Server Project (LTSP) solution would be used to set up the facilities.
The hardware was supplied by a state-owned enterprise and the LTSP solution was implemented
by a private company. Since the project involved the installation of new hardware, it was possible
to use identical computing components (computers, video cards, network cards, hubs, and other
accessories), which simpliﬁed the whole setup. The LTSP server was a Pentium IV machine with
CDROM drive and hard disk. The disk-less workstations were Celeron machines without any hard
drive or CDROM drive. All of the computers were conﬁgured and tested off site before they were
sent to the schools. Each school initially received one server and 3-5 workstations.
The server ran a customized Red Hat distribution and LTSP. The other FOSS software installed to
run from the server were OpenOfﬁce suite, multimedia and Internet applications, programming
tools and other educational software.
Using the LTSP to set up the computer facilities resulted in substantial savings as more computer
facilities could be set up in more schools. Forty-three government schools now have access to their
own computer facilities running GNU/Linux with numerous FOSS. The teachers were given basic
training on GNU/Linux systems and the computer facilities have been well received by both teachers
(More information about this project is available at s2s2net.netﬁrms.com/project.html).
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100,000 sites are using LTSP. During boot up, the diskless workstation obtains the necessary network
information from the server and the operating system is downloaded from the server. Any programme
supported by the server can be run from the workstation. It should be noted that a network setup using
LTSP will be a GNU/Linux only network and is primarily suited for a new installation.
Although there has been increasing adoption of FOSS for desktops, its penetration is still relatively low.
Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop environment, with an estimated 90% market share.
However, it is believed that the desktop based on GNU/Linux suits many users.7 The increasing availability
of applications on the GNU/Linux desktop with features comparable to proprietary software will only
encourage more widespread adoption. A long list of FOSS desktop applications that are equivalent
to proprietory applications running on Windows is available at linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-
However, it should be noted that in order to use FOSS on the desktop it is not necessary to discard the
proprietary desktop operating systems. For example, programs such as OpenOfﬁce, Mozilla, and GIMP are
available for the Windows platform. Hence, FOSS programs can be easily downloaded, installed and
experimented with, without having to replace the existing proprietary operating system.
In fact, there are various options when considering the introduction of FOSS on the desktop, namely:
retain the use of Windows and run FOSS applications for this platform;
replace Windows with GNU/Linux;
set up dual boot systems, which allows users to choose between Windows or GNU/Linux during
run Windows within GNU/Linux or run GNU/Linux within Windows using appropriate software.
In educational institutions, both staff (administrative and academic) and students require a suite of ofﬁce
productivity software consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software. Microsoft
Ofﬁce is currently the most widely used productivity suite. However, the FOSS productivity suite,
OpenOfﬁce (www.openofﬁce.org), is gaining popularity as its features are becoming comparable to the
proprietary Ofﬁce suite. As noted earlier, OpenOfﬁce can run on various platforms and a complete
migration to Linux before it can be used is not necessary. In fact, it can be run on Windows side-by-side
with Microsoft Ofﬁce. A prominent feature of the latest version of OpenOfﬁce is the ability to export
documents directly to pdf format. This feature is not available in its proprietary counterpart.
Although interoperability with the existing proprietary productivity suite is not perfect, OpenOfﬁce is an
attractive option for educational institutions. The look and feel are similar to that of Microsoft Ofﬁce. In
most cases, only the basic features of the productivity suite are utilized by students and staff and these
are available in the OpenOfﬁce suite.
There are other FOSS productivity suites available but they are not as complete as OpenOfﬁce. KOfﬁce is
the productivity suite running on the KDE desktop and GNOME Ofﬁce is the suite running on the
competing desktop GNOME.The word processor (Abiword) and spreadsheet (Gnumeric) components in
GNOME Ofﬁce are considered to be of high quality.
AbiWord (www.abiword.com) works on most major operating systems, including Windows, and it
supports many languages. It can read and write most documents in Word format and has the same look
and feel as Word. AbiWord’s native document format uses Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is
an open standard. This means that an AbiWord document can be read by any other software using an
appropriate XML parser.
Gnumeric (www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric) is a fast and complete spreadsheet programme that is
being actively developed. It can support various spreadsheet ﬁle formats and has good support for Excel
7 Decrem, B., “Desktop Linux Technology & Market Overview”, Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF), July 2003; available from
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FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION
Word processor in OpenOfﬁce
ﬁles. Many of the worksheet functions available in Excel are supported in Gnumeric. However, it currently
does not run on Windows. Work is being carried out to make this possible.
There are a number of Open Source browsers available such as Mozilla, Galeon and Konqueror. Mozilla
(www.mozilla.org) is a popular browser that is based on source code released by Netscape. Apart from a
browser it also contains an email client, a Web authoring tool and other utilities. It is cross-platform and a
version for Windows is available that can be downloaded and installed without affecting existing Internet
Explorer installation. Unlike Mozilla, Galeon (galeon.sourceforge.net) is purely a Web browser. It runs on the
GNOME desktop. Konqueror (konqueror.kde.org) is a Web browser that runs on the KDE desktop.
A wide range of multimedia FOSS is available, including graphics editors and video players that can serve
as tools for enhancing educational content and its delivery.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Programme—www.gimp.org) is the most well-known FOSS for image
editing and graphic design. It is a desktop application that can be used for various purposes by both
academic staff and students. It is available for GNU/Linux, Unix variants and Windows. As it supports
various image ﬁle formats, interoperability with other programs should not be an issue. GIMP is
considered to be the FOSS equivalent of the proprietary Photoshop software.
A programme that allows the drawing of diagrams will ﬁnd good use in an educational institution.There
are some good proprietary software that serve this purpose, such as Visio and Smartdraw. A FOSS
equivalent called Dia (www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia) has been designed to provide similar functions. It can
be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has special objects to facilitate the drawing of
ﬂowcharts, network diagrams and simple circuits. The programme is available for the Windows platform
in addition to FOSS operating systems.
Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net) is a FOSS audio editor through which you can record sounds, play
sounds, and import and export ﬁles in various formats. It can be used to edit your audio, mix tracks
together, or apply effects to your recordings. This software will be useful when there is a need to digitize
audio or make recordings for incorporation into multimedia educational content. It runs on most Unix
systems (including GNU/Linux) and Windows.
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Mozilla, a FOSS Web browser
A media player for workstations is necessary for playback of videos and other multimedia content.This is
commonly available on proprietary platforms. On FOSS platforms, Mplayer (www.mplayerhq.hu) is a
programme that provides similar functionalities. It is available for Linux and many other Unix variants and
it supports many video and audio formats.
For a listing of other multimedia FOSS available, please refer to the following URL: linuxshop.ru/
Other Educational Software
Aside from FOSS desktop applications for general use, there are a lot of Free/Open Source educational
software that can be used for teaching speciﬁc subjects or courses in schools,colleges and universities.These
range from drawing programs for young students (e.g., Tux Paint—www.newbreedsoftware.com/
tuxpaint) to programs for learning geometry (e.g., Kig—edu.kde.org/kig), chemistry (e.g., Ghemical -
bioinformatics.org/ghemical) and physics (e.g., Open-Source Physics Education project—www.
opensourcephysics.org). For higher education, there is QCAD (www. ribbonsoft.com/ qcad.html), a
programme for Computer-Aided Drafting that may be used in technical drawing classes. Scilab
(scilabsoft.inria.fr) is a full-featured scientiﬁc software package that may be used in numerical analysis or
engineering courses at the university level.
These represent only a very small sample of FOSS available for education.There are various useful online
resources available for locating other educational software some of which are mentioned below.
Schoolforge (www.schoolforge.net) is a website for projects that use Free and Open Source solutions in
education. It is conceived as a site where resources are made available that can help schools to develop
affordable and dependable software and educational content.
SEUL/edu (richtech.ca/seul) is an education portal of Simple End-User Linux promoting the use of Linux
and other open resources in education. It covers various aspects of educational uses of Linux by teachers,
parents and students. It has a directory of school-related FOSS.
The Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching (OFSET) has developed Freeduc
(www.ofset.org/freeduc), which provides a catalog of educational software. It has also created a live CD-
ROM of FOSS for schools. The idea behind a live Freeduc system on CD-ROM is that no installation is
required, therefore students and teachers can easily use the applications.
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The KDE Edutainment Project (edu.kde.org) aims to develop educational software for the KDE desktop.
Its main focus is young schoolchildren but there are also programs that cater to university students and
Survey of OSS Use in Tertiary Institutions8
To gauge the extent of the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in tertiary institutions, staff of the
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering of the University of Western Australia
conducted a survey and reported the results in February 2004. Thirty-four tertiary institutions in
Australia, New Zealand and the UK provided feedback for the survey. The number of systems that
the respondents were responsible for ranged from 10 to 18,000.
Seventy-eight percent of the respondents reported having staff with skills in OSS. All of the
institutions surveyed had deployed OSS in servers, 50% of the institutions had deployed OSS in
administration, 53% of the institutions are using OSS in teaching, 56% are using it in laboratories,
and 50% are using it in research.
Eighty-seven percent of the respondents said there is equivalent or better support available for
OSS. Sixty-eight said that the support requirements of OSS are not higher than that for proprietary
software and that OSS is sometimes easier to support.
The main beneﬁt (84%) cited for the adoption of OSS is the lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
although this may not be supported by a thorough assessment of the TCO in the institution.
Seventy-eight percent said the beneﬁt of using OSS is less reliance on a speciﬁc vendor.
This survey shows that OSS has already made signiﬁcant inroads into tertiary institutions in Australia,
New Zealand and the UK, with 94% of the respondents indicating that they are already using OSS.
As shown earlier, FOSS in backend servers is mature and is equivalent or better than the proprietary
counterpart. Applications for the desktop are increasingly available and some of them are suitable for
production use. Given this case, it is imperative for administrators of educational institutions, especially
those that are publicly funded, to give due consideration to the use of FOSS in their institutions. Even
though it is common for heavy discounts on proprietary software to be made available to academic
institutions, FOSS should still be considered. In the long run the choice to use FOSS instead of proprietary
software can result in bigger cost savings.
Proprietary software designed speciﬁcally for the education market is generally very expensive, since
vendors must recoup their development costs from very small markets. These may be administrative
software such as Library Management Systems or Learning Management Systems. However, even for
such specialized applications, high quality FOSS equivalents are now becoming available. In other areas
such as Student Information Systems, Human Resource Management and Financial Management
Systems the FOSS alternatives are not mature enough for production use. But it is likely that FOSS for
these and other education-speciﬁc applications will become available in the future.
As mentioned earlier, the initial cost of FOSS is negligible. The cost of upgrades of FOSS is also
insigniﬁcant. However, it has been argued that Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) should be used in making
comparisons between FOSS and proprietary software. TCO also includes maintenance, support and
training costs and these may be higher for FOSS. However, in various comparisons, the TCO for FOSS is still
lower than that for proprietary software.
In countries where labour costs are lower, the cost of maintenance, support and training will be a smaller
percentage of the TCO, in which case the TCO of FOSS will be much lower. The availability of the source
code also results in more companies being able to provide maintenance and support, which will drive
8 Glance, D., Kerr, J. and Reid, A.,“Factors affecting the use of open source software in tertiary education institutions”,First Monday, Volume
9, No. 2, Feb 2004; available from ﬁrstmonday.org/issues/issue9_2/glance/index.html.
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down these costs. In an academic setting, there is often the possibility of getting assistance from the
FOSS community without any cost involved.
In some situations, the availability of funds or lack of it is such that it is not a choice between proprietary
software and FOSS but a choice between FOSS and nothing. By using inexpensive or donated hardware
with FOSS, some institutions may be able to provide computing facilities to their students that would
otherwise be impossible.
Even if funds are available for purchasing proprietary software, the savings resulting from using FOSS
alternatives can be used for better purposes such as buying more computers, providing training for
administrative and academic staff or developing non-ICT related infrastructure for the institution.
Example: Goa, India
Another example of the use of FOSS technology in setting up computer facilities in schools is the
Goa Schools Computer Project (GSCP). Starting from 2000, the GSCP helped to deploy 425 used
computers shipped from the United States in 125 schools in Goa.The Linux Terminal Server Project
(LTSP) solution was used to network the computers in the school laboratories. A cost analysis was
made to estimate the savings resulting from the use of recycled computers and FOSS software.8 It
was found that there was a cost savings of 77% when compared to the use of new equipment and
proprietary software. The cost of maintenance was taken into account in the analysis. Even if new
equipment were used, there was still a savings of 64% because the new equipment was of lower
speciﬁcations when used with the FOSS software.
One of the issues that arose was the need to train the computer teachers to facilitate the move to
the Linux environment. But once this barrier was overcome, it was not difﬁcult to use the FOSS
desktop applications as they are quite similar to their proprietary counterparts. Another issue was
lack of technical support provided by ﬁrms locally, pointing to the need for in-house support staff.
More details of this case study are provided by Martyris.9
9 Martyris, D.,“Community–government partnerships and open source technology for low cost IT access in India–A case study”, Harvard
University, July 2003; available from www.developmentgateway.com/node/133831/sdm/blob?pid=5474.
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Proprietary software tailored for education administration has been dominated by a small group of
companies. They usually have a niche market for specialized software such as Library Management
Systems or student information systems.The costs of these types of software are often very high because
of the small market. Usually only the well-endowed universities or schools can afford such systems. Many
schools even in developed countries are not able to afford these. Needless to say, they are beyond the
reach of most educational institutions in developing countries.
In recent years, FOSS catering to this segment has appeared and in some categories like Library
Management Systems and Learning Management Systems, good systems have been developed and are
available for use by academic institutions.
Library Management Systems
For any school, college or university with a decent-sized library, a computerized system to automate the
management of the library is essential. The most well-known FOSS Library Management System is Koha.
There are other systems being developed that are not as mature as Koha, such as PhpMyLibrary
(phpmylibrary.sourceforge.net) and OpenBiblio (obiblio.sourceforge.net). These are at various stages of
development. Anctil provides a comparison of the various systems.10
Koha (www.koha.org) was developed in 1999 in New Zealand by Katipo Communications Ltd with
funding from the Horowhenua Library Trust. It is available under the GNU General Public License. It is now
supported by a growing developer community from various countries and has been ported to several
languages. It runs on Linux and uses the Apache Web server and MySQL database and was developed in
Perl. It is also possible to use other Web servers or databases to run the programme. Koha is used by the
Horowhenua Library Trust for their three library branches, which have a total of 80,000 books and 25,000
patrons. Another library that is using Koha is in Coast Mountain School District, British Columbia, Canada.
It has eight branches with 2,000-8,000 books per branch and 1,000 patrons.
Koha is full-featured and has modules for cataloguing, reserves, Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC),
circulation, patron management and acquisitions. The circulation component includes issues, renewals,
returns and ﬁnes, and it can be set up to use bar code scanners. The acquisitions module includes
budgets, pricing and supplier information.
Koha is a Web-based system where both library patrons and staff access the system using a Web browser.
It provides a simple and clear interface to allow searches to be done easily via OPAC over the Internet.
The earlier version of Koha lacked some features, such as support for international cataloguing standards.
However, the latest version supports the international cataloguing standards Machine Readable
Cataloging (MARC). There are also plans to implement a serials module in future releases.
In May 2002, Koha was awarded the prize in the category for “Software for Public Administration” in an
international competition organized in France. The competition was established to highlight FOSS that
has the potential to beneﬁt consumers and business.
10 Anctil, E.,“The Open Source Integrated Library System: An Overview”,2003; available from www.anctil.org/users/eric/oss4ils.html.
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Koha: Key Features
Circulation module includes issues, renewals, returns, ﬁnes, use of barcode scanners,
generation of overdue list
Full acquisitions including budgeting, pricing and supplier information and tracking of items
ordered and received
Simpliﬁed acquisitions features for smaller libraries
Patron (membership) management
Reserves with possibility of self-service reservation in the library or via the Internet
Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) in the library or via the Internet
Simple and clear interface for librarians and members
Customizable search by keyword, author, title, subject, class number or combinations
Ability to catalogue websites
Support for MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC)
Stock rotation through branch libraries
FOSS Library Management System—Koha
Learning Management Systems
A Learning Management System is a software application or a Web-based system that provides an
instructor with tools to create and deliver online content, monitor student participation and assess
student performance. A Learning Management System may also support collaboration and provide
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features such as chat facilities and discussion forums. Learning Management Systems are sometimes
referred to as Course Management Systems.
The availability of such a system in a school or university will help to achieve the pedagogical
improvements that ICTs are envisaged to bring to education. Its availability is also essential for
implementing e-learning. However, the existing proprietary systems such as WebCT and Blackboard are
too expensive and beyond the reach of many academic institutions, especially in developing countries.
Fortunately, several FOSS Learning Management Systems are now available. In a report published by the
Commonwealth of Learning in June 2003, thirty-ﬁve FOSS Learning Management Systems were
identiﬁed and evaluated.11 ATutor, ranked the highest, will be described later in this primer.
To facilitate the interoperability of different Learning Management Systems, the content created should
conform to a standard.There are a number of initiatives to establish standards for Learning Management
The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) was begun at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001.
It is a collaboration between a number of premier universities, with MIT and Stanford leading the
initiative. The initiative has resulted in two Learning Management Systems—Stellar, developed at MIT,
and CourseWork, developed at Stanford University. CourseWork was released as FOSS in June 2003.
The objective of OKI is to deﬁne an open and extensible architecture for learning technology. It is targeted
speciﬁcally to the needs of the higher education community. It provides speciﬁcations for interfaces
among components within a learning management system and facilitates communication with other
systems, including existing enterprise systems. Commercial and non-commercial developers of products
for the higher education market can use the OKI architecture which is fundamentally FOSS.
IMS (Instructional Management Systems) Global Learning Consortium is a non-proﬁt organization that
includes educational institutions, software companies and publishers across the world. It develops open
technical speciﬁcations to support distributed learning. Several of these speciﬁcations are being adopted
internationally as standards for learning technology.These speciﬁcations allow different course management
systems and content from different authors to work together or interoperate. For example, content produced
using a proprietary course management system such as Blackboard can be made accessible to another
system such as WebCT and vice versa.
A speciﬁc implementation of IMS is the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) developed
by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL). It incorporates elements from IMS and other speciﬁcations to
provide elearning capabilities that allow interoperability, accessibility and reusability of Web-based
Both IMS and SCORM use XML as a common language to enable communication between disparate systems.
Stanford University developed its own Learning Management System called CourseWork
(aboutcoursework.stanford.edu) used on its campus to provide instructional websites since January
2002. It was rapidly adopted by its faculty in various academic disciplines, supporting over 400 courses
with more than 12,000 users by the spring of 2003.
CourseWork has been released as Open Source software, providing academic institutions non-
proprietary, open access to a ﬂexible, scalable Learning Management System. It allows institutions to
integrate their course websites with other systems such as a student information system, library
management system, and other education-speciﬁc infrastructure systems. The tools in CourseWork can
be customized to suit the needs of a particular institution and the interface can be modiﬁed to be
consistent with the institution’s websites.
11 “COL LMS Open Source”,Commonwealth of Learning”,25 June 2003; available from www.col.org/Consultancies/ 03LMSOpenSource.pdf.
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CourseWork is designed to be user-friendly so that academic staff can set up a course website without
having to be skilled in the underlying technologies. But it has features that allow faculty with greater
expertise in Web technologies to build a more complex course website.
Using CourseWork academic staff can put up announcements, syllabi and course schedules. Course
materials can be uploaded on the server and managed by Coursework. Students can easily access these
by following the appropriate links. Links to appropriate external resources can also be added as part of
the online course readings. A discussion forum can be set up for a course to facilitate online discussions
among students and with the course instructor.
Tools are available for instructors to create homework sets, assignments and quizzes. Students can submit
their completed assignments online. Multiple-choice quizzes can be automatically graded. CourseWork
manages the distribution of assignments, collection of student work and provision of feedback to
students. Student grades for online work can be displayed and ﬁnal grades can be computed.
Moodle (moodle.org/) was ﬁrst developed by an Australian, Martin Dougiamas. It is an acronym for
Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. It has been released under the terms of the
GNU General Public License and currently has a very active group of developers working on it. Developed
using PHP, Moodle is cross-platform: it runs without modiﬁcation on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and any
other system that supports PHP. It supports the FOSS databases MySQL and PostgreSQL and can also be
used with other databases. Moodle is multilingual and is currently available in 34 languages, including
Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Thai.
Moodle has numerous features for site management, user management and course management. It has
modules for assignment, quiz, discussion forum and chat. Instructors can put up assignments with due
dates and maximum grades, allow students to upload completed assignments, and provide feedback to
students on their assignments. Various types of quiz questions can be created using Moodle—multiple
choice, short answers, true/false and ﬁll-in-blanks. The quiz can be graded automatically and feedback
can be given to explain the answers. The questions can be shufﬂed to make it more difﬁcult for students
to cheat, and the maximum number of times students can take the quiz can be speciﬁed. All grades for
assignments and quizzes can be viewed and downloaded for further processing if necessary.
Discussion forums can be set up, to facilitate student interaction in a particular course, with the option to
email copies to the students. Moodle also has a chat function for live discussions. Chat sessions can be
logged for later viewing by both staff and students.
Moodle, a FOSS Learning Management System
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Moodle: Key Features
Suitable for courses conducted entirely online as well as for supplementing classroom
Uses a simple browser based interface
Easy to install on almost any platform that supports PHP and requires only one database
Full database abstraction supporting all major database systems
Emphasis on strong security
Plug-in “themes” allow the site to be customized
Plug-in activity modules can be added to existing Moodle installations
Plug-in language packs allow full localization to any language
The code is written in PHP under a GNU GPL license which allows modiﬁcations to suit
Supports a range of authentication mechanisms allowing easy integration with existing
Each person requires only one account for the whole server
Teachers may have editing privileges removed so that they cannot modify the course (e.g., for
As a security feature teachers can add an "enrollment key" to their courses to keep out non-
Choice of course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focused format
Flexible array of course activities available via various modules—Forums, Journals, Quizzes,
Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops
All grades for Forums, Journals, Quizzes and Assignments can be viewed and downloaded as
a spreadsheet ﬁle
Full user logging and tracking with activity reports for each student
Teachers can deﬁne their own scales to be used for grading
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The Commonwealth of Learning Report10 evaluates Open Source Learning Management Systems and
recommends two products. The criteria used for evaluation include features and functionality, cost of
ownership, maintainability, usability, standards compliance and scalability.The report’s top recommendation
ATutor (www.atutor.ca) has a variety of tools to allow the instructor to manage the online content, such
as a built-in content editor, a resources database, a forum manager, course statistics and assessment
support. It has good standalone modules for collaboration and chatting. It provides good docu-
mentation and online help with a tutorial for new users. However, the user interface may not be very
ATutor supports IMS/SCORM speciﬁcations, allowing content to be imported from and exported to other
Learning Management Systems that also conform to IMS/SCORM speciﬁcations. However, it is relatively
new and does not have a large installed base. ATutor has been released under the GNU General Public
Among the other requirements for the administration of educational institutions is a Student
Information System for the management of student records and subject offerings, timetabling,
registration, management of academic and ﬁnancial records, and so on. As Student Information Systems
are often customized to the needs of particular institutions, there are not many proprietary systems
available. So far, there is no production quality Open Source student information system available.
However, there are some initiatives for developing such a system.
The SchoolTool (www.schooltool.org) project is one such initiative. The objective of SchoolTool is to
develop a system for school administration that can be used globally and which is suitable both for
schools and for higher educational institutions. It would incorporate best practices in school
administration and would be easily customized for local needs. The system will be made available under
an Open Source license. This project was started in South Africa in 2000 with funding from the
Shuttleworth Foundation.The project was temporarily suspended in 2002 but was restarted in 2003. It is
still in the early stages of development and the software is not yet available for use.
ATutor, another FOSS Learning Management System
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TEACHING IT WITH FOSS
In the earlier sections we looked at the use of FOSS in the setting up of the IT infrastructure of educational
institutions and its use in administrative functions. In this section, we examine the role of FOSS in the
teaching of Information Technology. Most software currently used in teaching IT, including basic
productivity software for teaching computer literacy, compilers for programming courses and relational
database management systems, are proprietary. However, there are FOSS equivalents available that can
be suitable replacements. In addition to the cost savings, there are other advantages to using FOSS in
At the very basic level, teaching IT involves imparting computer literacy. Computer literacy means having
acquired the skills to make use of a computer for common tasks. It implies competency in using common
desktop applications such as a word processor, spreadsheet, email client and Web browser. The skills in
Table 1 are considered essential.The order of the skills in the list is not indicative of their importance and
will change with time as technologies change.The relative importance of skills also varies, depending on
Computer literacy should be taught not only to students in schools but also to university students, who
may not have acquired these skills during earlier schooling. It is a common assumption that university
students today should be computer literate and have the skills to use desktop applications for their
academic work regardless of their ﬁeld of study. In some universities, computer literacy courses are
offered to ensure that the students have these skills. In others, there may not be formal courses and
students are expected to learn on their own. Whatever the case, computer literacy programmes usually
use the dominant proprietary software. Even at the lower education levels it is not uncommon to ﬁnd
students being taught to use Microsoft Windows and Ofﬁce as a part of computer literacy courses.
Setting up a personal computer
Using basic operating system features
Using a word processor
Using a graphics and/or artwork package
Connecting a computer to a network
Using the Internet
Using a computer to communicate
Using a spreadsheet
Using a database system
Using instructional materials for new applications
(Source: US National Research Council’s Committee on
Information Technology report)12
12 “Being Fluent with Information Technology”,U.S. National Research Council, Committee on Information Technology, National Academy
of Sciences, 1999.
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Teaching IT with FOSS
However, there are two problems with this method of teaching computer literacy. First, the skill in the use
of a particular version of proprietary software is usually short lived. Even though it will be easier to learn
how to use a new version of the software from the same vendor (relative to learning an entirely new
software), re-training will still be necessary unless the user has the ability to self-learn. A different
approach to teaching computer literacy should be used in order to equip students with the ability to
learn, unlearn and relearn. The emphasis should be on generic skills that should not be dependent on
software from a speciﬁc vendor.
The second problem with using speciﬁc proprietary software in the computer literacy curriculum is that
it encourages illegal copying of software. Students need to use the same software which is available in
their schools or universities for doing their homework and assignments, leading many of them to use
illegal copies at home or on their laptops. Schools and institutions with ﬁnancial constraints may even
use illegal copies of proprietary software in their enthusiasm to provide computer literacy training to
In teaching computer literacy it is not important which operating system, word processor, email client,
Web browser and spreadsheet are used. GNU/Linux, together with appropriate Graphical User Interface
(GUI) such as GNOME or KDE, is a FOSS operating system that can be used to teach the basics of operating
OpenOfﬁce has word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing programs that can replace the
proprietary equivalents. It should be sufﬁcient for teaching the basic features available in ofﬁce
productivity software. Other FOSS such as the Abiword word processor or the Gnumeric spreadsheet can
also be used in a computer literacy curriculum if necessary.
To teach students how to access the Web or to use email, the FOSS application Mozilla can be used. Again,
the features of Mozilla are comparable to the browser and email client that come together with Windows
and should be sufﬁcient for use in a computer literacy curriculum.
The FOSS database systems MySQL and PostgreSQL are full-featured and can certainly be used to teach
the basics of database systems. The GUI available for these databases may not be as user-friendly as the
proprietary equivalent but it should not be an obstacle to learning the basic principles.
Michael Surran, a Computer Science teacher in the US, states the following:13
People sometimes ask me, “Is teaching our students Linux preparing them for the workplace?” This
question is based on the fact that Microsoft is the current dominating presence in operating systems
and ofﬁce software. It is a question I have thought over a long time, and the answer I always come up
with is,“Yes, most deﬁnitely.” The basic principles of any type of operating system, ofﬁce application or
other similarly grouped software are the same. A student who becomes proﬁcient in Linux will not ﬁnd
themselves (sic) lost in a Windows environment. I have found Linux to be the more advanced of the two
operating systems, yet our students are very quickly and easily learning it. The process of copying a ﬁle
or formatting a paragraph is not so different between one operating system and the other.
Using FOSS software as the basis of the computer literacy curriculum also results in cost savings for the
school or university. It obviates the need to ensure that sufﬁcient licenses are purchased as FOSS software
can be legally installed in as many computers as necessary. Students can also install the FOSS software in
their own computers without restrictions, and illegal copying of proprietary software is not necessary for
their academic work outside the school or university’s premises. More importantly, it would encourage
placing emphasis on the teaching of the basic principles and concepts and avoid narrow exposure to
proprietary software from speciﬁc vendors.
However, it may be necessary to train teachers and lecturers in the use of Linux and FOSS before they can
be competent to conduct classes using these software. Modiﬁcation of the curriculum is necessary and
some effort will have to be put into developing suitable teaching materials.
13 Surran, M.,“Linux from Kindergarten to High School”, Linux Journal, February 2003; available from www.linuxjournal.com/
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FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION
Computer literacy is usually the main focus of teaching IT to students in schools. This would equip them
with the ability to use computers to enhance their learning, access the Internet, use email, and so on.
But as emphasized earlier, this should not be conﬁned to teaching students to use speciﬁc proprietary
software. Students who have not been exposed to computers are likely to be more receptive to Linux and
FOSS and it would be desirable to start using FOSS as early as possible.
For example, for pedagogical reasons FOSS was introduced in some non-governmental schools in
Australia.The students in these schools developed the ability to use IT without assuming that computing
can be based only on one predominant computing platform. Teachers at the Sydney Church of England
Girls Grammar School deliberately expose students to more than one suite of ofﬁce applications, giving
them the opportunity to use both FOSS and proprietary software and increase their understanding of
the principles of these applications.14
Apart from using FOSS for teaching IT, there is a lot of FOSS available that can be used to teach non-IT
subjects in schools. Some of these have been mentioned in Chapter 2 and the online resources for such
educational software are also given.
Learning how to write computer programs is invariably a part of Computer Science or Information
Technology programmes. It is often taught to students in other disciplines as well, since it may be
necessary for them to develop some computer programs for their projects or research work.
At a fundamental level, the choice of programming language to be used as the basis for teaching
programming concepts is not important.There are numerous computer languages available on the Linux
platform that can be used for this purpose. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of
programming language compilers that is included in most Linux distributions. It currently supports
computer languages such as C, C++ and Java.Work is in progress to include other languages such as Pascal
and Cobol. There are also other computer language compilers available, for example, dialects of BASIC
Many educational institutions currently base their programming courses on the Windows platform,
resulting in a dependence on proprietary programming tools. These tools are usually in the form of an
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that simpliﬁes some of the tasks involved in programming.
However, there are IDEs available for the FOSS platforms such as KDevelop (www.kdevelop.org), and
these can be used instead of the proprietary tools.
Availability of Source Code At the more advanced level, the teaching of programming will be facilitated by
the availability of source code of FOSS. The best way to learn how to write good computer programs is to
study what has been written by others, especially real-life high quality programs. Take writing a novel: a
writer cannot be expected to write a good novel if he/she has not read numerous works of others. In
contrast, programmers are expected to write programs by just mastering the syntax and construction of a
particular computer language without having much opportunity to study good code written by others.
In the past there was a lack of real-life high quality source code available for all to look at and to study.The
source code of proprietary software is protected as a trade secret and is seldom released publicly. FOSS
has made available the source code of thousands of programs, some of which are market leaders in their
particular segment.The importance of the availability of source code of FOSS and its vital role in building
capacity in software development is still not widely recognized.
14 Moyle, K., ”Open source software and Australian school education”, August 2003; available from www.educationau.edu.au/
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Teaching IT with FOSS
Most users of FOSS do not have an interest in looking at the source code and neither is it necessary for
them to do so. However, where students are being taught programming, the availability of the source code
should be utilized to enhance teaching and learning. For example, in programming projects undertaken
for IT courses, students can be encouraged to study the available source code and to build on it by adding
features or making improvements. If they are sufﬁciently prepared, they can even participate in various
FOSS projects such as those hosted on Sourceforge.net by submitting their code contributions.
Programming Languages Used in FOSS Although at the basic level it is not important which programming
language is used as the basis of teaching, at the more advanced level institutions should teach students
languages relevant to their future work. If there is a likelihood that students who take up a career in
software development will be involved in FOSS projects, then the curriculum should be designed to take
this into consideration.
Computer languages used in FOSS projects
Number of projects
Percentage of projects
Table 2 lists the computer languages used in FOSS projects, included in the SourceForge
(sourceforge.net) repository as of December 2003.
Many more languages are being used to develop FOSS. We have included only the top few in the list
above. C and C++ are predominantly used in FOSS projects. However, the use of Java, PHP, Perl and Python
is growing. C and C++ are already commonly taught in the traditional Computer Science curriculum.With
the growing importance of Java, PHP, Perl and Python, there should be an increased effort to include
these in the IT curriculum.
FOSS Development Methodology With the increased importance of FOSS, the teaching of software
engineering should be modiﬁed to take into account the processes and methodology used in
In his essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Eric Raymond describes the characteristics of FOSS
development and explains the metaphors he used to compare the methodologies used in traditional
software development (cathedral model) and FOSS development (bazaar model) as follows:
I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs
programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small
bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.
Linus Torvalds ’s style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open
to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise.No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the
Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches
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FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION
(aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a
coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.15
A FOSS project tends to be initiated as a result of the needs of the developers.They will then develop the
software to a stage where it is usable with the basic functionalities before releasing it to the community
as an Open Source project.The programme may be bug-ridden, incomplete and poorly documented. But
it must at least run and convince potential contributors that it has the promise of evolving into a good
piece of software in the near future. This will attract other developers interested in solving the same
problem to contribute to the project. However, it is not always the case that the development starts from
scratch. In fact, many of the successful projects such as Apache are built on existing partial solutions. It
should be noted that a project cannot be initiated from scratch in the bazaar mode.
Unlike a proprietary software project, a FOSS project is released as soon as it is usable. Updated versions
are released whenever there are modiﬁcations to the software. “Release early, release often” is an
important characteristic of a FOSS project. By doing so, many more users can participate in the testing of
the software under varying conditions. If there are any bugs, they will be quickly discovered and ﬁxed.The
availability of the source code allows the users to be co-developers in the sense that they can ﬁx the bugs
instead of only reporting them. In contrast, for proprietary software it takes much longer for the small
group of paid developers to ﬁx the reported bugs through a beta-testing process.
This model of development is not entirely without structure, especially for the larger projects. For
example, Linux has a hierarchical structure based on the delegation of responsibilities by Linus Torvalds
to different people. They each have the responsibility and authority for different parts of Linux, although
Linus Torvalds will always have the last word. The high degree of modularity of FOSS projects has given
rise to a speciﬁc organizational and decision-making process. Generally, the FOSS development model
tends to be more informal, since the developers perform their tasks voluntarily and for no direct ﬁnancial
It is now quite common for FOSS projects to rely on tools for issue tracking, source code management,
design, automated testing and packaging and deployment. The concurrent versions system (CVS) is the
most widely used version control system in open source projects. Its features include a central server
containing the latest versions of the software that makes them accessible to anyone over the Internet.
The CVS can be conﬁgured to send email notiﬁcations to project developers whenever changes are
made so that the new source code can be tested and reviewed. Bugzilla was developed for use in the
Mozilla project for issue tracking and technical support. It is now used in many FOSS projects.
The FOSS development methodology is different from traditional software engineering in many ways.
Some researchers who are studying it have found that FOSS development methodology “can be faster,
better and cheaper than the textbook software engineering often used in corporate settings.”16
However, they have not concluded that very large and complex software applications customized for a
small market, for example, the aviation industry, can be developed using the FOSS model; for these the
traditional software engineering approaches may still be required.
15 Raymond, E., “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”,2000; available from catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/.
16 Hart, D., “Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-Source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering”, NSF press release, NSF PR 03-132,
Foss 13/01/04 7:11 PM Page 23
The success of the Open Source phenomenon has prompted efforts to apply similar principles in the
publication of content. The idea behind publishing Open Content is that anyone can use the content,
distribute it freely, modify it and redistribute it. In this way, the content can be improved upon and
knowledge is made freely available for the common good. The term “Open Content” was coined by Dr.
David Wiley who launched the OpenContent project in 1998 and provided the Open Content License.
The Open Content License is now superseded by the Creative Commons licenses.
Creative Commons (creativecommons.org), which is based at the Stanford Law School, provides
various options for licensing Open Content. It should be noted that publishing content using one of
these licenses does not mean that the author is giving up copyright to the work. Rather, some rights
are offered to users of the work under certain conditions. The various Creative Commons options are
Attribution—Gives permission to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative
works based upon it but only if credit is given.
Noncommercial—Gives permission to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and
derivative works based upon it but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works—Gives permission to copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim
copies of the work but not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike—Gives permission to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the
license that governs the original work.
Open Content is particularly important to education and there are a number of initiatives to provide
Open Content for educational use, the most notable of which is the OpenCourseWare initiative by
In April 2001, MIT announced the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project through which it will make available
course material used in 2,000 courses taught at MIT. These will be available online and educators,
students and self-learners from anywhere in the world can access the material without any restrictions.
By May 2004, material for 700 courses from virtually all academic disciplines were published on the OCW
Educators from all over the world can use the course material as a basis for curriculum development in
their own institutions. Students can use it for self-study or as supplementary material for their courses.
The availability of such a repository of educational materials can stimulate innovations in teaching and
can lead to other collaborative efforts.
OCW is not about providing an MIT education. Neither is it a distance education initiative. According to
Phillip Long, “OpenCourseWare is not an online teaching environment; it is the opportunity to have
faculty at MIT present their view of good teaching material, the sequencing of teaching material, good
problem sets, and appropriate types of activities. It is a representation of content and sequencing and
thoughtful selection and juxtaposition of materials. It is an exposure to a public audience of the decisions
Foss 13/01/04 7:11 PM Page 24
FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION
and processes that faculty members go through to come to the point of having a collection of resources
and materials to use when teaching a particular course.”17
One of the courses offered by MIT OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare materials (Figure 6) are licensed under a Creative Commons License with attribution,
noncommercial and share alike options mentioned earlier.
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a free Web-based encyclopedia that is available under the GNU Free
Documentation License. The encyclopedia’s contents are written collaboratively by readers and are not
subjected to any formal peer review. Readers can also edit the articles written by someone else.
Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger who initially started another free Web-based
encyclopedia called Nupedia where the articles were peer reviewed. Progress for Nupedia was slow and
the number of articles available is limited. With Wikipedia, contributors make edits and create new
articles rapidly. In December 2003 it had 185,785 articles listed, covering a wide range of subjects. It is also
multilingual, with articles in various other languages. The founders of Wikipedia believe that the
continuous process of editing articles will improve the content until a stable state with high quality
content is reached.
Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science (PloS – www.plos.org) is a non-proﬁt organization founded in October 2000
with the aim of making the world’s scientiﬁc and medical literature a freely available public resource.
Over 30,000 scientists from over 180 countries, including 13 Nobel Laureates, endorsed the setting up of
PloS, which is based in San Francisco. The rationale for PLoS is that unrestricted and open access to
scientiﬁc ideas, methods, results and conclusions will speed up the progress of science and medicine.
Long, P. D., ”OpenCourseWare: Simple Idea, Profound Implications”, Syllabus Magazine, Jan 2002; available from www.
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PLoS Biology, an open access journal
With the help of grants from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation and the Irving A. Hansen Foundation,
PLoS launched, in October 2003, the ﬁrst open access journal, called PLoS Biology (Figure 7). The journal
is available online and full-text articles can be freely accessed, downloaded, printed and distributed.
Although it is an open access journal, PLoS Biology still follows a process of rigorous peer review and
selection similar to the current practice for conventional journals. The Public Library of Science plans to
launch a medical journal, PLoS Medicine, in 2004 using the same open access model.
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RESEARCH USING FOSS
Traditionally, academic research is carried out in an open manner where the publication of research
ﬁndings is preceded by a peer review process. All of the assumptions, calculations and experiments that
lead to the results are scrutinized before the ﬁndings are accepted by journals for publication. The
researchers do not usually acquire ownership of their ﬁndings and discoveries and they are expected to
Computer software is often used not only in Computer Science and ICT research but also in research in
many other ﬁelds. “However, scientists rarely make their software available to other scientists for
scrutiny—and even if they did, they often used closed-source programs in which the underlying source
code is protected by copyright and trade secrecy claims. But this practice strikes at the heart of science,
namely, the notion of veriﬁability. To be accepted as valid, all calculations and assumptions that go into a
given scientiﬁc assumption must be open to public scrutiny. Yet closed-source software makes such
In contrast, the open philosophy of FOSS is entirely consistent with the process of academic research
since the source code of the software is also available for examination. Researchers should use FOSS as a
tool in their work as far as possible. Bryan Pfaffenberger goes further to argue that “It’s not enough for
scientists to use open-source software; they must also use an open-source operating system.”18
As mentioned earlier, Free/Open Source programming languages, database systems, spreadsheet
software and other applications that can be used for computations and data analysis in research are
available. More specialized FOSS is also available. For example, Scilab (scilabsoft.inria.fr) is a FOSS package
for numerical computations that has features equivalent to that of proprietary packages. Scilab is a full-
featured scientiﬁc package, with hundreds of built-in functions for matrix manipulation, signal
processing, Fourier transforms, graphics and the like. It can be used as a research tool in a broad range of
science and engineering disciplines. Another example is the GNU Scientiﬁc Library (GSL), a FOSS generic
mathematical library with a rich set of functions that is available for use under the GPL. The use of these
library modules facilitates development of computer programs for research purposes.
Bioinformatics, in general, is the use of computers to handle biological information. It is the use of
computers to characterize the molecular components of living things (computational molecular
biology). The most prominent achievement of bioinformatics is the Human Genome Project, an attempt
to map the complete set of human genes. A tremendous amount of data needs to be handled in
molecular biology and this is clearly possible only with the aid of computers and software.
FOSS features prominently in bioinformatics. Ewan19 argues that “open source makes sense because it
follows good and well-known scientiﬁc principles. Traditionally, scientiﬁc practice has involved openly
sharing and discussing results, and providing enough information to allow third-party conﬁrmation of
results. Clearly open source software ﬁts well into this model.” The second reason for using FOSS is that
the “actual data matters much more than the tools used to process it.” Sharing the software used to
conduct research reduces duplication of effort to develop the software.
18 Pfaffenberger, B., “Linux in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Minds, Social Justice”, Linux Journal, March 02 2000; available from
19 Stewart, B.,“Ewan Birney’s Keynote: A Case for Open Source Bioinformatics”,O’Reilly Network, 2002; available from www.oreillynet.com/
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Research using FOSS
The Bioinformatics Organization, Inc. (www.bioinformatics.org) was founded in 1999 to facilitate
worldwide communications and collaborations in bioinformatics research and to provide free and open
access to methods and materials in such work. Its website hosts extensive resources, including software
and databases, and provides a forum for activities that facilitate the development of such resources
GNU/Linux and FOSS have been used in projects to provide affordable high-end computing capabilities.
This is done by combining the processing power of multiple low-cost servers and workstations into a
system that can deliver supercomputer power. According to Cook, “The reason these systems are so
effective is that there are a great many very big, very complicated problems that naturally break down
into a bunch of iterations of the same, much simpler, problem.That describes everything from forecasting
the weather to doing computer animation.”20
Beowulf is the name of the architecture used for building a massively parallel system constructed out of
commercially available PCs. The computers used for building the system can be 486 systems, Pentium
systems and Alpha computers; the computers need not be homogeneous. Even old PCs that would
otherwise be discarded can be used to build such a system. In Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US,
the Stone SouperComputer was built using a combination of old PCs connected together using a
standard Ethernet network and was used to solve a mapping problem.21 The system has a theoretical
peak performance of 1.2 gigaﬂops (FLOPS stands for ﬂoating point operations per second. It is used as an
approximate measure of computing speed. A gigaﬂops is one billion FLOPS).
Another example is the supercomputer launched by the State University of New York, which consists of
over 2,000 computers running GNU/Linux to conduct drug research to combat cancer, Alzheimer’s
disease and AIDS.
20 Cook, R.,“Supercomputers on the cheap”,April 2000; available from www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/04/13/cheap.super.idg.
21 Hargrove, W. W., Hoffman, F. M. and Sterling, T., "The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer", Scientiﬁc American.com, August 16, 2001; available
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TRAINING IN FOSS
Although training in FOSS is not normally a part of formal education, educational institutions can play a
role in providing this service in their professional trainings or adult education programmes.
One of the ways to promote the adoption of GNU/Linux and FOSS in government, educational
institutions, organizations and the corporate sector is to ensure that suitable human resource capacity is
available. A short-term measure for building human resource capacity in FOSS is to provide a path for
current IT professionals to acquire the necessary skills and certiﬁcation. Although many system
administrators, network engineers and other IT professionals should be able to learn on their own, a more
structured training programme will ensure systematic and adequate coverage of the various topics. A
certiﬁcation process will assess the competence of GNU/Linux and FOSS professionals; give conﬁdence
to employers; and facilitate the hiring process in an organization.
Training in GNU/Linux and FOSS is primarily to enhance job-related skills. Since FOSS is now
predominantly used in back ofﬁce servers, the areas for training would be in operating systems, servers,
security and Web application development.
Since desktop applications are beginning to mature, there is also a growing need to train users to use
these applications. Some governments and corporations are already implementing policies to migrate to
FOSS desktop applications either on a mandatory or voluntary basis. However, such policies can succeed
only if they are accompanied by a concerted effort to train the users who are affected by the move to use
Lack of technical support is often cited as one of the reasons for not considering the adoption of FOSS.
There is, of course, support provided informally through various newsgroups and mailing lists, and
vendors like Red Hat also provide support options that can be purchased by institutions. However, the
existence of a pool of GNU/Linux-certiﬁed professionals will go a long way to allay the fears of
organizations considering the adoption of GNU/Linux and FOSS.
A certiﬁcation programme also helps training centres in deciding on the training curriculum. Instead of
having to develop its own curriculum, a training center can adopt a widely recognized certiﬁcation
programme. There are other advantages of certiﬁcation, such as industry recognition of GNU/Linux and
provision of a path of study for professionals desiring to acquire skills in GNU/Linux.
A certiﬁcation programme should have some form of examination to reliably assess the competencies of
students. The training centres should be certiﬁed and the instructors themselves should also be certiﬁed
to be suitable to conduct the training.22
Linux Professional Institute (LPI)
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI - www.lpi.org) is a non-proﬁt organization established in 1999. It is
vendor-independent and through its activities it aims to promote the use of GNU/Linux and FOSS.
York, D., “Creating a Linux Certiﬁcation and Training Programme”, Linux Gazette, Issue 33, Oct 1998; available from
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Training in FOSS
The LPI certiﬁcation programme consists of three levels and is designed to certify the competency of
system administrators, system engineers and other IT professionals in the use of GNU/Linux and other
associated servers and utilities. It is not based on any particular GNU/Linux distribution, although inputs
to the programme are provided by major hardware and GNU/Linux distribution vendors.
LPI tests for well-rounded skills that are usable on any GNU/Linux distribution. To ensure validity,
reliability and high quality, LPI does not provide the training or the training material directly. A wide
range of preparation options are supported, and training and testing centres for LPI certiﬁcation are
available in many countries.
Red Hat Certiﬁed Engineer (RHCE)
Red Hat (www.redhat.com/training) has two certiﬁcation examinations—the Red Hat Certiﬁed Engineer
(RHCE) and the Red Hat Certiﬁed Technician (RHCT). The training and testing emphasize practical skills
and the exams measure competence with live equipment. The RHCE is aimed at two groups of IT
professionals.The ﬁrst group consists of system administrators, network engineers and other IT staff who
already possess experience and knowledge in UNIX or GNU/Linux. The second group includes IT
professionals who have little or no prior experience with UNIX or GNU/Linux.
The RHCE and RHCT certiﬁcations are meant to assess competencies in installing and conﬁguring Red
Hat Linux, conﬁguring basic networking and ﬁle systems, essential system administration and
conﬁguring basic security. The RHCT is certiﬁcation to a technician level and focuses more on client-side
services and supporting Red Hat Linux systems on an existing network. RHCE focuses on server services
and assesses competence in managing Red Hat Linux servers.
Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) Linux+ (www.comptia.org/certiﬁcation/
linux/default.asp) certiﬁcation is another vendor-neutral programme that validates the knowledge and
abilities of technicians with at least six months of practical GNU/Linux experience. The CompTIA Linux+
certiﬁcation exam measures competencies in planning and implementation, installation, conﬁguration,
administration, maintenance and troubleshooting of GNU/Linux systems. This is considered to be an
entry-level certiﬁcation on GNU/Linux.
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As the earlier chapters have shown, FOSS has an important role to play in education. We have seen how
it can be used in setting up and running ICT infrastructure in academic institutions. It can be used to meet
specialized administrative needs, such as the management of libraries and the setting up of learning
management systems. Its use can potentially lower the costs of providing ICT facilities. The use of FOSS
also makes possible improvements in teaching computer literacy, programming, software engineering
and other non-IT subjects. FOSS has a role to play in academic research and it has inﬂuenced and
contributed to a more open dissemination of academic and research content.
Nevertheless, in considering the adoption of FOSS in education, policy-makers and decision-makers
should be aware of the following issues.
Since there are a number of advantages to using FOSS in educational institutions, including lower costs,
reliability, better performance and, arguably, better security, strategic plans or policies for education at
the national or institutional level should have guidelines for procurement of software that give due
consideration to FOSS. These guidelines should also apply to decisions on software acquired for use in
The different approaches that can be taken for developing guidelines for the procurement of software
Making it mandatory to use FOSS unless a suitable FOSS equivalent to the proprietary
software is not available.
Recommending that FOSS be used whenever possible.
Ensuring that FOSS is given due consideration and not excluded in favour of proprietary
In many situations, an educational institution may already be using proprietary software for both
backend servers and desktops. In these cases, a strategy should be developed to migrate to the use of
FOSS. The ﬁrst place to start is usually the backend servers, since the migration will be transparent to
users and a wide range of high-quality FOSS is already available for servers. The exception will be certain
applications such as ﬁnancial management systems, where good FOSS equivalents are not yet available.
In such cases, servers running proprietary operating systems in support of such applications can be
maintained and can coexist with other servers based on FOSS platforms, on the same network.
For desktop applications, the adoption of FOSS can potentially result in greater cost savings. However, a
migration policy will have to take into account the existing use of proprietary software and the need to
maintain the use of some proprietary applications for academic requirements. A gradual approach can be
taken, for example, by ﬁrst introducing and supporting FOSS applications that run on Windows, followed
by the introduction of GNU/Linux as part of a dual boot system.There may be a transitional period where
dual or multiple operating systems have to be maintained, which may result in additional support costs.
The available FOSS expertise within the institution will determine the training requirements for system
administrators and other IT support staff. User training may also be required for other administrative users.
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Curricula in Schools
More and more schools are being equipped with computer facilities and many have already
implemented curricula to teach computer literacy to their students. These curricula should be examined
to ensure that they are not based on speciﬁc proprietary software. If necessary, modiﬁcations should be
made to the curricula so that the emphasis is on teaching concepts and generic skills. As we saw earlier,
FOSS suitable for teaching computer literacy is available and should be used wherever possible. It has
cost advantages; discourages software piracy; raises the awareness of the students regarding the
availability of FOSS solutions; and avoids over-dependence on one proprietary platform. This does not
necessarily mean that proprietary software should be excluded entirely. If the resources are available,
proprietary software can be used to demonstrate the range of software available to accomplish certain
A lot of FOSS educational software for speciﬁc subjects are available, and teachers should be encouraged to
use these to enhance teaching and learning. If they have the skills, the teachers should also be encouraged
to develop appropriate software for their classes and make these available as FOSS.
To introduce FOSS in the curricula of schools, appropriate training for teachers is likewise required. The
emphasis in this case will be on training the teachers to use the appropriate desktop FOSS, such as
OpenOfﬁce, Mozilla and GIMP.
Curricula in Tertiary Institutions
At the tertiary level, the policies of institutions with respect to curricula for Computer Science or
Information Technology programmes should encourage the incorporation of FOSS. Academic staff
should examine course syllabi and modify them where necessary. Student projects that leverage on the
availability of source code of FOSS and encourage participation and contribution to ongoing FOSS
development efforts should be introduced. Consideration should also be given to the introduction of
computer languages that are increasingly being used in FOSS development such as PHP, Perl, Python and
Java, in addition to the traditional languages. FOSS development methodology and the tools commonly
used in developing FOSS should be incorporated in software engineering courses.
Non-IT students should be taught computer literacy using curricula that is FOSS-enabled, with emphasis
on acquisition of generic skills. It may be useful to expose students to a wide selection of software,
including both FOSS and proprietary software if the resources are available. FOSS for teaching speciﬁc
subjects should be identiﬁed and used wherever possible. Staff with the requisite skills should be
encouraged to develop relevant educational software and release them as FOSS.
Development of FOSS for Education
The numerous FOSS available for educational use range from Learning Management Systems to
software that can be used to teach speciﬁc subjects in schools or universities. However, in order for
academic institutions in a particular country to use these software, it may be necessary to modify them
to suit local educational requirements. In countries where English is not used as the medium of
instruction, there is also a need to translate the software into the local language. Where there are no
suitable FOSS available such as a Student Information System or software applications for speciﬁc
academic subjects, then there may also be a need to develop new applications.
To encourage the customization, localization and development of FOSS for education, the relevant
government agencies should consider establishing incentive schemes for the private sector and
academic institutions to undertake these activities. This can be in the form of grants that would help to
alleviate the risks involved in investing in the development of educational FOSS that may not have direct
commercial returns for the private sector.
Earlier we gave some examples of the use of FOSS in research and the reason why it should be used,
instead of proprietary software, where possible. To promote the use of FOSS in research activities,
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FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION
agencies providing research grants can consider making the use of FOSS one of the criteria for the award
of the grants. They can also specify that any software developed as part of research activities should be
released as FOSS. These conditions should apply regardless of whether the research is related to ICTs,
since computer software are very often used as research tools in many other areas.
Immediate measures need to be taken to build the human resource capacity required to implement and
support FOSS. This will require setting up training centres that conduct programmes preferably leading
to certiﬁcation such as LPI or RHCE certiﬁcation. The training centres may be government-run, set up by
the private sector or set up in partnership with universities or colleges. To act as a catalyst and to ensure
the availability of sufﬁcient trainers to run these programmes, “train the trainers” programmes can be
Foss 13/01/04 7:11 PM Page 33
BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is a computer programme developed to facilitate the resolution
of domain names to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses on the Internet. It is the most widely used DNS server
DHCP is the acronym for Dynamic Host Conﬁguration Protocol. Every computer connected to a network
needs to be assigned an IP address. This can be done manually but it is most common to have the IP
address assigned dynamically by a DHCP server.
DNS (Domain Name System) is an Internet service that translates domain names into Internet Protocol
(IP) addresses. Domain names (e.g., www.sample.com) are easier to remember and to use but the Internet
is actually based on cryptic IP addresses (e.g., 126.96.36.199). Hence, a translation between the two is
The word “free” in Free Software refers to the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and
improve the software. It does not refer to the price of the software. More precisely, a programme is Free
Software if users have the four freedoms:
The freedom to run the programme, for any purpose.
The freedom to study how the programme works, and adapt it to one’s needs. Access to the
source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
The freedom to improve the programme, and release your improvements to the public, so that
the whole community beneﬁts. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The deﬁnition of Free Software and a more detailed explanation is available at www.fsf.org/
GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is a collection of front ends for programming languages that is included
in most Linux distributions. It currently supports computer languages such as C, C++, Objective-C,
ForTran, Java and Ada and contains libraries for these languages. Work is in progress to include other
languages such as Pascal and COBOL.
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FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Programme) is the most well known FOSS for image editing. It is
available for various operating systems. It supports various image ﬁle formats and is considered to be the
FOSS equivalent of the proprietary Adobe Photoshop software.
GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) is one of the two main desktop environments with a
graphical user interface for the Linux operating system. It is intended to make the Linux operating system
easy to use.
GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”. In 1984, a project was started by Richard Stallman to
develop a complete UNIX style operating system that is available as Free Software.This is called the GNU
The General Public License (GPL) was originally used as the license for “Free Software” distributed by the
Free Software Foundation (FSF). Under the GPL, users may run, study, copy and modify the software. Users
may also redistribute the modiﬁed software. However, users are not allowed to add their own restrictions
and the modiﬁed software must be released under the same licensing terms.
IDE (Integrated Development Environment) refers to an integrated computer programming
environment that usually has a user-friendly graphical user interface and that provides the necessary
tools for developing computer programmes.
IMS (IMS Global Learning Consortium) is a non-proﬁt worldwide consortium that includes educational
institutions, software companies and publishers. It develops open technical speciﬁcations to support
distributed learning. Several of these speciﬁcations are being adopted internationally as standards for
learning technology.These speciﬁcations allow different course management systems and content from
different authors to work together or interoperate.
KDE (K Desktop Environment) is one of two main desktop environments with a graphical user interface
for the Linux operating system. It is intended to make the Linux operating system easy to use.
LAN (Local Area Network) is a local computer network for communication between computers, typically
covering a small area such as an ofﬁce building or a group of buildings like a campus. A LAN may be
connected to the Internet or it may be a separate distinct network. LAN is commonly used for sharing of
resources such as ﬁles, printers and disk storage.
In the context of software, localization is the process of adapting, translating and customizing a product
for a speciﬁc market. This means the modiﬁcation of the interface so that it is meaningful and
comprehensible to local users of the product. Apart from the linguistic issues, localization also needs to
address content and cultural issues as well as technical issues.
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The Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) provides the necessary software to set up a network of diskless
workstations or thin clients to connect to a Linux server. It supports various Linux distributions, and many
sites are using LTSP. During boot up, the diskless workstation obtains the necessary network information
from the server and the operating system is downloaded from the server. Any programme supported by
the server can be run from the workstation.
In 2001, MIT announced the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project through which it would make available
course material used in the courses taught at MIT. These would be available online for use by educators,
students and self-learners from anywhere in the world. Materials for 700 courses from virtually all the
academic disciplines are currently available on the OCW website (ocw.mit.edu).
The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) was initiated at MIT in 2001. It is a collaboration among some
leading universities, with MIT and Stanford leading the initiative.The objective of OKI is to deﬁne an open
and extensible architecture for learning technology and it is targeted speciﬁcally to the needs of the
higher education community. It provides speciﬁcations for interfaces among components within a
learning management system and facilitates communication with other systems, including existing
Open Source software does not only mean access to the source code.To qualify as Open Source software,
the distribution terms of the software must comply with the following criteria:
Availability of Source Code
Possibility of Derived Works
Integrity of The Author’s Source Code
No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
Distribution of License
License Must Not Be Speciﬁc to a Product
License Must Not Restrict Other Software
License Must Be Technology-Neutral
For further explanation of the deﬁnition of Open Source, please refer to: www.opensource.org/
The OS (Operating System) is the collection of software that controls the hardware and software
applications on a computer. The OS manages and allocates the physical resources (CPU processing time,
hard disk space, inputs from the keyboard, etc.) among the different applications that run on it. Examples
of an OS are Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X.
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FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION
Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is an interpretive programming language designed to
process text and is typically used for CGI scripts. Perl has been developed as an open source project and
was started in 1987 by Larry Wall. Developed originally for UNIX it is now available for different operating
PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page”. Today it is a recursive acronym for “PHP: Hypertext
Preprocessor”. PHP is an Open Source server-side scripting language for Web programming. You can use
it to add dynamic features to HTML pages or to create entire sites that generate HTML dynamically. PHP
is executed on the server and the client cannot view the PHP code. PHP is compatible with many types of
Python is an interpreted, interactive and object-oriented programming language developed by Guido
van Rossum in 1991. Python is portable and runs on most operating systems. It is suitable for rapid
prototyping and as an extension language for applications that need a programmable interface.
Although Python is copyrighted, the source code is freely available and distributable even for
SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) is an XML-based framework that allows
interoperability, accessibility and reusability of learning content. Learning content created using SCORM
can be easily shared among different learning management systems.
The source code of the software is the set of programming instructions that is written by the
programmer using a particular computer language. In order for the computer to understand and run the
software, the source code must be compiled or “translated” into machine code (also referred to as binary
code, executable code or object code). To modify the software, the source code must be available for
modiﬁcations, as the machine code is not human-readable.
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) includes all of the costs involved in a technology or business solution. In
addition to the initial investment cost, such costs include maintenance, support, replacement costs, and
the like. In the case of software, the TCO should include the initial cost of the software; upgrade cost; and
maintenance, support and training costs.
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portfolio.umaine.edu/~hartt/OS in Education.pdf.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tan Wooi Tong is Programme Specialist for the International Open Source Network (IOSN) at UNDP’s
Asia-Paciﬁc Development Information Programme (APDIP). He obtained his Bachelor and Master degrees
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US. He has more than 20 years of working experience in
the Information Technology ﬁeld, academic institutions and engineering ﬁrms.
Foss 13/01/04 7:11 PM Page 40
The Asia-Paciﬁc Development Information
The International Open Source Network (IOSN) is
Programme (APDIP) is an initiative of the United
an initiative of UNDP’s Asia-Paciﬁc Development
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that
Information Programme (APDIP). Its overall
aims to promote the development and application
objective is to serve as a Center of Excellence and a
of new Information and Communication Techno-
Clearinghouse for Information on Free and Open
logies (ICT) for poverty alleviation and sustainable
Source Software (FOSS) in the Asia-Paciﬁc region. In
human development in the Asia-Paciﬁc region. It
order to accelerate the world-wide adoption of
does so through three core programme areas,
FOSS, IOSN seeks to raise awareness, facilitate
namely, Policy Development and Dialogue; Access;
networking of people, strengthen capacities, and
and Content Development and Knowledge
The beneﬁciaries of IOSN are governments, IT
In collaboration with national governments, APDIP
professionals, software developers, the FOSS R&D
seeks to assist national and regional institutions in
community, academics and the NGO community.
the Asia-Paciﬁc through activities that involve
IOSN serves as a resource center to help policy-
awareness-raising and advocacy, building capacities,
makers and decision-makers in the public sector,
promoting ICT policies and dialogue, promoting
educational institutions, businesses and others
equitable access to tools and technologies,
develop policies and plans for the use of FOSS in
knowledge sharing, and networking. Strategic
their respective organizations. Much of IOSN’s
public-private sector partnerships and opportunities
activities are undertaken online and the IOSN portal
for technical cooperation among developing
has been developed for this purpose and serves as
countries (TCDC) are APDIP’s key building blocks in
a comprehensive online resource center on FOSS.
implementing each programme activity.
The IOSN portal also provides a means for the FOSS
community in the region to contribute to its efforts
and to interact with each other.