A comment on James Farmer's (ongoing)
rant against commercial software in education.
Despite efforts by James and others (who have often bit the bullet and become experts at system administration despite probably just wanting to use the damn technology), I think most institutions are in the situation where it's probably cheaper (factoring in necessary staffing) and less risky to go commercial much of the time, rather than go the open source route, hiring the right people to support/extend it, etc.
This is again because the open source projects are more difficult than they need be, and the perception (and often the reality) is that it is rare to find people to turn to for help, compared with the help you'd get from a company you bought software from.
Imagine if you could actually get the right people and resources together to improve those open source projects (with or without the consent of the developers of those projects), flesh them out in terms of documentation, add some support channels, etc. Build out these projects into products in essence. This could help nudge these open source tools into the realm of possibility for many institutions: reduce the resources required (which are now needlessly duplicated in every place trying to get rough tools working) and risk globally.
Here's I think the underlying reality that probably infuriates James and people in similar positions. The cost to do this is fairly small, probably miniscule compared with the cost of all these different insitutions paying hefty license fees for commercial alternatives. However, and here's the sticking point, that cost is still way more than any individual institution would be paying for commercial choices.
See the problem?
I can't of course let this go without a comment on the (in)ability of academics to work together in a constructive manner, to get organized across institutional boundaries, raise the needed funds to get such a collaboration going, manage it appropriately, and so on. You know, all those skills that businesses are supposed to have.