Do open source learning solutions really stand a chance?

This evening I was reading the blog of Andreas Wittke who brings up an interesting and the same time somewhat worrying perspective. I think he is quite right in his analysis that higher education institutes have a sort of default procedure when they consider changing to another VLE. Basically the process starts with setting up an extensive list of requirements, followed by a request for proposal (to which companies can subscribe). After the companies have provided their information a small number is invited to make a commercial offer. This whole procedure has to be done according to strict European rules (and takes part mostly behind closed doors). Basically this is what happened in the decision making process of buying a new student information system (SIS) at the University of Twente. For open source communities it is much more difficult to make a bid and offer their proposition in this kind of procedures. The Sakai board tried to enter the Dutch High Education market in 2007, e.g. by setting up a meeting with members from the boards of directors and not to forget by organizing one of the Sakai World Conferences in Amsterdam. It was not a great success in the sense that only a few institutes went along with Sakai. The criteria that Andreas Wittke mentions sound very familiar. Annual turnover is one of them. Companies fall out of the buying procedure, just because their annual turnover is too low. This makes it impossible to compete for small or relatively young companies, which don't have a very good track record. And what about market share? Microsoft claims to have a 95% market share, but this can also be part of their sales strategy in order to keep up a high score on this criterium. An analysis earlier this week at the University of Twente shows that 27% of our VLE users use Firefox as a browser, which is surprisingly close to the share mentioned by Wittke. Perhaps we may set our hopes to our government. The Dutch parliament is nowadays very critical about the sales procedures on software applications. The recent disasters in large governmental ICT projects will make this even worse. A few weeks ago the government stated that in case of equality of software applications (I wonder how they will measure equality...), governmental institutes (which then also applies to higher education institutes) should choose for open standards and open source. Among a lot of other issues we did mention this in our final evaluation report on MS SharePoint. It seems that Google Sites might be(come) an interesting alternative. Our board of directors has to make up their minds on what to do with our current VLE TeleTOP. But what will it be? Take the 'easy' way and go for a migration project with a big and reliable multinational? Or maybe not... Whatever the choice, I think it is time to make a choice, any choice. After three years of doing research, running pilots, analysing where the real problems are, it is not done to postpone the decision again. The first group of students who gave their input on what needs to be improved (system integration!) are moving quickly towards their bachelor or master degree. So they won't benefit anyway...