At any university, college or school, there are open source advocates who see the advantages FOSS can bring to their institutions. They are common “in the trenches,” but in a Dilbert-esque twist, are rare among the decision-making elite. Over time and as their careers advance, I think we’ll see the inexorable increase in use of Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and other FOSS applications as formal policy. Until then, I’m watching the subtle clues that tell us what’s hiding out there. Here’s a good example from Zane State College in Ohio:

“I have dominion over a handful of laptops that faculty can check out of the IDEA Center. After MIS puts the base image on the laptop (operating system, Novell stuff, MS Office) they hand it over to me to add whatever I want. Then MIS captures the image and pushes it down to the other laptops and we end up with five identical images.

So what did I put on the image?”

Hit the link above to see the chosen apps.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2006 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.