Welcome to OSS@PLU, the homepage for the university's open source initiative. This site is here help you learn more about open source software and how it affects PLU. If you're new to the idea of open source, the FAQ might be a good place to start. Otherwise you can look into more specifics of open source deployments at PLU like the Sakai project, or our inventory of the open source programs we use and develop. If you want more information, go to the contacts page.
Indiana University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the Mellon Foundation have invested millions of dollars in recent years to produce Sakai, an open source course management system that
costs nothing to download and install, but substantial staff time to implement and support. Dozens of higher education institutions have already migrated or are migrating to Sakai. PLU has joined them in implementing Sakai, but this is only the beginning.
The options for open source software in academia are numerous and growing. As more communities identify similar needs and coalesce around mutually helpful development projects within the open source paradigm, the more options open source has for everybody. Classically the options for institutions is to either purchase incorporated, closed source, software or write their own. PLU has indeed pursued a number of options in both categories with such commercial systems like Corporate Time Calendar, Blackboard "eCourse", and the Banner administrative information system. On the other side PLU has developed many of its own solutions like Uedit, Inventory Live, Gatekeeper, and the Digital Asset Manager. In the middle is a more robust, sustainable solution -- open source. PLU currently employs a lot of open source software like Mozilla Firefox, GNU/Linux, Drupal, and pGina.
PLU's open source initiative has inspired the university to create an 'open source implementation specialist' position in the Digital Media Center. This position will initially help mainly to install, configure, migrate-to, and maintain the sakai course-ware system. Also, this position will work collaboratively with other universities to contribute to the Sakai project. In the future this position could b
e employed to design pathways away from costly closed source software to more sustainable open source solutions like The GIMP (an alternative to Adobe Photoshop), OpenOffice.org (Microsoft Office), and even Linux (Microsoft Windows).