PLU uses a number of open source projects in its day-to-day operation. This is a list of some of those projects.
Sakai is PLU's latest open source endeavor. The Sakai system is a
communally developed online course management system. PLU
Blackboard-based eCourse is being replaced with Sakai. Mainly managed
by the Sakai Foundation and the University of Michigan, Sakai hails from
a wide development base. Most sakai developers are in higher
education, but there are also community members from the industry and
health-care sectors. Sakai is licensed under the Educational Commons
License (ECL).
Sakai is attractive to schools for many
reasons. Most obvious is the price-tag but also are the wide
user-base, fast rate of development, and the large scope of tools being custom-developed for the system. PLU currently
lends time specifically to a Sakai tool that will aid institutions in
migrating from WebCT and Blackboard to Sakai.
SquirrelMail is a standards-based webmail package written in PHP. The project has a long history as a very stable and easily customized open alternative to other webmail systems. PLU adopted it in the Summer of 2006 as a open-source replacement for our legacy webmail system. PLU has customized SquirrelMail in various ways including skinning, address book enhancements, LDAP integration, and a forthcoming single-sign-on mechanism.
Firefox is a full featured web-browser based on the Gecko rendering engine.
PLU uses Firefox as the standard web-browser on all university machines.
Thunderbird is an open source email client from Mozilla. Like Firefox, it also uses the Gecko rendering engine. Thunderbird is recommended to all students for personal use and is supported on all university machines.
Uedit is a PHP-based web content management system. It is used to aid PLU faculty and staff in the creation and maintenance of their PLU web sites that fit into the greater PLU web design scheme. Uedit was developed by students and staff in the Digital Media department. The plans to publish Uedit under an open source license are in the works.
The Digital Asset Manager enables university departments to publish and maintain collections of digital assets such as photos, computer documents, and multimedia resources. The system employs extensible use of XML to cope with changing forms of assets. DAM was written primarily by Layne Nordgren in the Digital Media department with he hope that because the system's extensible design other institutions would find it valuable.
pGina is a login system that replaces the standard Windows system to allow integration with multiple, cross-platform authentication mechanisms. pGina was written by PLU seniors Nate Yocom and Michael Wright in 2002 originally as a capstone project. Yocom has maintained the project through a number of versions and aided its adoption all over the world. Yocom's own XPA Systems is a private consulting group that specializes in designing and implementing login solutions around pGina. The project is licensed fully open source under the GPL.
GNU/Linux, often referred to simply as "Linux", is an open source operating system widely used in industry, education, and at home. At PLU we use Redhat Enterprise Linux on over a dozen centralized servers. These servers perform myriad tasks--everything from backup management, internet connection management, user lookup and authentication, to email handling.
Inventory Live is a wireless open source approach to collection
inventory and maintainenance. PLU library staff use it to track inventory changes and quality control issues with the library's collection. It is used to wirelessly inventory the collection and is integrated with the commercial tracking system Voyager employed to enable web-based searching of the library catalog.
The Gatekeeper project is a network registration and trouble-ticket system. It was developed over the years by students and staff in the Computing and Telecommunications department. The current version is 3.5 and written in Perl, but there is an open source, java-based version known as Gatekeeper 4 in the works. Gatekeeper 4 is being designed by Eric Finseth (PLU 05') and Aaron Gerow (PLU 06') to apply to a wider-than-PLU audience. The intention is that other institutions with similar network registration needs will be able to use Gatekeeper.
Here is a short list of some open source tools in use at the center of PLU's IT infrastructure. For more information contact Keith Folsom in the System's and Communication department.
Students and faculty in the CSCE department also rely on open source software. This comes inherently to many academic situations in which learning the under-pinnings of a given software system wouldn't be possible with closed source systems. Here is a small list to name just a few of the technologies and systems at use in the department: