Hello. Well this is great. I want to put one or two things on the table that I think flow from both Pat's post and Richard's comments. I do think that requirements should be guided by the end user and when necessary the translation can be facilitated through multiple professionals. So, when a faculty member indicates that she want to be able to support “group work” and assessment based on ongoing development of socially derived artifacts, there is somebody who can identify how those needs will be functionally supported. That is, the functionality of the application.
That's fine on one level, at least for the faculty member mentioned above, but at some point we know that she is going to want something else because her needs will evolve. This is predictable, and a good administrator will recognize this and somebody has got to ask the question about the extensibility of the application relative to teaching and learning functionality. Another administrator will also look at growth rates of his institution and will ask how the application will perform in 3 years when our enrollment have increased by 120%, etc. These, becomes architectural issues that require translation for the faculty members or administrators with needs, but do possess the technical competence or understanding to evaluate the options. This would hold true also for needs that point to the benefits of open code and fee free applications.
My point here is that we might want to evaluate software based on qualities that meet our needs, as Pat suggested at the end of his post, but find ways to ask the right questions and translate the questions into qualities. There are differences between the value propositions around Free Software 1 as discussed in Wayne's posting and proprietary software. I think that some of the differences are exposed through the Business Readiness Rating model 2 (BRR) that outlines ways to assess and evaluate open source software.
Can we acknowledge the differences in Free and proprietary software without making OSS a point of debate and fear among faculty, administrators, etc? That is, is lauding the benefits of free software a distraction? If so, are there methods that help prevent the relevance of OSS from becoming a distraction?
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