Thanks for the great comments, Gavin. It had been my original intention to have a couple of sections on the practical implications (or prescriptions, as you put it) for open source in higher education, but I realized that it would have doubled or even tripled the length of this post to do so. Ken is already talking about some kind of follow-up activity that focuses on Benkler's ideas, which I believe can lead to some prescriptions regarding how higher education-focused open source projects could be optimized.
In the meantime, you might want to look at OpenBRR 1, which is a framework for evaluating open source *products* for implementing institutions. Ken and I did a preliminary analysis of modifying the framework to specifically allow cross-comparison of open source and proprietary LMS platforms by universities. It's available from the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education 2. (Sadly, it's not free. One of these days, Ken and I need to get around to writing a non-proprietary version of our analysis.)
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