The use of OSS in academic computing is sometimes invisible, because it meets the requirements, the end users or academic decision makers are not even aware that they are using OSS. As the academy increasing depends on software to support mission critical tasks and as OSS becomes ubiquitous across application and system classes, who will make decisions about the use of OSS? Pat takes this a step further by discussing the differences between how the treatment of OSS low in the software stack relative to very visible applications differs. He points out that software low on the stack that is OSS meets with little debate and has virtually no visibility to academic decision makers, while applications at the top of the stack or residing on the desktop are treated differently. This is captured in the following question, “How many of the folks governing online education and debating Moodle are also debating the LAMP stack?” In addition, it is pointed out that because vendors are adopting OSS, but not advertising the fact, many academic decision makers are selecting OSS based applications without knowing it, so they treat OSS objectively. Pat suggests that this is an overall governance issue and a function of awareness of academic decision makers relative to software across the stack.
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