Education IT Chiefs Debate Open Source

“”It’s really tough to take [commercial software] systems built
for a corporate world and stick them into an education world,” said
Bradley Wheeler, vice president for IT and CIO at Indiana
University, adding that one recent book estimated education
globally would spent US$5.5 billion installing ERP, much of it in
modifying commercial software to meet institutional needs. “We
spend so much money trying to hard fit those things in.”

“”I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that we will
substantially match our business [with a community-source project]
any better than a commercial system,” countered Adrian Sannier,
university technology officer and professor of computing studies at
Arizona State University. “The CIOs of oil companies don’t say ‘our
business is so different from everyone else’s, [that] we have to
write our own financial applications.’ They’re doing everything
they can to get out of that business.””

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