Open Source Software - Resources

OSS Watch is a JISC-funded advisory service on open source; the website provides many resources, including briefing notes, studies, reusable teaching material and a forum for discussion.
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/

The Open Source Initiative provides full details of open source licences; the Open Source Definition is also maintained by the OSI.
http://www.www.opensource.org/
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html

The Free Software Foundation is a more overtly political group promoting the free use of all software.
http://www.fsf.org/

The UK Government published a policy on Open Source in November 2004, which sets out guidance for exploitation of publicly-funded software development. This is expanded upon by the forthcoming JISC policy.
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/consult_subject_document.asp?docnum=905

The Australian Government Information Management Office have published a useful Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies. It contains detailed advice on administrative and managerial aspects of open source software.
http://www.sourceit.gov.au/sourceit/oss

There has been a great deal of study of open source methodology, and it is the subject of current funding by the EU, details of which can be found at:
http://www.flosspols.org/

A large amount of open source software is available to meet most needs. For desktop use, a mature selection of programs to run under Windows is available on TheOpenCD:
http://www.theopencd.org/

Ubuntu provides a robust and well-integrated Linux environment:
http://www.ubuntu.com/

Firefox is one of the best web browsers available:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

OpenOffice is a major office suite, made open source by Sun Microsystems:
http://www.openoffice.org/

In educational circles, the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) is an innovative project for online learning, developed by Macquarie University under a dual-licensing model
http://www.lamsinternational.com/

Moodle is a very popular virtual learning environment (VLE) with an admirable community ethos.
http://moodle.org/

There have been many other successful open source projects in higher education.uPortal is a standards-compliant portal framework developed by a consortium of top US universities with UK participation.
http://www.uportal.org/

In the UK, JISC has funded the e-Prints project for institutional repositories, and the Reload SCORM editor and player.
http://software.eprints.org/
http://www.reload.ac.uk/

In management of web and mail servers, the use of the Linux operating system is very common, as are the Perl and PHP scripting languages.
http://www.linux.org/
http://www.perl.org/
http://www.php.net/