OSS Watch Survey 2006

OSS Watch performed a survey during February and March 2006 on UK Higher Education and Further Education institutions with the purpose to get an image of the present situation of open source software (OSS) in the target group. A comparison was made with the previous similar report drafted in 2003 and future work areas were identified for OSS Watch activities.

The survey was carried out by Dr. Ellen J. Helsper. Helsper, a Tutorial Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, considered also the reasons for using OSS and the contribution to the OSS community by the target group.

Having received answers from 23 institutions, the present study shows a positive trend in the use on OSS in both types of institutions.

Some of the findings of the 2006 survey are that:

• Although only 25% of institutions mention OSS in an institutional policy, in practice 77% of institutions consider OSS when procuring software;
• 69% of institutions have deployed OS software on servers;
• 100% of institutions provide Internet Explorer on their Windows desktop PCs, yet 68% now also provide Mozilla Firefox;
• 56% of Further Education institutions use Moodle as a Virtual Learning Environment;
• there is a big number of CMS solutions in use;
• cost continues to the principal driver in reasons for considering OSS.

One of the most important results of the report is that OSS solutions have increased since 2003 and will certainly continue to be used in educational institutions also in the future.

OSS Watch Survey 2006 (07.06)
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/studies/survey2006/