Greg Jackson Will Speak on Sustaining Open Source in his Jasig Keynote

Greg Jackson has been a force in the Research & Education IT community for many years. From leadership positions at MIT, the University of Chicago, and now EDUCAUSE, he’s been a pusher for policy and organizational changes needed to support R&E at all levels. And he has an uncanny knack for making people see what’s important.


Until recently, the big stakes game for R&E IT was the network – ensuring that the network needs of R&E can be met and sustained by the R&E community. We now take for granted multi-gigabit end to end speeds between R&E locations anywhere in the world, but it took the formation of Internet2, National Lambda Rail, the Regional Optical Networks, Starlight, and many other organizations to change away from a course that would have left R&E dependent on the business models of the commercial network providers.


Now the stakes are high around IT services needed by R&E. Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and other commercial providers are winning mindshare with their products and cloud services, but will their businesses suffer if they don’t produce a good research library management system, integrate with our student information systems, or enable far-flung collaborators to parse corpuses of digitized text and particle collision products?


Against these Goliaths we pit our Davids: Jasig, Kuali, SAKAI, Internet2, Globus, and other organizations that produce open source software meeting needs peculiar to R&E. They are crucial, but are organizations like these, and their products, sustainable?


In his keynote, Greg will focus his ability to distill the important, and his considerable organizational experience, on the need to sustain our open source efforts. How should we deal with maintenance and updating of a successful open source product? Is the way we produced it to begin with also a good way to sustain it? Should commercial interests be harnessed somehow? Are all products sustained in the same way? What should open source producing organizations be and how should they do that?


You can find out more about Greg and his presentation on the Jasig Conference website.