Jun 19, 2007

Jay Pfaffman, an instructional technology professor from the University of Tenessee recently wrote an excellent piece which appeared on the LinuxInsider site entitled, It's Time to Consider Open Source Software. As can be expected, this generated a fair amount of debate and comment on the CETPA (California Education Technology Professionals Association) listserv, which revealed a surprisingly prevalent perspective that using open source software somehow equates to "switching" or replacing existing applications only.

I believe it's important to emphasize to all education technology people (or anyone else, for that matter) that they should not view open source simply as a cheap replacement for something else. There is no need or requirement to switch any core application, business process, etc., if one's organization is unprepared to do so or finds it otherwise unnecessary. However, when an opportunity or initiative is in play, then open source should absolutely be in the mix for consideration. The arguments against doing so simply don't hold up to any sort of honest evaluation.

Jun 8, 2007

Latest Xen Posts

For those who are wondering why I haven't posted lately, especially since the latest Xen releases, I'm now on the advisory boards for techtarget.com's SearchEnterpiseLinux and SearchServerVirtualization sections, and have been posting there on Linux and Xen. My two most recent posts are:

Xen 3.1, XenEnterprise and RHEL

Last week, XenSource released Xen 3.1 (formerly 3.0.5) to the community, offering significant new features and capabilities. There are a number of enhancements, but the most significant are More...

Fedora 7 Xen First Look

Having spent a few days with Fedora 7, I have found that, while still a bit buggy, the updated Xen tools show some real promise More...

You can quickly get to all my posts there, and subscribe to a feed of them, if you want, at http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.techtarget.com/author/jklein/

I may double post them down the road - we'll see how this new site goes.