Rob Abel has only recently been appointed as CEO of IMS. I guess one can't fault IMS for trying to drive some more membership in order to secure some funding, they are not necessarily a rich organization, but this whole thing felt a bit icky. I noticed it too this morning when I got the mailing. IMS has always had a focus on commercial vendors for a good reason, these are the guys who have far more interest in playing fast and loose with 'standards' and were in large part the reason for these efforts in the first place. But it does feel kind of strange for the CEO of IMS to be authoring papers on open source software adoption.

There is also the invitation: if you want to read the article, you have to become a paying member of a consortium which seems to have a lot of support from commercial software vendors. Sounds like a good marketing strategy for offering the alternate solution. Things would certainly seem less icky if the report on open source were itself open.

You should forward your note to Inside Higher Ed. They certainly don't want to be a puppet for this kind of creative research. Nice detective work. It's a common practice for "the man" to disguise his own marketing research as something other than that. Guerilla marketing. News releases have been doing that for a while, but these days, those aren't very effective anymore. Gotta try something else, I guess.

I posted a couple of comments to their piece. Hopefully someone at Inside Higher Ed reads the comments that people post.

Hi All- I can certainly understand why you might think all this IMS and open source stuff is a little weird. So, let me explain it to you. I posted a response at Inside Higher Ed as well. This one is a little more detailed.

First, the study was funded by Sun Microsystems, Unicon, and SCT. While commercial companies all three have been leaders in promoting and implementing open source in higher educattion. Second, the study was conducted from day 1 under the auspices that only those who participated in the research and the sponsors would receive the full report. That's how we attract support and involvement. If we made it all available for free no one would see why they should pay or participate. Third, IMS has had no involvement - other than me. We're making the A-HEC research a benefit of IMS membership starting with this and in the future. Fourth, IMS is not just commercial vendors - far from it. Members include open University, Stanford, Michigan, Indiana, MIT, etc. Fourth, I wrote the report and the sponsors helped make minor editorial comments. So, it is my work and I don't perceive myself as biased but then does anybody?

Finally, those that have actually read the report from the higher ed open source community have so far commented that it is on target. I seen many comments that it is negative but the report itself is not negative at all. I think that is the impression from the Inside Higher Ed article that interviewed many other sources. But, the overall message is not negative. In the infrastructure area (Linux, Apache, etc.) open source is doing very well in higher ed. The application area (course management systems, finance systems, etc.) is where there is no tremendous interest but not a lot of fruit yet. That doesn't mean there won't be - long way to go.

If at some point in the future this research track becomes well enough subsidized that I can afford to open it up to the whole world I will. That may happen under the IMS umbrella. I certainly hope so. You won't find Gartner, Eduventures, or even Educause providing as much open info on teir web sites as A-HEC has published - and we are much less funded.

Thanks for your interest in this, Rob

One of the biggest challenges for open source software is can't compete with billions of dollars of marketing from commerical vendors. The $100 laptop project has stated that its cheap pricetag has everything to do with no marketing fees. They mention that up to half of the cost of a computer is to reclaim spent advertising dollars.

 So, when commercial software vendors put money into negatively-slanted research, what is the open source community to do? Perhaps more millionaires open source values like Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth need to step up to fund research for the other side.

21apples - my K-12 blog on educational technology