There is an interesting discussion at Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog about Academia and the adoption of open source software. I think sometimes we make the mistake of relying too heavily on the ‘it’s free’ argument when promoting open source solutions. It’s misleading as there are inevitably other costs associated with large scale open source implementation (application support and development, for instance), so the cost comparison is actually difficult. There are plenty of other arguments for open source initiatives within the academic environment when the project is right.
Thoughts, anyone?