This might be long. Let’s start with a quote from an article in the Economist linked by Tim Bray:
“I hate programmers,” replies this dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. “They only cause trouble.”
The article, by the way, is about the appalling state of IT at major banks, with some “buy vs. build” discussion. Anyway, since I’ve been saying my job is to cause trouble for quite a while, here I go again.
We can identify three basic paths the University could follow in moving to “open systems”:
- Convert to commercial products like Peoplesoft or Banner and stop developing our own administrative applications.
- Convert to shared source applications like Kuali and Sempai and collaborate on application development with those communities
- Select new development tools (programming languages, databases, etc.) and continue to develop UT-specific applications.
There are variations within these plans—especially the last one—but I think any roadmap we could come up with fits into one of these three categories. So what criteria should we use to pick one?