The past few days we’ve had folks from the Kuali Foundation here giving us an overview of their projects, so I thought I’d post my reactions.

I think the Kuali business model—developing open source software in a consortium of similar organizations—makes the most sense for the University. Our current model of developing everything on our own seems less and less sustainable as time goes by; even if we were to continue developing what we’ve already done indefinitely we’d want to try to find other partner institutions to share development efforts with eventually. I think it would be easier and cheaper to convert to something open source like Kuali rather than a vendor product where we would have to rely on their documentation rather than being able to look at the source code to see what’s actually going on. Also, as a member of a consortium we would have more influence on product directions and features than as mere customers of a vendor. The only real advantage of going with a vendor from a management perspective is you have someone else to blame when things go wrong.

Given that the business model seems good, the only question is how is the quality of the product. Now, it’s hard to judge that just on presentations and demos, but they seem to have done a reasonably good job of designing and implementing their systems. So if it were up to me, I’d say we should plan to convert to Kuali.