Why Open Source is good for Academic Institutions?

Open Source with its promise of distributing source code and allowing anyone to modify it or derive other software from it, makes it an excellent choice for learning computer science, technology and engineering of software.

Academic institutions are given the responsibility of building strong expertise in all aspects of software engineering, be it operating systems, device drivers, database systems, application architecting and engineering, front end graphical user interface (GUI), complex algorithms, working internals of business applications or tools. Learning proprietary tools or technologies that doesn’t provide the software code and the freedom to modify or derive other software from it, limits the learning potential of academicians and students to fully understand the software, thereby seriously curtailing the creativity of the great minds and the learning process.

If one has to become an automobile engineer dreaming of building better automobiles, he/she has to learn the core engineering principles, how the basic building blocks of automobile work and how to design an automobile with building blocks. Similarly a software engineer has to understand in school, the core software engineering principles, how the basic building blocks of software applications work, i.e., operating system internals, database internals, applications server internals, libraries internals, IDE tools internals, business application internals and how the applications are architected and implemented. Unless one has access to the source code of these building blocks and architecture and implementation of these, learning is going to be limited and in-effective. Hence the best way is understanding of the software source code, modifying it or deriving from it for effective learning in the school.

Open source adaptability provides this great opportunity as it harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of implementation. Also it provides lower cost of adoption and higher flexibility of learning for academicians and students.

It is the best time for academic institutes, faculty and students to come together to adopt open source technologies like Linux Operating System, MySQL & Postgress databases, Perl, PHP, Python, Java and Ruby programming languages, Open Standards for application architecture and engineering, Open Source tools and Open Source Business applications in all domains.

Why Open Source will be hot now?

With the deepening of the credit crisis, melt down in the financial industry, the IT budgets in the big companies is under squeeze.

Companies are looking at optimising their IT budgets and seriously looking at Return on their investments. The commercial software license costs; be in hardware, operating system, infrastructure, database, commercial applications and consulting & support, is being reviewed and seriously considered for optimising and cost cutting.

Open source software and solutions have a great opportunity to survive and benefit in this economy as they provide better returns for the companies that are looking to save huge licensing costs and greater availability of solutions and software that can be easily adopted.

Open source software and solutions have matured over years and a bigger community to support them. There are several solutions from multiple vendors for business problems and substantially less expensive compared to commercial software from the proprietary software companies.

According to statistics, open source solutions did really well during the last economic downturn in the year 2000 and 2001.

Aghreni technologies started at Banglore, India realising the potential of open-source technologies and solutions and its impact on society and enterprises, is focussing on providing open source technology services and solutions.

Aghreni's business solutions practices provides consulting and implementation services major open source ERP, BI, Content Management and Email Marketing applications.

Aghreni provides product incubation and services on open source technologies like Java, perl and php. It has an interesting mix of services on open source technologies and trying to promote them in a big way. It has also embarked in creating the talent pool locally through their education services targetted at college students who would like to build their career on open source technologies early in their college.

For more information on the company, you can visit their website http://www.aghreni.com or drop an email at info@aghreni.com