Capillary Growth

I see my old chums at OSS Watch have come out with a survey of open source use in higher and further education institutes in the UK, and it makes interesting reading.

The extent to which open source is creeping into higher education almost without anyone noticing is striking. From the summary:

Most institutions (69%) have deployed and will continue to deploy OSS on their servers. Generally, the software on servers is a mix of OSS and proprietary software (PS). The use of OSS is most common for database servers (used by 62% of institutions), web servers (59%) and operating systems (56%).

This is particularly true on the desktop. Although GNU/Linux is not much used there, free software apps are:

Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer are deployed by all institutions on most desktops. Other commonly deployed applications are Microsoft Outlook (82%) and Mozilla/Firefox (68%). The latter's use is now considerably higher than in 2003.

Not mentioned in this summary, is the share for OpenOffice.org (23%) and Thunderbird (22%) both of which are eminently respectable. It's also noteworthy that some 56% of further education establishments surveyed used Moodle.