Roundtable 1 — Reevaluating Open Source in Academia

Much has been made of the role and value of open source software within academia. But, is open source, on its own, the panacea that it was once thought to be? After all, open source is really only about a software license. 

As open source software has matured and, in many areas, become the new norm, people are looking deeper into the mechanics of collaboration. In the first of this year’s Phaidracon debates, we will explore the relevance of this debate to the Phaidra project’s objective of sustainable, long-term data preservation.

Questions

• Is open source code a solution for software longevity, or is this more about community, collaboration and agreed standards?
• In the long term, are we better to decouple data (as far as possible) from the short term liabilities of software?
• And in a world of tightening academic budgets, is sustainability more about ensuring that we use technology effectively to derive ongoing value from the data we seek to preserve?

Participants

• Chair: Raman Ganguly — Technical lead of Phaidra
  • Sayeed Choudhury — Associate dean in the Sheridan Library at Johns Hopkins.
  • Daniel Bernstein — Technical lead Fedora
  • Radu Meza — Associate Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University