How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source? 497
exmoron writes "I work at a small university (5,500 students) and am in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions. I use a number of FOSS solutions at home (OpenOffice.org, Zotero, GIMP, VirtualBox). My university, on the other hand, is a Microsoft and proprietary software groupie (Vista boxes running MS Office 2007, Exchange email server, Endnote, Photoshop, Blackboard, etc.). I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money and think through a gradual transition process to open source software (starting small, with something like replacing Endnote with Zotero, then MS Office with OpenOffice.org, and so on). Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers? In short, what's the skinny on moving to open source? How much money could a university like mine save? Additionally, what other benefits are there to moving to open source that I could try to sell the university on? And what are the drawbacks (other than people whining about change)?"
money is not the way (Score:5, Insightful)
You won't be able to win this with the money argument. Microsoft will swarm all over you, giving free stuff away. They have a fund just to give away free licenses to anyone who's even thinking about trying open source.
No, since you're a university, the way to approach this is to let the undergrads explore. Sell it as a learning experience. Why is OSS so popular nowadays? Maybe the University itself, as a place of learning, should offer this? Don't limit it to just OSS, bring up OSX as well, to be fair. Let the students explore.
Now, how to get everything work well together? Why, we depend on open standards of course! The entire Internet is built on open standards, RFCs and so on. All the software must be open interfaces (exchange has imap, for example, and AD has ldap). Keep doing this. Get in touch with the contracting office, and ask them to consider putting language in for their RFPs and RFIs to include "must work with appropriate open standards".
Slowly, but surely, things will get better.
Surely (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:money is not the way (Score:5, Insightful)
One more thing - recognize the shortcomings of OSS too. Not everything that's OSS is perfect. There are shitty OSS things too. For example, openoffice sucks, compared to MS Office. Be open about things.
Also look at external offerings. Why run your own mail server, when you can do google apps - I think it's free for non-profits and .edus. Gmail, and instantly, you just saved a bunch of money, and a bunch of work. Now those people can be put to working on other higher priority stuff.
Re:money is not the way (Score:5, Insightful)
Always remember that a bit of job training is in there too. Your artists *need* extensive Photoshop experience. Same with Maya, 3ds max, protools, etc. And asking non-techies to switch from MS office is like convincing 70-year-olds to drive on the other side of the street.
E-mail is a perfect place to start the transition, especially if nobody uses meeting requests. But go one piece at a time, and realize that people in academia are frequently motivated by things other than money.
Re:Here is at good way to start (Score:4, Insightful)
If they're smart, they'll call bluffs selectively. Assess those likely to fail in a highly public manner if they all shift across to MS's competitors and use them for publicity. Academia is pretty word of mouth and the odd disastrous migration is worth more to Microsoft than the odd lack of licence fees. It's a risk, but it's probably what I would do on select cases. A good salesman should be able to suss out likely disasters. And lets face it, even if the software you are moving to is better (however you define that), you're going to see big problems in demand for support, data migration, etc. just by virtue of the move.
Re:money is not the way (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent is right: money is not the argument, that is worth the switch. Software companies, Microsoft included want students to learn MS Office, Adobe, Matlab, Autodesk Inventor, etc. Some companies even give their student versions of really expensive software packages away for free, just have a look at Autodesk [autodesk.com].
For the students it is of great value, if they are able to work efficiently with open source software. Just a few days ago I helped someone to switch from Endnote to Zotero+Jabref. It was quite a pain to convert from the Endnote format to something more open like the Bibtex format and there are several websites which show you 10 different hacks how to do it somehow.
With open source the file format is always documented, at least in the code itself. So if you want to work with your reference in 5 years without upgrading Endnote to Windows 8 this is the only sane choice.
For science in general it is necessary to check your results carefully and be able to reproduce other people's work somehow. How are you going to judge a paper claiming: "We simulated bla with this $$$ software package and it looks marvelous"?
Besides file formats and reproducibility in my opinion it is in most cases better to teach something that can be useful for the next 5-20 years, instead of some fast moving target. Software vendors often change their products and break backwards compatibility (Labview is great, but going back 2 versions is a no go) not because they invented this new must have feature but to sell the next version. If your students can do statistical analysis in Gnumeric and R they are well equipped for advanced work and do not have to worry about all the errors in Excel (statistics in Excel [daheiser.info]).
Re:Remind me not to send my kid there. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes! Exactly! Your argument is so wonderfully persuasive. You've totally discouraged me from open source software! I will only send my children to universities that support convicted monopolists and their patent/copyright law abusing corporate pals. Also, I 100% agree that free as in speech OR beer software shouldn't exist to insure the enrichment of these companies.
It is of UTMOST importance that I spend two years of wages on an education designed to give my kids painstakingly detailed, precise instruction on where to point-click in MS-Word to make pretty charts! And to help cover the licensing costs, I will GLADLY support and requests to raise tuition. After all, it would be down right un-American to not work my ass off to help cloth and feed a bunch of rich assholes!
Pay attention to what your users need (Score:5, Insightful)
You can do it by paying attention to what your users need, not just what you want. OpenOffice.org may be an acceptable substitute for MS Office apps in your organization. Or, you may hobble the faculty because they're required to submit Word documents for various publications, using Word templates. It's bad enough having to suffer through this in Word, but having to manage this with another layer of indirection sounds utterly intolerable. That situation sucks, but you aren't going to change it by unilateral decree.
Likewise, using the GIMP vs. Photoshop may be great for some of your users. But if they're using features daily in Photoshop that aren't supported in GIMP, soon they'll be GIMP'ing up dartboards with your face on it.
Simply put, users care about applications that meet their needs and organizations should too. If you are truly in a position to influence these decisions, then your responsibility is to understand and meet those needs, not serve your own ideology. Working contrary to users' needs is a terrible way to promote the OSS software cause; you'll make more enemies for OSS than friends.
Give up now. Pick your spots intelligently. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am being 100% honest here. I too work at a univeristy, a bit larger but same deal. You are shooting yourself in the foot big time, but well intentioned.
There are far too many individual needs in this setting to do what you propose. Instead identify and choose a few specific spots where open source actually makes sense and offers a huge advantage (there are a couple) and make it happen. Start small and be smart about it. If it goes smoothly and shows real savings and improvements you may have earned the chance to do the same in another area.
Openoffice sucks. Period. Large-scale monitoring and maintenance can also suck. Sometimes Mac OSX is even the best choice. You have to take off the rose-colored glasses and think critically about everyone's real needs not just your pie-in-the-sky dream.
Don't shortchange the whiners... (Score:5, Insightful)
In most organizations, it takes only a small group of whiners to transition the whole of an IT focus to something else. Trust me, I've been through this battle.
Make changes where it *makes sense*. Microsoft Office currently is best of breed, no offense meant to OpenOffice but seriously... it's not even in the same realm. Windows on the desktop obviously goes side by side with this.
Where you can make arguments are on the backend where users don't really have a say. Say you want to launch some web servers -- go *Nix and Apache instead of MS and IIS. Want a database cluster? Go *nix and MySQL. These are changes that *can* happen.
I have seen far too often that 'techies' get involved and just because the technology is more superior (in some way) they totally discount the business benefit from having it set up that way. What is your roadmap for the future of IT? What paths are you looking to cross? Say the CIO wants to invest some money into Sharepoint, or wants to use WIM (standard image format) for deployments, or wants to lock down users better (AD Policies). These things are *windows specific*. You can make the argument, but if you can't look at it from a business perspective, then you are already on the path to failing at your argument.
Usually the cost of changing everything, retraining users, and getting them to be AS PRODUCTIVE as they were before is far more expensive than to keep technology the same and use branches into other things to accomplish business tasks.
And don't say you're an educational facility... you're a business first, and any good business is in the *business* of making money or showing results. That's what you call an organizational unit :)
Good luck to you, but make sure you have your ducks in a row before you go making arguments of vast change, because if you don't know what the future holds or what the goals are, you will just look like an idiot.
Re:Have you ever tried to re-seed a lawn? (Score:4, Insightful)
You'll need to organize training for everyone. Twice. And you'll need a kick-ass help desk for everything from copying files to equivalents of obscure Excel formulas.
He's never prying Excel out of the hands of his accounting professors and to try to do so is fucking retarded. They simply won't do it and will continue to mandate Excel, which shoots holes in this entire game that the submitter wants to play.
He's not going to be doing this. I get the feeling that he's a helpdesk monkey with delusions of competence, though, seeing as how he doesn't even know the cost of his Microsoft licenses...
Re:money is not the way (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Trying a global migration to OSS, or anything else, is doomed to failure. I saw a similar thing in a crazy "lets get rid of Linux" effort at a big bank: doomed to failure because a few groups really wanted Linux as the compute farm OS. One size does not fit all.
The best thing to do is find bottlenecks that are tying the users to a specific OS - IE only webpages, mail servers, print services, weird apps, etc. Spend your effort prying these loose. Fight pointless mandates (you must use XYZ software to do random task ABC.) Get support in place for other OSes: if your helpdesk thinks in terms of MS software only, you are screwed - get them used to MacOS, Linux, etc. Then let the users do what they want: they'll be happier, and you'll see a lot more software diversity, which will in turn encourage more infrastructure openness.
Re:Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
You are pretty much correct, and primarily because I was not sufficiently specific.
Graphics design and media art majors should waste little time on GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, and the like. You are correct--these packages are not as robust as Photoshop and Illustrator and probably won't be.
However, 100 level classes which out-of-major students might take to fill credits or get some kind of liberal arts visual performance credit could talk a little about these options. It's unlikely that an English major is going to drop hundreds of dollars on Photoshop to crop pictures and remove red eye when they could do it for free with GIMP.
What's more important, though, is teaching the theory behind the methods instead of teaching the software.
Re:money is not the way (Score:3, Insightful)
> Also look at external offerings. Why run your
> own mail server, when you can do google apps
Right, why be Microsoft proprietary and have *SOME* control over your destiny when you can be Goolge proprietary and have *NONE*.
Not to be negative... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Declaration of independence (Score:3, Insightful)
Tis true - we all become that which we fight against.
Re:money is not the way (Score:5, Insightful)
This is huge and vastly underestimated. Your goal should not be to transition to open source--that's just as bad as an all closed-source ecosystem. Your goal should be to transition to infrastructural openness so people can use what they want. If they want to use Office, great--just make sure that their documents save in ODF so everybody can access them, etc. etc.
Re:Heh, good luck getting rid of Blackboard (Score:3, Insightful)
We moved from Blackboard to Moodle at our institution. I am responsible for it and we have a very much larger installation than yours, even. But the GP is right - the instigation for the move came from a department that engaged and dealt with the academic departments. The drive did not come from the University's IT services and nor would it. IT in a university is a supporter, seldom a driver.
Re:Have you ever tried to re-seed a lawn? (Score:4, Insightful)
A "nothing but open source" policy is as terrible as a "no open source" policy. Use what's best for the job, not what fits your ideologies.
New media departments, for example, aren't going to switch to whatever bullshit the OSS world flogs when they have Maya/3DS Max, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Blender's good but nonstandard and nobody really uses it, the GIMP sucks for all the reasons everybody already knows, and Inkscape simply does not step to Illustrator.
It seems like most of the posters here have missed the point. Open source software at a university is not an end in and of itself. Getting the job done is.
Re:Surely (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking from experience: Microsoft site licenses for its products for academic institution cost $0. What's not available for free with MSDNAA [msdnaa.net]
is negotiated to be as if it were.
Any discussion starting with licensing costs in academic environments will be shot down on these grounds.
The OP probably needs to find something in OSS that's qualitatively better (it will be tough).
Re:money is not the way (Score:2, Insightful)
On top of that, I would start with a free FOSS DVD that all students and staff get with the most current software builds on it. People are amazed at what is free but often don't know how to get it or even what it's for.
Many people are grateful to have OpenOffice or GIMP when they don't have something like that already. Especially when they realize the same software is released is on Windows and OS X, etc. and won't have trouble sharing with their peers.
When people start demanding compatibility with FOSS, then the University will implement tools that follow.
Start the Movement!
Re:Here is at good way to start (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what I am waiting for. It seems to be taken on faith here on /. and to some extent in the larger tech community that "threatening Microsoft with OSS conversion" is a way to extract concessions." It has become a meme at this point. It is only a matter of time until the Microsoft rep shrugs and says, "Good luck with that. We wish you the best. When you want to talk again in a few years, I'll be able to work out a, 'used to be a good customer' discount for you." Given the current economic climate, it is probably coming sooner than most people anticipate.
Slightly off topic, I work for a 501c3 non-profit and we get ridiculously good deals on Microsoft software. My understanding is that the education market receives similarly great deals. The non-profit sector specifically, and the education market in some cases are always notoriously strapped for cash. Those are the markets that are most likely to switch based on licensing cost, and it seems that because of that, those are the markets with the lowest licensing costs.
I'm also right on the front lines of the OSS/Microsoft debate. We have a new CFO whose background is centered in internet startups. He likes Linux and OpenOffice and has been making noises about conversion. I welcome the discussion, because I'm always open to efficiencies and better ways of doing things. However what I'm almost 100% certain he will release is that there are a lot of proprietary, MS-centric applications that are necessary tools for the work we do. Even beyond that, for being an OSS supporter, he still uses Office, and specifically Excel for all of his financial analysis. The guy is all into OSS though. Our first conversation involved him saying, "Where I used to work, we used SSH and VNC." to which I said, "Here is your VPN client and RDP software." I don't have anything against SSH and I like VNC. But the discussion highlights the main thing that keeps people who are on MS from switching to OSS. MS provides all of the functionality that people need.
The place that MS fears OSS is emerging markets. Those people aren't already locked in. They don't have ten or twenty years of business processes built on top of the MS stack. OSS offers similar, or in some cases, exact, and in a few cases, better functionality than the MS offering. Nearly always it come at a fraction of the upfront cost. Just look at the netbook market. I know that there are a lot of people at MS losing sleep over what HP just did with their customized Ubuntu distro. The place to fight the MS beast is on the front lines of the emerging markets, not at a university or in corporate America.
Re:money is not the way (Score:4, Insightful)
Seconded. You'll never get anywhere driving it from the top down with mandatory "we're switching to XYZ campus-wide" decrees. Make it optional. Introduce voluntary users to a good OSS tool in a non-critical area - clubs, non-credit courses, etc. - where the stakes are lower. Make sure they have a good experience by having lots of in-person help. If it goes well for them, word of mouth will become your friend. "Hey, Dr. SoAndSo did this really interesting thing with ..." "I wonder what Prof. ThisNthat is doing that has her students so engaged and excited?" Your early adopters become advocates for the cause. They can also help other users on campus get going with the new tool(s).
It's very similar to grass-roots organizing: start small and build momentum.
*NOT* free for the *Students* (Score:5, Insightful)
You won't be able to win this with the money argument. Microsoft will swarm all over you, giving free stuff away. They have a fund just to give away free licenses to anyone who's even thinking about trying open source.
They give free license (or outrageously cheap site license) for universities. *BUT* not everyone is getting the softwares for free !!!!
No, since you're a university, the way to approach this is to let the undergrads explore.
Also undergrads *DON'T* benefit from all softwares. Most often the students ends-up torrenting their office suites off pirate bay.
Does the University really wants to indirectly encourage software piracy ?!?
Usually, the licensing agreements with stuff like MSDNAA are :
- University gets a dead cheep site license as part of MSDNAA.
- Professors, teaching staff, etc... *DO GET* the right to obtain all these softwares *also for home*.
but
- Students *DO NOT* obtain license for MS-Office for home/personal laptops. They officially have *TO PAY* to get the same software that everyone else is getting for free and that everyone has declared necessary. (Usually, the students actually end up pirating it).
MS-Office is the critical point here.
Microsoft think that, as long as they have seeded the nest (the university) and the important influencial figure (the people giving the lessons), MS-Office will get automatically adopted as the de-facto standart and every body will start using it.
Student will probably get pirated copies anyway, so there's no point in trying to give them free licenses. At least they are getting used to it, they get brainwashed into the notion that there's nothing else worth beside MSO (like all other sheeple), and probably 5-6 years down the line when they finish studying and enter the professional world, they will ask at their workplace to use whatever is the then MSO du jour.
The strategy to bring open source into the university should work on two points :
- not only going open source can save licensing money in the long run.
- open source is also a way for the *students* to get the necessary software for home.
Currently OpenOffice.org is functionally equivalent to MSO. (And is indeed used as a replacement in several public administrations here around in Europe)
At least, even if the university refuses to switch open source, the *students* might be interested getting it for home because it's free, it's compatible with MSO to open university's documents, is functionally equivalent, and even is currently EASIER to migrate to from older MSO 2003 than migrating to MSO 2007, as the OOo's classical interface is closer, unlike 2007's criticized ribbons.
So even if the university refuse to change its stance you have a way to encourage a significant part of the university's population to switch to open source.
Now you can try to use these arguments with the university :
- if they go with MSO, not only do they have to pay (a small) site license, but they are using a solution that WON'T be accessible to the students outside the computer labs (and everyone has seen how currently there are lots of laptops everywhere. Modern students tend to use much more a laptop they carry everywhere, rather than going to the uni computer labs).
- if they go with OOo, the licensing is cheaper (free). They also will be offering a solution that absolutely everyone can use : teacher, staff, university computer labs, students at home, on their laptops... all this regardless of the system : Windows, Mac OS (very popular on student laptops in some richer region) or the customized Linux wich are the latest craze in the netbook segment.
*AND* as an icing on the top of the cake, the current version of OOo will require much less retraining as it looks much more like classical MSO than latest MSO. This is a really ironic argument given the fact that usually Microsoft have always been fast to point retraining as "hidden short-term costs" against ope
Re:Remind me not to send my kid there. (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, it would be down right un-American to not work my ass off to help cloth and feed a bunch of rich assholes!
So, while we are at it then, do you want to do something about universities owning huge patent portfolios paid for by your tax dollars, while at the same time raising tuition faster than even the price of gasoline?
Re:money is not the way (Score:3, Insightful)
For the students it is of great value, if they are able to work efficiently with open source software.
Why? Variations on this argument are common on Slashdot, but rarely backed up.
Students can work with OSS anyway if they want to, without any help from the university beyond supplying a broadband Internet connection.
Meanwhile, students cannot necessarily work with industry standard commercial software without the university providing it for them, even though such software is:
(I'm assuming we're talking about things like Microsoft Office, Outlook/Exchange for e-mail, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics and DTP work, and similar applications where OSS really have no competition to offer, not things like programming tools, multimedia players and TeX.)
Start by making sure new software is compatible (Score:1, Insightful)
When you are in a hole, first stop digging. Make sure that when you use new software that it supports Linux/Mac/Windows.
Re:money is not the way (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, MS Office sucks, but for the most part it only sucks when you start doing things beyond typing up a memo. Say, futzing around with tables and so on.
OO.o sucks in other ways. Part of it may be due to my perception since the StarOffice days (when it tried to take over your desktop - how freaking obnoxious). But definitely opening a word or excel file is far faster than doing it in OO.o. Additionally, if you open anything other than a "calc" or "excel" file, it'll open it in writer, instead of giving you a chance to say, import it into calc as a comma or some other delimited file.
And I have used quite a few word processors in my life: AppleWorks (the original Apple II version), WordStar, WordPerfect (DOS/VMS/others), Wordperfect 6.0 (Linux), etc etc. Does OO.o suck as much as some of the others? No. But is it as good as it can be? Not close.
Thank samba for diversity (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does an organization or enterprise need to be all one OS or another? Do you really want to be responsible for the fate of an entire university's computing infrastructure?
The "transition" to open source at your institution is already happening. Get in touch with faculty and grad students using open source tools. Encourage them to request open source software and services from the University. Work with anyone and everyone you can to make sure that the websites and application they are responsible for work with Firefox and WebKit.
Use open source tools in your office, and document how you made it work with the University's services. Work with the IT folks when you can (cooperation is your friend!) but when you can't, or they are dragging their feet, quietly find some other way to do it.
Unless you have a mandate from administration and funding for your own shop, you can't actually force any kind of transition. Bide your time, keep in touch with other users, and use your expertise to help out where you can.
If you want to propose something to the administration, providing professional and secure PHP and Ruby-on-Rails services to students and faculty will do more for open source adoption than just about anything else I can think of.
Re:money is not the way (Score:2, Insightful)
I will give you that visio and photoshop is currently better than the oss solutions
That's very generous of you. Can I have Illustrator and InDesign too, if I ask really nicely?
how the hell is office better than openoffice (subject to my criticisms posted else where)
Looking through your posting history, the last comment you made on that subject seems to be "For example, openoffice sucks, compared to MS Office." Then again, I notice that you kept getting modded down as a troll as well, so perhaps I won't waste any more time on this point.
And what the fuck are you smoking when you tell me outlook and exchange is better than an OSS solution? What is in outlook that you *must have*?
What OSS solution do you propose that offers all the centralised co-ordination features of the Outlook/Exchange combination? One of these millenia, the Mozilla gang might actually have a basic calendar application... but I wouldn't bet on it.
Re:open or closed ecosystems (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried CinePaint back when they still called it Film Gimp. It was a lot better than the Gimp in its core features, but it inherited its predecessor's shit UI and shit workflow. I haven't heard anything to suggest that that's changed, so I haven't spent any time with it. If I were going to be using nothing but Film Gimp I might consider it, but I actually use my tools in a novel (to OSS, anyway): in concert. I expect my tools to benefit my workflow, not hinder it by switching up everything and anything when I jump from (say) Photoshop to Illustrator.
Inkscape - meh. Yes, it's the SVG reference implementation for all intents and purposes--good for it, I don't care about its features if it sucks at presenting them. It's a clunky tool with a poor UI and--surprise surprise!--little to speak of in terms of horizontal integration. It'd be fine if I could do everything in Inkscape without any other tools, but that's a very rare occurrence.
Blender - eew. Internally it's not bad. The feature set is nice and it's a solid program. But...again...shit UI, shit workflow. No horizontal integration to speak of. I mean, hell. For example: I can modify a texture in Photoshop and see its effects propagate right to my textured 3D model in Maya. It's easy there. Such integration needs to be the standard with open source apps if they want to be taken seriously and it simply is not.
The capabilities of these programs are fine (CinePaint is head-and-shoulders better than the GIMP, which is probably praising with faint damns), it's just that their workflows all suck enormous amounts of donkey cock and I don't see their workflows improving anytime soon. Don't get me wrong: it's not that I can't do what I want with the open source tools, it's that doing it sucks with the open source tools. It takes longer and is more of a hassle. And, for burgeoning professionals in a university environment, having them not use industry-standard tools is mindfuckingly stupid. People always trot out CinePaint as "oh, look, people are using this IN INDUSTRY!"--great, go CinePaint, may you someday have all the success there is. But a hell of a lot more professionals are using ProTools, Premiere, After Effects, and other proprietary software packages, so it's pretty stupid not to teach what's actually used.
From a faculty member... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am an assistant professor. If you came to my office and told me to use anything, I'd kick your IT-fiddle-monkey-ass to the door.
Here's something I really want university IT guys to get through their thick skulls:
You work for us. Not the other way around.
If I want to use a Windows machine, you need to figure out how to let me. If I want to use a Mac (which I do), you need to make sure I can get to my servers. If I want to use Linux (which I hope to be doing one day--when the software I need to do my research is available on the platform), I expect your support there, too.
In the specific case of what you're proposing--moving to OSS for all everyday tasks, I have to be totally clear and honest here: You are wholly unqualified to make that call. It's not your job; it's not your responsibility; it's none of your damned business. You don't even know what I do; how could you know what I need?
Finally, let me say this: My first jobs in academia were in IT support, and I, too, got drunk on the power. I, too, was young and full of myself, and I, too, ran around telling people what they should do, instead of listening to what it is that they needed to do, and helping them do it. Now that I'm on the other side (and older and less full of myself), I see why I pissed people off so much in those days. I sucked at my job.
If you try to meddle in your customers' business, you suck at your job, too.
Re:From a faculty member... (Score:3, Insightful)
I am an assistant professor. If you came to my office and told me to use anything, I'd kick your IT-fiddle-monkey-ass to the door.
That's because you have little respect for others based on the tirade you just posted.
Here's something I really want university IT guys to get through their thick skulls:
You work for us. Not the other way around.
I'm not sure what it is that you teach, you didn't mention that; however something you may need to get through your thick skull is that professors, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals are good at their profession. They suck as any authority for IT work. They need to stop acting as if they have any experience dealing with IT whatsoever. I don't tell you how to teach your class, don't tell me or him how to run my network or his workstations
If I want to use a Windows machine, you need to figure out how to let me. If I want to use a Mac (which I do), you need to make sure I can get to my servers. If I want to use Linux (which I hope to be doing one day--when the software I need to do my research is available on the platform), I expect your support there, too.
No, you run what the university deems as the most cost effective, safest software they can use. Your needs are of a lower priority than the security, safety and reliability of the University's IT department. They are entrusted with that, not you. They entrust you to provide knowledge and experience to students; stick to that.
In the specific case of what you're proposing--moving to OSS for all everyday tasks, I have to be totally clear and honest here: You are wholly unqualified to make that call. It's not your job; it's not your responsibility; it's none of your damned business. You don't even know what I do; how could you know what I need?
That may be true. He may be unqualified to make the final call. But IT's is responsible for your network stability, security, and support. It should be their call as to how to handle this, as university professors do not know enough about computer networks and systems to be qualified either. You're a rarity in a bunch of academics that have no more training than the average office worker.
Finally, let me say this: My first jobs in academia were in IT support, and I, too, got drunk on the power. I, too, was young and full of myself, and I, too, ran around telling people what they should do, instead of listening to what it is that they needed to do, and helping them do it. Now that I'm on the other side (and older and less full of myself), I see why I pissed people off so much in those days. I sucked at my job.
If you try to meddle in your customers' business, you suck at your job, too.
You seem to forget that yours and others workflow is based upon a device given to you for your use by the university. These are their tools; not yours. Your workflow needs to conform to their standards of operation for IT, not how you would run things.
It is unprofessional to suggest that you, an academic, should be the deciding factor in how IT infrastructure is run. Again this is like me coming into your classroom and telling you how to run your class; I wouldn't do it, so where's your justification for why you see fit to tell IT how to do their job?
How you choose to run your computers and/or networks at home is your business, but at a business or at a university, you run your system the way the business or university designates it, and if IT designates that you run using certain products, then you'll run them that way. If you were running on my network, you run what I say you can run, end of story.