1. Reducing Costs of Running Universities with Open Source SoftwareBy
Tendai MARENGEREKE
Department of Information Security & Assurance
School of Information Sciences and Technology

2. Speaker Profile Tendai Marengereke Research Areas Qualifications
Lecturer in Information Security & Assurance at HIT
Cyber Security Consultant
6 years academia experience
Qualifications
E-C Council Certified Ethical Hacker
Oracle Java Certified Programmer
Masters in Information Security & Cyber Forensics, SRM University, India
B.Tech Computer Science, HIT in collaboration with Daejeon University, South Korea
Research Areas
Defensive Security, Social Cyber Security, Cyber Threat Intelligence, Machine Learning

3. Research Objectives We aim to answer the following questions:
RQ1 What are the OSS tools being used in higher education?
RQ2 How can financially constrained Universities utilise OSS to save costs?

4. Open Source
Open Source Software/Free Software (OSS/FS) refers to any software can be copied, used, studied, modified, distributed with few or no copyright restrictions.
The four freedoms
--Use
--Study
--Distribute
--Improve
The four freedoms
--Use
--Study
--Distribute
--Improve

5. Open Source Software vs Free Software
What are the differences.
Free as in FREE BEER
2. Free as in FREE PUPPIES
Which would you take?

6. THE COST OF FREE PUPPIES

7. Benefits of Open Source
Stay in control
Stay Secure
Lower Costs - at HIT we are trying to reduce any expenditure
Extendable
Community Support

8. Reducing costs

9. Methodology Data Collection:
We examined open source software if the following categories:
Student Life
Academic
Research
University Administration
Library Services
IT Infrastructure
Compliance & Cyber Security

10. Results
Over 50 Software catalogued in each section Operating Systems : Linux, CentOS Domain Name Resolving : BIND Webserver: Apache Nginx CMS: Joomla, WordPress, Drupal E-Learning : Moodle, Chamilo, Open EdX Library: Koha, ABCD, Evergreen Repository : Dspace, Greemstone, Eprints, Fedora IT Security, AlienVault, PFSense

11. Zimbabwean University Case study
Reduced expenditure from to 6000 on licences alone.
Use of Moodle for e-learning
Switch to Google Apps for Education for Hosting Mail and Classroom for e-learning
Lack of Mirror Sites

12. Key area to consider before launching OSS – Total Cost of Ownership behind Open Source
Licensing and maintenance
Implementation and integration
Training and technical support
Hardware and data storage

13. Key area to consider before launching OSS
How active is this community?
Are there several third-party providers available to help?
With open source you count on kindness of strangers and not service level agreements

14. BIG SOFTWARE COMPANIES WITH FREE SOFTWARE PROGRAMS FOR ACADEMIA
GOOGLE APPS FOR EDUCATON
IBM ACADEMIC INITIATIVE
MICROSOFT FREE PRODUCTS FOR ACADEMIA

15. Conclusion
Open source clearly is possible to use and implement at a lower total cost to institutes but sometimes there are better solutions
as the case with HIT
Solution to consider are Google Apps for Education which are free for all academic institutions

16. How to handle the wide variety of OSS software
Define Requirements
Always choose
Mature software
Wide community
Recent releases
Well documented software
Modifiable code in case need arises

17. Recommendations
Conduct a five-year analysis review of all software on campus
Offer
FLOSS Repository / Mirror
Local downloads of recommended FLOSS (reduced bandwidth costs
Training
Certification ( another revenue stream)
Documentation

18. marengz tmarengereke@hit.ac.zw www.tendai.co.zw