I’m proud to work in the education field. Being part of a 110-year old organization that has provided services to the education world is at once a humbling and daunting task. Being involved in the new media side of things is even more daunting, as sometimes it takes a lot of work to draw out the true potential of an established company in an established field.

Still, there is a sense in which the educational world has been at the fore when it comes to technology. There are few areas in which this is as obvious as the area of open source.

Educational institutions have, historically, been hotbeds of activity for incubating open source projects. Take, for example, Free BSD and Berkeley Unix, developed initially at Berkeley. Consider GNU and the Free Software Foundation, housed at MIT. Even FileZilla, the fifth most popular download of all time on SourceForge.net, was originally developed as a university class project by Tim Kosse and two of his classmates.

This connection between open source and education goes back a couple of decades. Universities began adopting open source software in the early 1990s. it was ideal for Universities, because it was low-cost software and it let the University tech staff make small changes and tweaks. It gave Universities the kind of agility and control they wanted and needed as the Internet and the World Wide Web began to take hold as part of the Universities’ suite of services.

Now, a lot of this early open-source activity met poor ends. Many Universities argued that development and changes they made to open-source software were valuable intellectual property, and might have commercial value. This meant that much of the software produced during that time was locally developed and not shared. Without the full community of developers, then, much of the development would wind up being just sort of barely good enough. Part of the point of open source is that there are literally thousands of developers waiting to improve your product, as opposed to the one or two a University might have on staff.

As time went on, however, more and more Universities could see the value in contributing to open source. In particular, some of the most popular suites of Learning Management Software (LMS) have been developed in universities for an open source environment.

Whether you’re talking about something like FileZilla, the various LMS or the Geographic Information Systems software MapWindow GIS, most of the open source apps developed in Universities were born of necessity. Faculty and students had a need to accomplish a specific educational task, and so they designed software to handle it. By doing it in an open-source environment, today we have robust, versatile and efficient apps to aid in the task of educating young minds. In that way, the world of education has both benefited from and contributed to the open source movement.

Even with the occasional bump in the road, you’d be hard-pressed to suggest that any other field has had the kind of positive impact on open source that education has had.