About
Centre for OpenSource Development
The centre was established in 2006 by the late Prof. Fergus O'Brien to provide the focal point for integrating open source activities and development of open source research teams within the University. The move to open source is important if the University wants to attract students from regions where governments and industry policy directions are moving to open source software.
Mission Statement
To promote the use of open source software and to build a centre of excellence in Open Source software development.
Objectives
- To develop educational materials which includes the presentation of short courses to industry and the development of coursework materials for University teaching
- To build links with industry to develop open source software and to build on the research interests of the University
Goals
- To provide industry with short courses on open source software to increase awareness of the advantages of open source
- To introduce open source software into university courses to provide students with exposure to alternative software
- To develop open source software with industry, and to build research teams and partnerships which benefit all parties involved
- To promote open source to the wider community via the web to deliver software to regional areas and globally
Functions of Open Source Web Site
- To provide a taxonomy of open source software that can be used in teaching Business and Informatics courses. The taxonomy includes:
- summaries of suitable software packages and links to their home pages
- links to organisations promoting the use of open source software
- links to case studies and articles written by organisations with experience implementing open source solutions
- To provide an information portal with up-to-date manuals, users guides, howtos, tutorials, example configurations, distribution ISOs, CGI tools and search engines. This should be useful for people implementing open source solutions.
- To distribute open source software via compilation CDs built with a collection of open source applications that are useful to staff and students. These compilation CDs are built for users from different platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
- To help users new to Linux by providing a simple transition pathway.
- firstly by providing bootable Linux CDs with most of the functionality of a fully installed system.
- secondly by running Linux concurrently within Windows using a customised version of coLinux.
- thirdly by gaining enough confidence to install ADIOS or Fedora Core Linux onto a disk partition.
- To provide workshops and online tutorials to help users new to open source and Linux learn more about what is available and how to use it. In particular to help people new to systems administration learn how to configure and manage software that runs of workstations, networks and servers, such as router, firewalland proxy services.
This page was written by Neville Richter and was last modified on the 16 October 2006