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Teaching

Many departments that use computers in Labs are either using or considering the use of Open Source software replacements to costly commercial products. Right now, this is mostly in the area of replacing Microsoft Office but Linux and other products are also being used. Depending on what sort of licensing agreement you have with Microsoft, the savings can be substantial.

Another thing to consider is publishing lecture material as Open Source - i.e. making it freely available to anyone who wishes to use it. MIT is currently publishing all of its course material in such a way.

In the Dept of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Linux and Open Source development tools are used on several units. Again, savings can be made if Windows is replaced with Linux.

Research

Apart from the use of Open Source software to carry out research, we would encourage all academics to consider publishing software developed as part of a research project as Open Source if this would be of benefit to others. The particular license used can be one of several (see the page on What is Open Source for links to get more details) but we recommend the default should be the GNU Public License.

Their is still an issue of who owns the intellectual property when an academic writes software at UWA and until recently this was under review.

Administration

Open Source software is used to provide file sharing, mail and web facilities by ITS and many departments. Again, using Open Source software as the default server software should be an aim at UWA.
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