Re:Universities == The funding for this (Score 1)

Universities were heavily into building their own library systems until the mid-80s. Stanford, for example, used an Open Source-"like" model for its SPIRES system which ran everything from the library interface to the bookstore. NOTIS, one of the most successful library systems of all time, grew out of a homegrown system at Northwestern. I fear the university mindset is tainted by previous "in-house" systems due to the upheaval they went through when it was realized that these mission-critical systems were dependent on a handful of highly marketable programmers on campus. Open Source changes the equation by leveraging a much greater pool of programmers behind the application but university administrators probably only see the fearsome prospect of funding a software development group to keep their systems running.

The danger may be in mixing up the COBOL/Assembler/whatever spaghetti code of 1975 with today's development environments. The software world is striving g mightily to give us binary re-use of code, so that putting together an application is more like configuring a new remote to work with a TV rather than getting a technician to pour through a set of schematics. Perl, Python, and other scripting environments have put very powerful programming libraries into the hands of more developers than ever before. The Enterprise Java Bean notion of Container Managed entities and tools like Castor are another step in this direction because they open the door to using XML to declare the needs of the application rather than coding each program statement step by step.

In other words, Open Source has advantages today that didn't exist when universities were at the height of building communal code. Universities should be at the head of this movement but there may be too many bad memories out there for this to happen.