Academic institutions are given the responsibility of building strong expertise in all aspects of software engineering, be it operating systems, device drivers, database systems, application architecting and engineering, front end graphical user interface (GUI), complex algorithms, working internals of business applications or tools. Learning proprietary tools or technologies that doesn’t provide the software code and the freedom to modify or derive other software from it, limits the learning potential of academicians and students to fully understand the software, thereby seriously curtailing the creativity of the great minds and the learning process.

If one has to become an automobile engineer dreaming of building better automobiles, he/she has to learn the core engineering principles, how the basic building blocks of automobile work and how to design an automobile with building blocks. Similarly a software engineer has to understand in school, the core software engineering principles, how the basic building blocks of software applications work, i.e., operating system internals, database internals, applications server internals, libraries internals, IDE tools internals, business application internals and how the applications are architected and implemented. Unless one has access to the source code of these building blocks and architecture and implementation of these, learning is going to be limited and in-effective. Hence the best way is understanding of the software source code, modifying it or deriving from it for effective learning in the school.

Open source adaptability provides this great opportunity as it harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of implementation. Also it provides lower cost of adoption and higher flexibility of learning for academicians and students.

It is the best time for academic institutes, faculty and students to come together to adopt open source technologies like Linux Operating System, MySQL & Postgress databases, Perl, PHP, Python, Java and Ruby programming languages, Open Standards for application architecture and engineering, Open Source tools and Open Source Business applications in all domains.