Thursday, July 28, 2011

On the other hand, I could be wrong...

...about the unlikelihood of open source at the enterprise level.

Inside Higher Ed reports that Cornell and a handful of other universities have committed "to fully adopt the Kuali Financial System, an open-source application." A sign of things to come? Maybe. I don't know about Cornell's peer adopters, but the fact that Cornell switched from "homegrown financial software" seems significant to me. It suggests a pre-existing organizational culture of owning one's own headaches. Also, financial management software is only one step towards an entire open-source ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite.

So: I'm intrigued, but not yet convinced that open source is a trend.