Where have the universities gone?

Where have the universities gone?

I got my start hacking on free software from two different university organizations. First is the Unix Users Group, members of which generously helped me and my friends get started installing Linux on our PCs. In 1994 this was not as easy as it seems today. We also, as undergrads in the engineering school, had free access to large and small Sun systems, SGI supercomputers, and Alpha systems running VMS.

Secondly every department on campus had work-study jobs available to undergraduates and they were all quite willing to support the use of free and open source software in IT projects. I and my friends built a number of campus web tools in those early days of the web using NCSA httpd and Apache with Perl CGIs, and we contributed our work back to CPAN, Apache, and the mod_perl project.

So two hypotheses come to my mind. 1) Unix users groups are going away, and 2) university IT departments are now much more conservative. I see a lot of universities deploying off-the-shelf commercial software instead of building their own systems. No doubt this saves them some money but it also cuts off an educational opportunity for work-study employees.