There. I’ve said it. Now I await the pitchforks.

Before you toss me into the vat of boiling oil for heresy, however, hear me out. We’ve all been in this fix before. We really, really, want to use only open source software, but there are just so many things that stand in our way.  That YouTube video your friends are laughing over? That’s proprietary Flash all right. That cool new game everyone’s been playing? Chances are (but not quite),  that it runs only on Windows.

Things get worse when you’re put into situations that are completely out of your control. In NUS, we most often run into such situations in the courses that we take. Perhaps the lecturer wants the class to use some software that only available on a closed platform. Or he wants you to develop code in a proprietary language. Or perhaps he just insists on sending out .pptx files. Every. Single. Time.

What’s an open source geek to do? Good question, we’re stumped too!

So here’s the deal, if you’d ever faced a dilemma like that in NUS, we want to know! What situation were you put in, by whom, and how (if at all) you managed to get around that. Drop us a note in the comments, and we’ll collate the results for a nice fancy table in a follow-up.

Oh, and general comments welcome too, of course.

Not possible, you say? Well, just ask the folks at the NUS Office of Estate and Development then.

NUS’ parking permit management facilities were once run off a *Microsoft *Windows NT-based application. Unfortunately, as this system was not fully integrated into the University’s backend database, a lot of the processing of parking permit applications still had to be done manually. However, to enable automation and integration in the existing application would have been "prohibitively expensive, with additional user licence fees adding significant costs to the department".

Eventually, a new parking system was developed that ran off  *SUSE Linux Enterprise Server virtualised on top of *VMWare Server . Virtualisation was used in order to run separate application environments on the same physical server, thus enabling further cost saving. Said Toh Yong Soon, of the Office of Estate and Development, "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides NUS with a highly reliable and scalable environment capable of managing the very high demands placed on it. … Deploying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server virtualised on VMWare Server has saved NUS some SGD100,000 in fees that would otherwise have been required for proprietary operating systems and user licences."

[Download the PDF version of the report. ]

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This post was written as a purely journalistic article and was in no way sponsored by any vendor.