Periodically an OSS Watch practice becomes sufficiently coherent to constitute a policy. We will add policies to this page as they arise. However, we do not make a policy of creating policies for their own sake. So the list of policies on this page may be short.
OSS Watch is not an advocacy group. Our goal is to provide unbiased advice and guidance to UK colleges and universities. What this means in practice is that we do not claim that open source will be the best solution in every instance. Rather we want to help universities and colleges (and individuals) think through their engagement with open source, whether that is in a procurement process, or a development process, or even just a 'thinking about' process.
If you spot us moving beyond our non-advocacy role, let us know and we will have a rethink.
OSS Watch does not recommend specific open source packages. All examples of open source, or proprietary, software mentioned on our site are for illustrative purposes only. We simply do not have the resources, and sometimes not the skill set, to make a comprehensive and exhaustive evaluation of individual software packages. Nor do we provide comparative evaluations. We recognise that the needs of individuals and institutions vary. And although we can provide useful tips for how to evaluate software that might meet your needs, and also sometimes pointers to useful evaluative tools and instruments, we do not undertake these evaluations ourselves.
If you spot an instance on our site where we appear to have gone beyond the above policy, and seem to be recommending specific software, do let us know and we will revise our documentation.
We are usually keen to point to examples of open source software in use at universities and colleges. If you want to suggest a software package that we should be using as an example, please do. But to make that suggestion especially useful, also please identify a college or university (ideally your own) which is using that software. Send your suggestions to info@oss-watch.ac.uk
Where possible we encourage open source projects to generate a DOAP file about their software package/project and let us know about it. OSS Watch would like to build a catalogue of open source software currently in use in UK colleges and universities, and this seems to us a useful route to that end. For more information on DOAP please see Project Catalogues and Project Descriptors using DOAP.
It is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales licence.
OSS Watch is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.