Canadian academia and open source

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 01:54:51AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> I'm doing a little research, and I'm wondering if anyone here can help 
> with this: which universities in Canada are friendliest to open source 
> and which are the most hostile?
> 
> There can be many factors in this, including (but not limited to):
> - the amount OSS is taught in CompSci
> - Awareness and support of open development models outside CompSci
> - the amount of FOSS used internally in administration
> - the scale of cheap-software deals struck with Microsoft
> - the level of freedom/suppression of open source advocacy
> - specific instructors who are particularly friendly or hostile
> 
> I'm looking for any data I can find on any and all Canadian universities.
> Feel free to reply to me personally or to the list as you feel 
> appropriate. All confidences will be honoured.

Well I don't know if open source is taught, but it is certainly used a
lot in some places.

When I got my CS degree at Waterloo, we certainly used many open source
programs, such as gcc, modula 3, nachos, libsvga, and many others.

The environment was mainly solaris, although at the start (1994/95) was
mostly SunOS 4, and some ultrix and aix systems.  First year courses
were thinkpascal on Macs, so no open source involved there.

I know java is now used instead for first year courses, and some second
year courses (in place of modula 3), but for later stuff I doubt much
has changed.  They still use unix and hence gcc and company for
compiling code.  uc++ is also open source (used for a concurrency
course).

I know some engineering courses at Waterloo now use C# for reasons I
can't imagine other than some deal with MicroSoft.

In general people seem to use what works best and is most accessible to
students whenever possible, at least in the math/cs faculty.  The CS
club certainly has many open source advocates involved in it.

My wife is taking a few courses at the moment at York, and the current
one uses common lisp, which is also an open source program running on
aix (although she mostly runs it on her own machine on windows or linux
(depending on her mood about the linux wireless support) :)

Lennart Sorensen
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