Free Software Case Studies/Case Studies

Free Software Case Studies

Learn about Free Software adoption and migration through case studies

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The purpose of this page is to help learners find relevant case studies. Please add, perhaps with a short note on why you think yours would make a good case study for students of free software.

Wanted: more case studies, especially where an ethical commitment to free software has been made. Add a link on this page.

This content resource is a stub. Please help by adding more information.

On WikiEducator

• The Case of SchoolNet Namibia
• Free Software and People & Planet
• Free Software at Warrington School (New Zealand)
• Free Software at Albany Senior High School (New Zealand)
• Digital Storytelling with Free Software
• The Fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo and Free Software
• A Web 2.0 Journal and Disadvantaged Brazilian Youth

Collections and Lists of

• Education Case Studies collected by the GNU project/Free Software Foundation.
• UOC: Implementation of Free Software Systems: Case Studies (GNU FDL)
  • Development and implementation of free software in Extremadura
  • Free Software in the Brazilian Government
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Cometa Technologies
• OSOR/IDABC (restrictions: non-commercial distribution)
• APDIP: Breaking Barriers: The Potential of Free and Open Source Software for Sustainable Human Development - A Compilation of Case Studies from Across the World (cc-by)
  • IOSN link
• OSS Watch: Case Studies (cc-by-sa unless otherwise stated)
• ict@innovation: African Business Models: Case Studies - (Module 2) (cc-by-sa)
• Possible (mostly government) case studies within from GOSSRC
  • Articles and Publications (go through the list, add below)
  • ...
• From FLOSSinclude (case studies and pilots) (by-nc-sa)
• Open Source Academy Case Studies (include NC and/or ND restrictions)
• Open Source Africa Case Studies
• Canonical's list (© Canonical Ltd. - but check each document).

Candidate Case Studies

Below is a selection of individual case studies for development/adaptation for learners. Some may exist as case studies already and need updating or extension, or may be projects which use free software but have not been presented as complete and up-to-date case studies yet. Please add:

Public Administration

• Large-scale migration to an open source office suite: An innovation adoption study in Finland
• City of Munich migration: Declaration of Independence: The LiMux Project in Munich an OSOR study
  • LiMux - The IT-Evolution
• Gendarme (French Police) migration to FS desktop apps and to Ubuntu
• Free and Open Source Software in Government - South Africa

NGOs

• Convene - a project promoting the use of free software to meet the technical needs of social development organisations (previously known as NGO-in-a-box).

Education

• Consider Warrington School-- a primary school who has migrated to free software and open education values (update: now on WikiEducator)
  • Open Education/Computing - NZ case study
  • Warrington's Ubuntu Journey.
• Uganda Martyrs University
• NetDay
• BECTA Research report: Open source software in schools: A case study report
• The Use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as a Cost-Effective Way of Integrating ICT in Liberian Schools: The Case of B. W. Harris School.

Distro Case Studies

The following are prime candidates for learners to explore. For more candidate distro-related case studies see DistroWatch and the list on Wikipedia.

• Red Hat
• Ubuntu (operating system)
  • See Canonical Ltd. below
• Debian
• FreeBSD
• Mandriva
• SUSE Linux distributions
  • See Novell below
• Xandros and Xandros Corporation

Case Studies of Free Software Projects/Packages

• OpenOffice.org
• JBoss
• Apache
• Mozilla
• ...

Multinational Companies and other Private Sector

• Canonical Ltd.
• IBM
• Novell
• Oracle Corporation
  • Sun Microsystems

Personal Experiences

• Kim Tucker on using free software in general
• Kirby Urner on using WikiEducator which runs on free software - freedom to innovate (educationally) for the benefit of society.
• Please add ...

Create a New Case Study

Enter the title of your case study into the box below and click the button to create a new page with that name. Remember to create a link to your new case study above.

See Also

• Wikiversity list - cross-reference and share across communities.
• Inventory of Case Studies

References

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Keywords: free software, open source, case study, libre software.