"..relying on one company and one system.." -- the same thing     like putting all eggs in one bucket..

@Elena - indeed, except that it is a bucket owned and completely controlled by someone that wants you to buy more eggs or rent a bigger bucket; that may at its discretion decide to replace your eggs with pebbles;  that could and probably will decide that you need a smaller bucket with fewer eggs but that costs more money;  that could at any time take the bucket away completely, leaving you eggless;  that could be taken over by a company that will replace your nice eggs with rotten eggs and then start throwing them at you, sharing pictures of the event with its friends. You would, of course, like to get out of this rotten deal but, once you have moved your eggs into the bucket, they are scrambled by the bucket owner, so you can never get them back in one piece ever again or move them to a different bucket, and you are forced to eat scrambled eggs forever even though you now prefer them hard boiled or you've heard of a great new bucket that offers poaching instead. The issue is essentially one of egg control. The reason I prefer the Wordpress approach is that you get to keep all of your own eggs and can do what you like with them but, if you want, you can pay Wordpress to assure that they remain in one piece, that they don't go off and, if you wish, its chefs will cook them the way you like them.

The other aspect of closed solutions is privacy. As pointed out in this FSF call for donations the proliferation of computers in every aspect of our lives, from home automation to chips in our own bodies, "raises ethical issues inherent in proprietary software". So, closed software is only acceptable where the model of trust is built in other ways. External hosting is as well subject to a model of trust. A Wordpress hosted solution as you pointed out Jon, is acceptable as there is no personal information involved. Things are different when it comes to entire infrastructure as you don't want to have a 3rd party spying on your communication and that's why private clouds powered by open source technologies are becoming popular. As this RedHat page puts it: "Unlike a public cloud, a private cloud is for a single organization. You implement it behind your corporate firewall under IT’s control. A private cloud is great for speeding innovation, handling large compute and storage needs, and securing data".

And Github, HTC, Seagate, Dropbox, Mozilla, etc, etc - it will be interesting to see who *isn't* here. I don't see Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple, for instance.

https://github.com/AthabascaUniversity is as close as we've got to a list of our public OSS projects as it goes. There are other items scattered around, but some time ago we moved most of the stuff from personal repos over to the central AthabascaUniversity one.

So how about an open course on open source?  Required components could be contributing to open source projects.  This gets back to another good idea that Dmitry about harnessing some of the creative power of our students to contribute back to AU.  This seems like a perfect fit for AU and open source and engaging students are two strong ways forward towards sustainability.

Came across The Origins of Ansible and realized that a course as the one we envision here can't be complete without a history of open source projects. The new keyword here is "research". As Michael DeHaan describes:

Ansible owes much of it's origins to time I spent at Red Hat's Emerging Technologies group, which was an R&D unit under Red Hat's CTO -- this was back around 2006. Emerging Tech was a fantastic place where a large group of people at Red Hat were able to work on basically whatever they thought people needed. It was beautiful and taught me most of what I know about Open Source. Google's 80/20 time? This was basically 100%, provided it was good for the end user.

So researching open source solutions can benefit an organization. Take Xen as another example.