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.

nice one, close but not it. There was some form of presentation or something where FB folks themselves talked about OSS making them into what they are etc.

It gives me goose bumps...in a good way

Me too - those reasons for using OpenStack make such good business sense it is hard to understand how anyone would choose anything different. Quite a powerful recommendation.

if you look at the IT landscape today - proprietary "dinasaurs" are being outflanked by outfits specialized in OpenSource technologies - Facebook, Twitter, Google - all are both recepients of OpenSource benefits and also creators in that same field - just look at the number of their OSS projects. Better yet - they sponsor a TONN of projects as well. Microsoft, of all places is nearly capitulating slowly ramping up release of OSS code in various domains (anybody saw that creepy advert "Mirosoft <heart> Linux"? ..creepy). Looking at market darling - Apple - if it wasn't for OSS it would't have succeeded. Built on top of FreeBSD from the assortment of OSS tools etc. is what made it work "out of the box" - Cups for printing, Apache for web server, MySQL, GCC toolchain, Konqueror's HTML rendering engine (forked as WebKit)... There is no denial that OpenSource moved most of today's IT giants leaps and bounds and allowed for their existence. Otherwise - it'd be Microsoft world domination today, no fancy iPhone, nor Androids. Welcome Zune (yuk) and WinPhone (ouch). 

To sum it up - it's unsurprising that OSS makes total business sence. What is surprising is that Walmart - which in itself is a very proprietary and self-enclosed enviroment decided to go that route. When places like Walmart and Microsoft say "OSS is OK" how could anyone say otherwise?