Open Source: Advancing Our Digital Commons
A Q&A with Jack Suess
Not many of us think “open source” as we use today’s sophisticated software. But in fact, most of that software is actually based on open source. IT leaders are recognizing the benefits of returning to open strategies and are exploring options to do that. To get some perspectives from a seasoned IT leader in this space, CT asked Jack Suess, VP of IT and CIO at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) — whose career path has wound its way through the many stages of open source — for his views on returning to the digital commons of open source.
Mary Grush: How has your career involved you in open source?
Jack Suess: My first work with open source dates back to the mid-to-late ’80s. At that time, I was the main system administrator at UMBC. I was running a VMS cluster and a Unix environment.
To us, the world was wrapped around being able to leverage software that was being developed at universities, or national labs, or other research centers recognized for open source software. The way we got our operating systems, at least in the Unix world, was by downloading them from FTP sites so we could install the open source software locally. And so, many of our environments were running the Berkeley system distribution in Unix.
Right after that mid-’80s timeframe, MIT was releasing the Kerberos package. And Carnegie Mellon was releasing the Andrew File System (AFS) and Andrew system. All of this interesting development was taking place within the higher education community that I grew up in professionally. Both AFS and Kerberos are still in use today at UMBC.
I didn’t call myself a developer. I have a math and computer science background, though I never got deeply involved in development work. But I installed and supported all this open source software and made sure it worked for faculty and students.
So, that was how I first came to experience open source. Then over time, as I got more involved in other kinds of projects in higher education, I began to see a whole range of settings where the world was being run by open source. A good example would be the early cybersecurity tools — they were often open source and had been developed and built out through many of the Unix systems environments.
And mid-career, as I got involved in the identity management community, I found that a lot of the work that Internet2 and various groups were doing with SAML, or with middleware, was released into the open source community — and picked up not just at universities in the U.S., but all around the world. I was able to watch diverse communities evolve in open source.
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