Robert,
 I can only apologise on behalf of university IT divisions. What you have said is sad but often true. However, it is changing. And the best place to advocate is not in the IT division - it's in the research arena. With the significant pressure on all universities to improve their research performance, it is your DVC (Research) who has the best chance of making your IT division a more research-friendly place. Without this influence, IT often becomes about enterprise-scale, efficient solutions that suit the masses (mostly) but don't support innovation, exploration or individual needs - as you note below.

So, form a group of like-minded people from a range of disciplines and write a proposal to your DVC (Research) about how certain policies are restricting research performance across the university, and provide some suggestions to help change this.

On a final note - even at Monash, where open source is relatively well-supported, we still have some of the challenges you describe (eg. for a long time we could only complete electronic leave applications in IE). Sometimes such functionality forms a small part of a much larger system that was not selected for cross-platform accessibility. Or other times, all the equivalent peer systems share such limitations. Nonetheless, there is still opportunity for your cross-disciplinary group to advocate for your needs to be reflected in the selection of future products (and in the implementation, configuration and deployment of existing ones).

Good luck! :-)
Nathan

Robert Barnett <robert@barnett.id.au> wrote:> 
> 
> This is the first time I've ranted here, but I thought I should sum up
> my experiences.
> 
> I haven't seen very positive experiences of Linux in the academic
> tiers of Universities.
> 
> My experience at Sydney, UNSW and Wollongong is that departments are
> discouraged from using Linux and open source.
> 
> * Faculties send essential notices and information as word documents.
> * Staff members must have a windows computer to run enterprise
> applications
> * Linux computers can only be connected to the university network if
> the IT department is instructed to co-operate by those in authority
> (e.g. Head of school).
> 
> I know of a particular example of a lecturer who was employed to use a
> FOSS tool in research. He was told that he would have to have two
> laptops, one for his FOSS work and one for his lecturing. He was not
> permitted to plug his FOSS laptop into the network, thus not able to
> collaborate effectively with his counterparts.
> 
> In my own faculty, researchers have difficulty getting linux installed
> for FOSS projects which are at the core of our research.
> 
> At the same time, I learnt a great deal about linux at university. I'm
> very grateful to UNSW Compsoc which got me involved in linux. If it
> weren't for them, I would never have installed linux and I would not
> have learnt most of what I know about software.
> 
> I suspect that most of it stems from an enterprise approach to
> computing. This works well at cutting costs in a large organisation.
> However, in research it perpetuates ignorance in IT. It stifles
> innovation and it causes a great deal of frustration to people like
> myself.
> 
> I wonder if I have enough tackling fuel to write that letter...
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Robbie.
> 
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