Apereo Foundation Launches HEOSAT to Help Higher Education Evaluate, Adopt, and Strengthen Open Source Software
New Higher Education Community Open Source Assessment Toolkit gives institutions a practical framework for considering open source in technology decisions while helping open source projects strengthen their communities, governance, sustainability, and institutional readiness.
DENVER, Colorado — September 30, 2026 — The Apereo Foundation today announced the launch of the Higher Education Community Open Source Assessment Toolkit (HEOSAT), a new open source resource designed to help colleges and universities confidently evaluate open source software while helping open source projects assess and improve their own maturity.
The launch comes during the 2026 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, as thousands of higher education technology leaders gather to consider the technologies, partnerships, risks, and strategies shaping the future of their institutions.
HEOSAT addresses a persistent gap in higher education technology decision-making: while institutional procurement and technology review processes have become increasingly sophisticated, they are often designed primarily around traditional commercial vendors and products. Open source solutions may consequently be overlooked, evaluated using criteria that do not fully reflect how open source communities operate, or excluded before their benefits and risks can be meaningfully considered.
HEOSAT gives institutions a structured way to bring open source into those conversations.
“Higher education has developed increasingly mature processes for evaluating technology, but those processes do not always account for the very different ways open source software is developed, governed, supported, and sustained,” said Patrick Masson, Executive Director of the Apereo Foundation. “HEOSAT is about making it easier for institutions to ask the right questions about open source, not to give open source a pass, but to give it a fair and informed evaluation.”
A Higher Education Framework for Assessing Open Source
HEOSAT evaluates open source projects across areas including licensing and legal practices, governance, community, development practices, adoption and deployment, sustainability, and institutional and procurement readiness.
Rather than simply asking whether source code is publicly available or whether software carries an open source license, HEOSAT examines the conditions that can make an open source project understandable, adoptable, governable, supportable, and sustainable across institutions.
For each assessment area, the toolkit provides criteria, scoring guidance, explanations of why individual questions matter, examples of evidence, and additional resources. Results can be used to identify strengths and gaps and can be visualized through an overall project profile and radar chart.
Importantly, HEOSAT is designed for two complementary uses.
Colleges and universities can use HEOSAT when assessing open source solutions as part of procurement, technology selection, adoption, risk review, or institutional planning. The framework helps campus technology leaders, procurement teams, academic technology organizations, libraries, research computing groups, OSPOs, and other stakeholders identify the information they need to make informed decisions about an open source project.
At the same time, open source projects can use HEOSAT themselves. A project can establish a baseline, identify gaps in governance, documentation, community development, sustainability, licensing, contribution processes, or adoption readiness, make improvements, and reassess over time. In this way, HEOSAT is not simply an evaluation mechanism but a project and community development tool.
“Assessment should not just tell an institution whether it is comfortable adopting a project,” Masson said. “It should also help a project understand what it can do to become easier to adopt, easier to contribute to, and more sustainable. That feedback loop between higher education institutions and the open source communities serving them is one of the things we hope HEOSAT will strengthen.”
Learning from HECVAT and the Higher Education Community
In developing HEOSAT, Apereo looked to successful community-developed approaches already familiar to higher education, including the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT).
HECVAT has demonstrated the value of giving higher education a common, community-developed framework through which institutions and technology providers can exchange information and evaluate technology risk. HEOSAT applies a similar principle to a different set of questions: the characteristics of open source software projects and communities that matter when institutions consider adopting, supporting, contributing to, or depending upon them.
HEOSAT does not replace HECVAT, cybersecurity review, accessibility review, legal review, procurement processes, or other institutional due diligence. Instead, it can complement those processes by addressing characteristics particular to open source software that traditional vendor-oriented assessments may not capture.
The toolkit builds on a broader body of open source and higher education work. HEOSAT was originally inspired by and adapted from the OSS Watch Openness Rating and has been informed by resources and practices including:
- the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) and higher education technology risk and procurement practices;
- the OSS Watch Openness Rating and related openness assessment work;
- the Open Source Initiative's standards and guidance around open source licensing;
- Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software, focused on the practices and communities behind successful open source projects;
- LYRASIS's It Takes a Village guidebook and toolkit addressing open source sustainability;
- recent Ithaka S+R work on sustaining open source software in the research enterprise, including its practical guidance for universities, research teams, and open source communities; and
- decades of experience within the Apereo Foundation and its project communities developing, governing, adopting, and sustaining open source technologies in higher education.
HEOSAT brings these perspectives together in a framework specifically oriented toward the realities of colleges, universities, research organizations, and the open source communities that serve them.
Bringing Open Source Back into the Technology Conversation
The release of HEOSAT comes at a time when institutions are examining questions of technology cost, institutional autonomy, interoperability, data control, cybersecurity, sustainability, AI, and dependence on external technology providers.
Open source has historically played a major role in higher education's technology environment, from research and infrastructure to teaching and learning and enterprise systems. Yet open source alternatives are not always systematically considered when institutions evaluate new technologies.
Apereo sees HEOSAT as one practical step toward changing that.
“The goal is not to suggest that open source is automatically the right answer,” Masson said. “The goal is to make sure it is one of the answers institutions are equipped to evaluate. Higher education should be able to compare its options based on evidence, understand the communities and organizations behind the technologies it depends upon, and make choices that align with institutional priorities.”
HEOSAT can also help institutions think differently about their relationship with technology. Unlike a traditional customer/vendor relationship, open source gives institutions opportunities to participate directly in the technologies they use through collaboration, governance, development, documentation, funding, testing, and community leadership.
For Apereo, that creates an opportunity for higher education to move from being primarily a consumer of technology toward once again becoming an active participant in shaping its digital environment.
“Higher education helped create many of the technologies and open source communities that underpin today's digital world,” Masson added. “We believe institutions can play that role again. Giving campuses better tools to understand and engage with open source is part of rebuilding that capacity.”
Open Source, Open to Improvement
In keeping with that philosophy, HEOSAT itself is open source.
Institutions, open source projects, technology leaders, procurement professionals, developers, researchers, accessibility specialists, security professionals, community managers, and others are invited not only to use the toolkit but to help improve it.
Apereo particularly welcomes contributions that strengthen assessment criteria, clarify guidance, add higher education use cases, improve accessibility and documentation, expand supporting resources, or address emerging institutional concerns.
HEOSAT is available at: www.apereo.org/HEOSAT
The project's source code, documentation, issue tracker, and contribution process are available on GitHub at: https://github.com/apereo/heosat
About the Apereo Foundation
The Apereo Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and sustaining open source software and communities serving higher education. Apereo supports institutions and projects through community development, project stewardship, incubation, collaboration, education, and advocacy for open technologies.
For decades, Apereo and its communities have brought colleges, universities, developers, commercial partners, and other organizations together to create and sustain technologies built around shared needs rather than proprietary ownership.
Media and collaboration inquiries:
Michelle Hall
Apereo Foundation
community@apereo.org
www.apereo.org