We previously have blogged the draft report of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, approved by the Commission at its August 10 meeting, subject only to minor copy editing and “wordsmithing” before it is presented to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings later this month.  Today’s Inside Higher Ed reports that the agreement nearly unravelled after a committee member from Microsoft disagreed with this language in the report endorsing the open source movement:

Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector division, sent an e-mail message to fellow commissioners Friday evening saying that she “vigorously” objected to a paragraph in which the panel embraced and encouraged the development of open source software and open content projects in higher education:

The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education.

Elliott … took issue with the commission’s decision to weigh in on “the manner in which the underlying software is developed.” … She proposed alternative language from which the word “open” was conspicuously absent. A few hours later, just after midnight on Saturday, Charles Miller, the panel’s chairman, wrote in an e-mail that he believed Elliott’s proposed changes were “an improvement and consistent with the work of the commission.” He said the panel would make the changes “if there are no objections.” But the objections came quickly, and in varying degrees of intensity….

Ever the conciliator, James J. Duderstadt sought a compromise … . that both broadened the original paragraph to address Elliott’s concerns yet sustained references both to open content initiatives and to open source software….

Saturday night, Miller endorsed Duderstadt’s compromise…. That didn’t quite go far enough for Elliott, though. She thanked Duderdstadt for his suggestion but objected to his proposed inclusion of “open source” ("it’s a method of coding software, and one of several available, period") and “open content” (a “term which can mean different things and enter us into some copyright debate"). She suggested language that struck those phrases. Monday morning, Miller said the commission would go with Duderstadt’s compromise language, which he called “an improvement in the draft” that “does not require and will not be put to a vote.” Later that morning, Elliott gave in, writing: “I support Jim’s paragraph as well.”