here’s a new phrase for you to burn into your brain: community source software is not exactly free software….why should you give you a rat’s ass about this? if you’re a small learning organization, library, academic group or other entity interested in any applications which serve to engender better research and information resource management, you’re probably paying attention to many ‘open source‘ projects (…if you’re like, “free software?” while licking ants off a stick, raising a clayey simian brow in the shadow of your cave, you can look over about 80 thousand such projects at sourceforge) …one big community undertaking that caught my eye this past year is the sakai project, which is all about integrating educational software into a pre-packaged bucket of open source tools…but i’m particularly troubled by the cost of partying with this crowd - kinda reminds me that free software ain’t the same thing as free beer (oh, or free speech for that matter)…

this is the gem from the site that really caught my eye…let’s call it the new low in small print for you disputatious types: “Community source describes a model for the purposeful coordinating of work in a community. It is based on many of the principles of open source development efforts, but community source efforts rely more explicitly on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments by community members than some open source development models.”

…what the hell is that bullshit definition? read it again. carefully. it sounds like it was supposed to say, “…but efforts rely more on serving a core group of members with an eye toward full cost recovery for providing resources to others in a restrictive and highly policed environment, which is different completely from most, if not all open source models, though saying ‘community source’ allows for our core group to suggest that we adhere to egalitarian ideals when in fact we don’t at all, because a few of us are probably assholes”

if you’re like, “sakai? do you mean saki?” then read up man (or woman) - because this is gonna matter big time to higher ed! “The Sakai Project is a $6.8M community source software development project founded by The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation….joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools.”

…if you’ve been asleep all summer, you should know that the sakai project has recently released the second public version of their software (first was july 15th week)…it’s online, and you can download the latest for the price of zilch (aka ‘nada’)…this is great, but oh! are you aware that if you wanna even talk about sakai in the forums then you’re gonna have to become a partner/member - and that starts at about 5 thousand bucks a year?…ouch….or of course, you could cough up some dough to work with one of the four current commercial partners for implementation (gosh, haven’t called for a quote yet, but hopefully it’s less expensive than linux support for academic institutions)

i’m concerned that this educational project is missing that little something special that promotes a sigh upon discovery…in fact, i’d say that sakai stands to further the technology divide in academia…”The Sakai Educational Partners’ Program (SEPP) extends this community source project to other academic institutions around the world”…that’s a load of crap - isn’t it? not only is the cost to play beyond the reach of most (or all) tiny, under funded educational groups, but it’s clearly beyond the reach of countless developers and contributors who might otherwise serve to better this application were they given the ability to actually speak for free in the sakai project community! …sorry folks, but this project is goin’ the wrong way for me…feels like open source collusion…

Powered by Gregarious (21)

Share This

Some similar nonsense, if you like that kind of thing:

Links that were in this post, but only if there were any: