Ah, to be proprietary and free from those pesky open-source projects! This is almost certainly the feeling at Blackboard, the "Microsoft of Higher Education" which is coming under increased pressure from Moodle, Sakai, two open-source alternatives for course management, as The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.
It used to be so easy to throw one's proprietary weight around. Blackboard has launched patent attacks on competitors and has been a tough competitor in a range of different ways. Still, open source is thriving.
Blackboard is heading for a showdown with the free-software movement, according to some observers. Although Blackboard remains the clear market leader -- about 66 percent of American colleges use its software as their standard... -- there are signs that open-source alternatives are starting to gain ground. [One] survey found that the proportion of colleges using Moodle as their standard rose from 4.2 percent in 2006 to 7.8 percent in 2007, and that about 3 percent of colleges have selected Sakai.
Another survey by the Instructional Technology Council, found that its member colleges have increased Moodle adoption from 4 percent in 2007 to more than 10 percent in 2008. Blackboard, of course, will continue to compete, and should do so. But it's going to struggle in an already open-source friendly Higher Education market.
I spoke at a Higher Education conference a year ago and was surprised by how wide and deep adoption of open-source software was. It wasn't just the MITs of the world, but also community colleges, state colleges, international institutions like Oxford, as well as online-only universities. Blackboard and other proprietary vendors have their work cut out for them. Open source isn't perfect for every institution, but it's apparently more than good enough.
I found this submission for the "In the Trenches" series to be intriguing. If you wanted to find someone with experience analogous to working in an open source community, where would you look?
According to Janice Smith of The rSmart Group, in academia. This may be particularly true for Janice, given rSmart's focus on open source applications in the Higher Education vertical, but I think it's telling that Janice found the same sort of collegiality and community-approach in open source as she had in her previous life in academia.
But let's hear it directly from Janice:
Name, company, title, and what you actually do
Janice A. Smith, The rSmart Group, Senior Education Consultant. I conduct on-site client assessments, develop requirements, design customizations, offer virtual and on-site training, and provide functional/technical support for an open source application in higher education and K-12.
... Read more
Larry Dignan over at ZDNet has an interesting, though speculative (though perhaps interesting because it's speculative? :-) post on Oracle's acquisition strategy. Since Oracle is not planning to slow its frenetic pace of acquisitions any time soon, Peter Goldmacher of Cowen & Co. asks, "Who would Larry buy?"
The list is interesting. I have a few alternative suggestions to Goldmacher's, to help Oracle get more involved in open source:
... Read moreMost people aren't aware of how vibrant the open source community is in the Higher Education vertical market. Sakai, uPortal, and other Higher Education-specific open source projects thrive in the academic environment. Oddly enough, two of the premier open source vendors in this space hail from Arizona, not normally known as the center of open source. Something in that heat must generate school-bound open source....
One of the strongest commercial open source vendors in this market is rSmart, which provides commercial support for the Sakai project, among other things. Jonny Brown hadn't taken Open Source 101 before he joined The rSmart Group, but as you'll read below, he has clearly imbibed the Kool-Aid.
Name, company, title, and what you actually do
Jonny Brown, Senior Information Architect, rSmart Group. In the very narrowest sense, my job is to find, create, and distribute to our subscribers and the open source community information about using Sakai software. For the most part, this means that I'm a technical writer - a role I played for many years quite some time ago and have never had much desire to revisit. For sure, it wasn't the nature of the meat-and-potatoes work I do (which is very detail-oriented and tends to be boring) that brought me to rSmart. Neither was it the pay check that lured me - I was happily self-employed, reasonably well compensated, very busy, and quite challenged.
... Read more
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