Update: Sakai Executive Korcuska has a more detailed blog post about what the Mellon Foundation is actually doing and the impact (or lack thereof) on Sakai.
There’s been a fair bit of hand wringing online about today’s piece in the Chronicle indicating that the Mellon Foundation will be “eliminating” it’s Research in Information Technology grant program “as a stand-alone entity.” Chronicle writer Marc Perry has positioned this as a “potential blow to open source software.” It’s not terribly surprising that Mellon, like many foundations, is forced to trim and focus its grant giving in this tough economic environment. As is noted in the article (but buried halfway down after a few paragraphs of somewhat breathless reporting), Mellon is not planning to stop giving money for the development of open source educational software altogether. They are reorganizing and trimming, but not stopping.
Perhaps more importantly for the Sakai community and the Sakai-curious, Sakai has not received Mellon funding (to my knowledge) for a few years now and is not dependent on it. So this announcement, while unfortunate, has no impact on Sakai’s development or its future.
I agree that the CHE piece had a bit too much journalistic hyperbole. On the other hand, I think we are at the end of an era: community source as a viable model is now established (though apparently Ken Green isn’t yet convinced). Ira’s “EduCore” vision has in some measure come into its own. I think outside funding of new kinds of community source efforts will still be important because there are still many constituencies within higher ed that require convincing. But I think we’re past the era where such efforts can be dismissed as naive.
Casey Green’s point is perfectly legitimate, and he’s not commenting on the Mellon model as a whole. What he’s saying is that Sakai is probablyjust reaching sustainability now while Kuali and Zotero are too early in their development to be able to say that they are there yet. I think that’s true, and it doesn’t necessarily follow that they won’t eventually achieve sustainability.
I’m sure you are better able to read between the lines than I am, so I hope you’re right. There is the issue of individual projects being sustainable–having a committed community willing to do what it takes to keep the project moving forward. This sustainability may include continued grants to take the project in new directions. There is also the notion of whether community source as a model is viable over the long term. I’m hoping we’ve turned the corner on that one.
It’s interesting to consider the “sustainability” of the commercial products. Was Angel sustainable?
Personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of the Mellon EduCorps/community source vision. What they did right was invest in some open source projects that had some institutions that were invested in their success. I don’t subscribe to the notion that there’s something special about community source as distinct from open source.
Not special, but different. With community source, the developers are not the primary users/beneficiaries of the technology. This necessitates differences in how requirements are determined and communicated. Also, the customers and investors tend to be institutional more than individual. That has governance implications.
There are other open source projects where the developers are not the primary users/beneficiaries (e.g., Firefox, Chrome, Sugar, Compiere, Alfresco, etc.). The governance differences in “community source” projects are differences in degree rather than in kind, and if you look at even a small sampling of community source governance structures, e.g., Jasig, Sakai, and Kuali, the differences among them are at least as salient as the similarities.
Community source was a good, reassuring marketing message for university CIOs/CFOs who found the idea of open source scary, but the term has outlived its utility, IMHO.