ANGEL Learning has announced that they have incorporated TiddlyWiki into their product and that they have released the source code to the enhancements. What the announcement doesn’t mention is that the company also made a financial contribution to TiddlyWiki’s main developer Jeremy Ruston in recognition and support of his work.
I happen to have had a number of conversations with the ANGEL folks about this move, starting from early in their process, and I must say that they made every effort to do this right. They put a fair amount of thought, for example, into where they should contribute the code and considered donating it back to the TiddlyWiki community before settling on EduForge. It’s sometimes difficult for a smallish company to figure out an affordable way to productively contribute back to open source; I hope that other educational software products, including open source and proprietary LMSs, pick up on ANGEL’s contribution and help to build a larger community around it. TiddlyWiki is a great tool for teaching and I think that ANGEL’s enhancements to it are rather clever.
Kudos to ANGEL Learning for understanding and respecting the work of an open source community.
No judgment here just some questions. How does this shape the discussions around open source…
1. How do folks feel about paying for an open source tool?
2. Will this provide folks with a sense of security knowing Angel is backing and contributing to a project, or will folks wonder who Angel is going to call at 2:00 a.m. when the wiki goes down?
3. How many developers does Angel need to hire now that they have incorporated an OS tool and thus needs to support it?
4. How then might licensing fees charged to current customers be affected?
5. How might this validate one of the claims of Open Source advocates, that OSS enjoys quicker development?
Patrick, I’ll take a stab at answers to your questions:
1. I don’t think people are paying for an open source tool in this case, since ANGEL has made the source code available for free. If you want to run their modified version of TiddlyWiki without paying them a licensing fee, you can. What customers are paying for is the other 99% of functionality in ANGEL, the integration between ANGEL and TiddlyWiki, and the support.
2. Specifics matter. TiddlyWiki is a particularly small and simple open source project. I can’t imagine that ANGEL is going to need a lot of support from the project developers to keep their own system running. That doesn’t mean there aren’t situations in which this question would yield a different answer. But it’s not always directly related to the size of the OSS project, either. For example, lots of proprietary software systems incorporate Apache projects in them, but because the open source software is mature and has well-defined interfaces, the potential for added complexity for support is often (though not always) a non-issue.
3. Again, TiddlyWiki is tiny and probably doesn’t take up significant developer bandwidth. I suspect one of the points you may be hinting at with this question and the one before it is that universities who adopt open source applications don’t necessarily have to hire developers to maintain them either, as the inaccurate cliche would have it.
4. If you buy my answer to your first question, then licensing fees shouldn’t be affected. A lot depends on your perception regarding what percentage of the value of the proprietary product is actually coming from the underlying open source application. Adding an open source widget to a proprietary application probably has a very different impact on perceived value than adding a proprietary widget to an open source application.
5. I don’t think this particular case speaks one way or the other to the relative speed of open source development. If you want to compare apples to apples, then look at how quickly new features get into comparable systems like Moodle or Sakai (or Dokeos, or LON-CAPA, or whatever). The ANGEL/TiddlyWiki case, IMHO, speaks more directly to the value of modularity that enables the re-use of externally developed components, regardless of the license under which they are available.