Present is Prologue

Tag: Apereo

rSmart to Asahi to Scriba: What is happening to major Sakai partner?

It looks like we have another name and ownership change for one of the major Sakai partners, but this time the changes have a very closed feel to them. rSmart, led by Chris Coppola at the time, was one of the original Sakai commercial affiliates, and the LMS portion of the company was eventually sold to Asahi Net International (ANI) in 2013. ANI had already been involved in the Sakai community as a Japanese partner and also as an partial investor in rSmart, so that acquisition was not seen as a huge change other than setting the stage for KualiCo to acquire the remainder of rSmart.

In late April, however, ANI was acquired by a private equity firm out of Los Angeles (Vert Capital), and this move is different. Vert Capital did not just acquire ANI; they also changed the company name to Scriba and took the company off the grid for now. No news items explaining intentions, no web site, no changes to Apereo project page, etc. Japanese press coverage of the acquisition mentions the parent company’s desire to focus on the Japanese market.

What is going on? (more…)

June 8, 2015
In Which I (Partially) Disagree with Richard Stallman on Kuali’s AGPL Usage

Since Michael is making this ‘follow-up blog post’ week, I guess I should jump in.

In my latest post on Kuali and the usage of the AGPL license, the key argument is that this license choice is key to understanding the Kuali 2.0 strategy – protecting KualiCo as a new for-profit entity in their future work to develop multi-tenant cloud hosting code.

What I have found interesting is that in most of my conversations with Kuali community people ,even for those who are disillusioned, they seem to think the KualiCo creation makes some sense. The real frustration and pushback has been on how decisions are made, how decisions have been communicated, and how the AGPL license choice will affect the community.

In the comments, Richard Stallman chimed in.

As the author of the GNU General Public License and the GNU Affero General Public License, and the inventor of copyleft, I would like to clear up a possible misunderstanding that could come from the following sentence:

“Any school or Kuali vendor, however, that develops its own multi-tenant cloud-hosting code would have to relicense and share this code publicly as open source.”

First of all, thinking about “open source” will give you the wrong idea about the reasons why the GNU AGPL and the GNU GPL work as they do. To see the logic, you should think of them as free software licenses; more specifically, as free software licenses with copyleft. (more…)

November 19, 2014
Kuali, Ariah and Apereo: Emerging ed tech debate on open source license types

With the annual Kuali conference – Kuali Days – starting today in Indianapolis, the big topic should be the August decision to move from a community source to a professional open source model, moving key development to a commercial entity, the newly-formed KualiCo. Now there will be two new announcements for the community to discuss, both centering on a esoteric license choice that could have far-reaching implications. Both the announcement of the Ariah Group as a new organization to support Kuali products and the statement from the Apereo Foundation center on the difference between Apache-style and AGPL licenses.

AGPL and Vendor Protection

Kuali previously licensed its open source code as Educational Community License (ECL), a derivative of the standard Apache license that is designed to be permissive in terms of allowing organizations to contribute modified open source code while mixing with code with different licenses – including proprietary. This license is ‘permissive’ in the sense that the derived, remixed code may be licensed in different manners. It is generally thought that this license type gives the most flexibility for developing a community of contributors.

(more…)

November 10, 2014
Michael’s Keynote at Sakai Virtual Conference

Michael is giving the keynote address at tomorrow’s (Friday, Nov 7) Sakai Virtual Conference #SakaiVC14. The virtual conference is only $50 registration, with more information and registration link here. The schedule at a glance is available as PDF here.

Michael’s keynote is at 10:00am EDT, titled “Re-Imagining Educational Content for a Digital World”. At 4:30pm, there will be a Q&A session based on the keynote.

November 6, 2014
LMS Market Update: May and June News
There have been a number of LMS and Learning Platform announcements over the past month or two that will help shape the market over the next year or more. One trend I’ve described is the transition from an LMS market to a Learning Platform market, which includes a broader scope of products. Below are some of the notable announcements. I expect that Michael and I will write separate posts in more detail on several of these updates.
- LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact
- Instructure, maker of Canvas LMS, raises $30M
- Desire2Learn announces Student Success System as predictive analytics with new release
- Sakai OAE recovers from loss of partners, rebrands as Apereo OAE
- Coursera shifts strategy in partnering with schools, now overlaps with LMS market
- edX finishes releasing platform code as open source
- LMS conference season approaching
LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact

In mid May, Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik hosted a panel discussion of the LMS CEOs at the Learning Impact conference. Blackboard’s new CEO, Jay Bhatt, was welcomed into the higher education community with the, ahem, liveliest panel discussion in recent memory. Given the all-star panel (John Baker, CEO, Desire2Learn; Jay Bhatt, CEO, Blackboard; Josh Coates, CEO Instructure; Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Moodle; Manoj Kutty, CEO, LoudCloud Systems; Matt Leavy, CEO, Pearson eCollege), I’ve been surprised to see very little discussion after the event.

But then I remembered:

The First Rule of the LMS Panel is you do not talk about the LMS Panel

(more…)
June 5, 2013