Update: Welcome, Chronicle readers. Since it wasn’t made clear in the Chronicle’s reference, I’d like to point out that the paper I’m quoting was written by Jim Farmer, who is the Coordinator of Georgetown University’s new Interoperability Center, formerly the Sakai SEPP Community Liaison and project administrator for the uPortal project. Jim has pretty impressive credentials across the board, including having served as the CIO for the Cal State University system. You can find his full bio here.
Sorry I’ve been incommunicado for a while. There’s been lots of stuff going on, both professionally and personally (including a new grandbaby).
Anyway, I’m going to make it up to you with a special treat. Jim Farmer has a fantastic analysis of how much it costs Blackboard to make a sale, what that means to their overall business model, and how that compares to the cost-per-sale of a commercially marketed open source software product and the cost for community-building the Open Source uPortal project. Some of it may be slow going if you’re not familiar with financial analysis, so I’m going to unpack a few of the good parts and speculate a bit on the implications.