In a recent post on Kuali, I characterized Unizin as a community source initiative. Brad Wheeler, CIO at Indiana University and co-founder of Kuali and Unizin, responded via email (with permission to quote): Unizin is not a Community Source effort in the way that I understand Community Source as we started applying the label 10+ […]
Kuali
Community Source Is Dead
As Phil noted in yesterday’s post, Kuali is moving to a for-profit model, and it looks like it is motivated more by sustainability pressures than by some grand affirmative vision for the organization. There has been a long-term debate in higher education about the value of “community source,” which is a particular governance and funding […]
Kuali For-Profit: Change is an indicator of bigger issues
On Friday the Kuali Foundation announced the creation of a new for-profit entity to be led by the former CTO of Instructure, Joel Dehlin. Jeff Young at the Chronicle described the change: Ten years ago, a group of universities started a collaborative software project touted as an alternative to commercial software companies, which were criticized as […]
Kuali: A Primer for Community Source Administrative Systems in Higher Ed
I was recently invited to attend a user conference – Kuali Days in Austin, TX – and was struck by the disconnect between Kuali’s relatively low profile and the excitement expressed by the institutional representatives attending the conference. Before getting to any analysis of Kuali and its prospects, however, I need to lay out the […]
More Venture Capital for Higher Education: $10.75 million for rSmart
On August 16 rSmart Group Inc. announced securing funding from Asahi Net Inc., GSV Capital Corp., and private investors. GSV investment advisor Michael Moe expressed confidence in the firm saying “rSmart is helping universities realize lower total cost of ownership and higher quality products that are easy to use. Most importantly, rSmart’s customers are becoming […]
More on the Sakai/Jasig Merger
As I have mentioned here before, the Sakai and Jasig foundations are in the process of evaluating a merger to create a kind of Apache Foundation for higher education. The new organization would be called the Apereo Foundation. The two communities will be voting on the merger some time in the next month or so. […]
Backward University IP Polices Force Convoluted Sakai License
A couple of weeks back, I was somewhat disturbed to read a post by Unicon’s John Lewis on the forthcoming Version 2.0 of the Educational Commons License (ECL), which is used by both the Sakai and the Kuali projects. While pointing out some significant improvements over the previous version, John notes correctly that the proliferation […]