Open Source
A few years ago Open Source was a real buzz – the future of software well beyond education. While the movement is still very active, the breakthrough promise hasn’t been realized. Yet. There are many who believe that the critical mass of openness – including new dimensions such as Open Data, Open Licenses, Open Innovation, Open Educational Resources, etc, is just around the corner.
Opportunity Statement
Learning technologies ventures based on an Open Source model are compelling in thought but challenging in practice. Analogous to social media applications, they depend significantly on cultivating a community committed to the value proposition. This is a not an unreasonable assumption in the education marketplace.
Prediction Source(s):
Posted in: Emerging Markets Poll
visramn 11:57 pm on September 8, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think open source is a wonderful concept because it makes programs, etc, accessible to everyone. Thu,s allowing for more equity and removing access barriers. However, it is difficult to keep programs and software like this going without the generosity of people’s time, resources and donations. All of which are often hard to come-by.
teacherben 8:43 pm on September 9, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Open source does not necessarily mean ‘coded by volunteers’. Many popular open source projects are almost entirely designed and created by large, for-profit companies who do the work in-house. Openoffice is a good example. At a big company like Sun Microsystems, it made more financial sense for them to design an office suite that suited their needs in-house rather than pay high costs of paying for licenses for thousands of workers. They had a number of other major players as partners (IBM, Apache…) that also contributed code and lowered costs but I don’t think their primary focus was particularly altruistic. (In fact, chipping away at the MS Empire could have provided some impetus as well.) Some companies offer an open source version of a product, then another that includes some proprietary code. Google Chrome is a good example (Chromium is the open source version). They get to make a contribution to the community, save some costs by crowdsourcing some of the technical work porting to other platforms and so on, and if anyone comes up with a really great idea, they can use it to make both versions of the product better (depending on the license.)
Pat A Son 3:16 am on September 10, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The interesting thing about open source software is that it that it has its roots in academia and as such it might expect educators to embrace the concept and products wholeheartedly. How this has not been the case because the prevailing conditions of the times did not support its widespread use.
First and foremost if one considers a purely Darwinian approach to software adoption then the traditional profit driven capitalist environment that we operate in may place open source software as the proverbial fish out of water when compared to its closed source for profit counterpart. For the most part the concept was new and the old guards i.e. the decision makers in were more comfortable with comfortable to go with what they were familiar with.
However in the that we are living the business is changing in some areas of the new cyber frontier and companies such as Google have proven that one does not have to sell a closed product to make money. Whereas Linux did not penetrate the pc world much android has taken a dominant place in the new mobile computing world. I believe that effort such as these become popular the world will be more comfortable with the concept and open source products will be accepted more readily than now.
longworth 10:44 am on September 10, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think this is where one can learn the language and take advantage of it….we just have to teach ourselves and teach our students to understand….