incorporated subversion

Something else I didn’t translate from the report, “Avec la solution MILLE les coûts totaux sur une période de 5 ans sont estimés d’être moins de 4 % des coûts totaux de la solution propriétaire le moins chère.” (Tx: Total costs with MILLE over a period of five years was less than 4% of the total costs of the cheapest proprietary system.)

James, that means a +96% savings!

It hardly matters if it works or not for those kinda savings!!!!!!

wow. those are big savings, just shows what you can achieve by exploiting software developers

Reckon you’ll employ far more developer in institutions this way, it’s the peopel trying to make a big buck out of the educational institutions that it hurts, no?

Ah yes, I agree entirely. I am all for organisations employing their own developers to develop their own products.

What I am not overly happy about is when one set of devlopers develop a product and then that product is taken by rich organisations like Universities and implemented without any recompense to the orginal developers. To rub salt into the wounds the University does not even employ the original developers to make changes to the original ‘free’ product. This is often touted as the ‘business model’ of the OSS movement but rarely seems to work in practice.

The whole thing is tantamount to theft of intellectual property. The original developers get nothing for their time effort and, most importantly, ideas.

Well they gave it away for free you say. Well they are fools and worse, they make it impossible for other small independent software developers to survive.

BTW this is not an argument against providing source code. My company always provides source code so that clients can make their own changes if they wish. We just expect to be paid for the product in the first place. If the product has value to the client then some of that value should be passed to the creators of the product.

There is obviously a lot more to be said but I have some software development to do. Hopefully I will find someone who values the software we are developing and is prepared to pass some of that back to us in one way or another. More likely we will find that someone else (probably subsidised by a large company) has developed a free OSS product.

Maybe I’ll go and get lessons in furniture making. At least people pay you for the product of your labour.

Lastly, I am m and always have been. Not N, never have been.

Good points m. Not sure if the developers of MILLE were taken advantage of or not. Creators should be compensated for work of value; no doubt there.

On the other hand, I can’t see why institutions should pay for software licenses that only go into corporate profits, when OSS is available.

Take for instance the hypothetical case of a Canadian university that uses public money to fund the development of an LCMS. This project then spins-off a for-profit company that sells the LCMS to Canadian universities for six-figures each. Is this correct? I would prefer that my tax dollars were used to foster learning, not vendor lock-in.

Glad to hear that you give the source code with your product – that’s ethical. I agree, you should be paid for your products & services.

See .LRN for an educational learning management system with portals that is Open Source, developed by a community of programmers, and supported by institutions that use the sortware. It’s also supported by OpenACS developers, including a few that make money consulting on OpenACS and .LRN projects.

Thnaks for the comment Dave… I guess first up I’ll do my grumpy bloke thing and say that anything that runs as an LMS is no good as you can’t manage learning… OK, got that out of my system now :o)

Secondly, looking at it I’m running scared from AOL server (well, not just scared, faily impotent too as the guys that do my hosting wouldn’t, I imagine, be up for it).

But all I can do is ask… we shall see.

Great blog BTW, just my kind of stuff!

Cheers, James