Hmmm… interesting… from Stephen:
“I have reports coming in from more than one institution that WebCT is asking for significant price increases (in the 60 percent range) for its Campus Edition learning management system for upgrades to CE version 6. This is combined with price increases for the database licenses necessary with WebCT”
Reminds me of a discussion we had about WebCT Campus, Vista and the future a bit back. From which I quote Karen Gage (VP Marketing at WebCT I think):
“Our next major release ‘WebCT Campus Edition 6.0’ is targeted for availability in the first half of 2005; WebCT Campus Edition 6.0 will run on a relational database and will include a wide range of new features and enhancements to our existing teaching and learning tools. We do not expect license fees for this new release to increase significantly over current license fees.”
Maybe today is a good day for the release of Sakai 2.0.0 and a very favourable review of the use of an open source VLE, Bodingtin. (thanks to the Scott for being the OLE-maven :o)
I guess I don’t need to go into the whole ‘lock you in through non-interoperable and extremely-particular systems and then bump up the pricing’ thing again, do I?
Update: Just remembered that I received this comment overnight from Christopher Sessums:
“Our institution was offered a WebCT Campus Edition license several years ago for $500 a year. Folks got hooked, then WHAM! Out comes the new pricing structure and lo! our institution must now pay multiple thousands of dollars per annum to keep this product mainlined.
Drug dealer analogies aside…”
Now am not sure if this is same thing that Stephen is talking about… could be…