Don, all I can tell you is what I see from my own experience. In my own life, I can get a news feed directly on my desktop from some website running I-don't-know-what using RSS, pump a post from my feed into my desktop blogging tool using another API, post it from my tool to my blog using a third API, and have my blog ping Technorati using a fourth. I can set up a JotSpot application that pulls information in from Salesforce.com and then lets me alter it and send the revised data back. I don't give a shit what anything runs on or even where it runs anymore; it's all transparent to me.
Sakai and uPortal are both designed for this world. I understand the resistance that Talli faces, but I'm not seeing it here in my world. In my world, everything is about messaging. If the monolith we have called an LMS can be broken into pieces that can be mixed and matched based on best-of-breed decisions, and if I can selectively choose to get hosted solutions for some of those pieces rather than running everything off my own servers, this is seen as a Good Thing, and it necessarily entails being open to as many heterogenous pieces as are feasible from technical and business standpoints.
Look, I've said my 2 cents on this and really have nothing more to say on it. I have no dog in this fight. As a friend of the community, I simply wanted to point out what I see as a strategic marketing opportunity that is very much in the same spirit as Talli's call for a message/solution on Apache. Increasingly, supporting standard API's is the name of the game. OACS has a reputation as being an outstanding closed system. It behooves the community to change that perception by demonstrating some high-profile integration wins. Apache is one opportunity to do so. Sakai and uPortal are two others.
Take your pick.
