I will ask back. Do you think Sloan would have been funding the development of dotLRN if it has not been for the efforts of volunteers like myself and the rest of the OpenACS community?
No, they'd probably still be contracting with me and others to continue to extend SloanSpace V1, aka ACES, aka ACS 3.5 (Oracle only) as distributed under the GPL by Sussedorf and Roy.
At least that's what they were doing last summer, and even this spring, though to a much lesser extent than before due to the imminent deployment of SloanSpace V2 (dotLRN).
Think of the pain they would've saved themselves if they hadn't chosen to base a new platform on our project, and fund a path that would lead to availability on Postgres as well as Oracle, and chart a course that will help extend funding for OpenACS developers in the future?
And you talk as though it is a one-way street, with MIT benefiting from our work and giving nothing back.
Au contraire, both SloanSpace V1 (ACES) and SloanSpace V2 (dotLRN) have been GPL'd and available to the community. It's a two-way street. MIT has given back to the community and I hope will continue to give back to the community. Again, someone in this thread might consider saying "thank you" to Al for releasing both ACES and dotLRN because MIT has been under no obligation to do so. Both could've been pursued as typical one-shot client jobs with the result, like Siemens ShareNet, being code the community would like to have but can't get their hands on.
