Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to dotLRN on .NET

I don't see anything controversial about your post, though I disagree with some parts of it.

Let me tell you in BIG CAPS, IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN. Microsoft won't allow what it considers viral licensing into any project they fund.

If this were unequivocably true, then talks between MS and MIT would most likely have ended already. I'm not privy to details but my understanding is that 1) MIT and MS have been talking 2) MIT has made its intentions clear 2) MS is still talking

I doubt that MIT's legal team have forgotten the Kereberos fiasco. MS didn't fund it, they just took advatage of the BSD-like MIT license , took it, and changed it to the point where Kereberos won't work with MIT's verison Setting themselves up to be ripped off again might happen, but I'm not terribly surprised to hear Al state it won't happen.

As far as misleading, yes dotLRN probably won't be funded by MS, but I have heard other rumors to the effect that there are already two people working on a C#/.NET version right now. I don't know if these two are MIT funded, but certainly one or more of them work at MIT (and no it isn't Phillip).

Al has stated that Philip's post is incorrect. Who to believe? It's possible that Al's misinformed, I suppose, but I doubt it.

All those rumors could be false (including Phillips) but I seriously doubt it.

Why? Al says they're in the study phase, no reason to doubt that. He says no deal's been closed, nor is there physical work being done. I see no reason to doubt that, either.

Answer this: if MS has already awarded this large grant to MIT, how come it's not been in the press? MS is going to milk this for all it is worth, and so is MIT. I'd bet money on a joint press release and I'd bet money on the NYT picking it up in the business section.

MS needs to get at higher education and this is an easy fruit to pick; steal the data model (which may or may not be covered by the GPL) and build on it.

The datamodel, expressed in SQL, is covered by the GPL just like any code. They can re-engineer it, of course, just as they could Linux or gcc.

If the datamodel weren't covered by the GPL, they wouldn't have to give MIT a large grant in order to rip it off. They could just do what MS has done in the past with Kereberos and the BSD TCP/IP stack ... use it legally without paying anyone a penny.

Since when has MS gotten so generous that they'll pony up large sums of money for something they can get for free?

Conversely, if the datamodel is covered by the GPL then that extends to the OpenACS datamodel. Remember that dotLRN is built on a bunch of standard OpenACS packages and their datamodels. MIT doesn't own copyright to those things and can't, for instance, agree to MS's having the right to issue those pieces in a proprietary way.

Now ... Torben's "deep pockets" comment about the success of a lawsuit if MS were to ignore the GPL and just rip off pieces for their own use is certainly one to think about.

But again ... they don't have to give MIT money in order to rip folks off. If they decide to rip off this or any other GPL'd project based on thinking that they can beat any legal suit, they'll just do it.

This also has the added benefit of MS being able to upsell all the Universities who got "sucked in" to this virally licensed .LRN.

There is this risk, yes.

I have no doubt that the people currently working on .LRN (either technically or otherwise) have the best intentions, but when your boss (MIT) gets into bed with MS and they have a revelation, after a nice big donation, that all eLearning needs to be using the latest and greatest MS offering, we will see who wins (principal or money).

Which I see as another compelling argument for getting the dotLRN Consortium up and for getting the dotLRN copyright assigned to the Consortium.

Because the Consortium will not be MIT, it will be its own legal entity. Imagine that MIT gets funded and then screwed by MS, despite its best legal efforts to ensure that they get the former without suffering the latter.

This doesn't impace the Consortium nor does it impact us.

Will this happen? I certainly don't know, but I think it is a likely scenario if the rumors are true.

The fears are rational, no doubt about that. I'm not downplaying them. But from our project's POV (OpenACS) and the dotLRN project's POV I see nothing to fear. Dilution of resource is one possible fear, but then again MIT is talking about adding MS money to the pot (or more accurately it's not the same pot). And whatever shakes down, we're seeing more resource made available to OpenACS/dotLRN in the near term and that's not tainted with MS money, not at all.

So IMO the absolutely worst thing that can happen from this is that the OpenACS community finds itself where it was a year ago except of course we'll have this great vertical app called dotLRN available unde the GPL, we'll have had a bunch more pieces added to it, we'll undoubtably have things like dotWRK out there ...

I mean ... MicroSoft's trying to take over the world with .NET and lock us all into a non-Open Source world, there's no doubt about that. Worst case from MS/MIT cooperation is that MIT might end up aiding and abetting MS's desire to do this, despite doing their best to push some .NET/Mono technology out into the world under the GPL.

But in all seriousness ... the practical effect of any accidental aiding and abetting is pretty much small potatoes. I worry more about MS's efforts to push Palladium, digital rights management, and similar things as being efforts to cut the heart out of the Open Source world.

Anything they do in regard to MIT would at worse mean that at some point in the future MIT funding of OpenACS-based work disappears in favor of funding of the .NET platform. That doesn't mean that we all of a sudden have no toolkit. Nor does it mean the Consortium disappears over night. All it means is a loss of a funding source for OpenACS-based work that didn't even exist 15 months ago ... we were surviving then, we'd survive this, too.

In the short term ... it's pretty clear that a near-term need will be integration with SOAP and the like. Things that many folks have said they need and want. This kind of stuff needs to happen with or without MS's grant to MIT and if anything is going to get funded by Sloan/MIT or other institutions or other clients not remotely related to the dotLRN world, it's going to include this, I'm quite sure.