Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: dotLRN Grants
This talk of grants etc sounds fantastic!
But, as ever the word of gloom and doom ;o) I'd like to suggest that this kind of granting also came with a caveat. Something like a requirement to contribute to the core in return..
We're talking about getting a test effort going for dotLRN at the moment,and that will not be benefiting from any 'grants' so I'm not entirely convinced of the merit of offering it to anyone else. Don't mis-undertand, I can see the idealogical merit of the idea, but I'm not personally a charity and I although I want to see it adopted, perhaps a more focussed way is to concentrate on its quality/*documentation*/delivery first.
I thought dotLRN was intended as a serious OS player in this field, not as a charity effort to help poorer companies/goverments? This sounds like the case. What is to be gained from adoption in these areas? If they can't afford to purchase a box, are they likely to have sufficient resources to help in its continued development? Is not bringing the cost of owenership down more important than subsidising a high-cost deployment?
So, my question is, should the hard work/effort of a voluntary community, be then passed to others *with* subsidy with no consequent reciprocal benefit in kind?
And, surely, if a decent port to Postgres was in place this would remove much of the infrastructure cost issue anyway? For eveyone. And therefore be a more cost effective way of overcoming that problem?
anyone can use dotLRN, not only participants of the voluntary community. And they don't have to contribute in any way.
dotLRN is a software that is driven by a community of people who want to use it for various reasons. If one of the reasons (and I strongly second Al on that one) is widespread use by people who cannot afford to pay for a sophisticated commercial package, then noone should stop them or question their ways.
It is Al's and other volunteers time that will be used for the grants. There is a governance board for dotLRN in place that could give backing for officially endorsed dotLRN grants.
If you don't feel comfortable with the possibility that people use the toolkit and get support for applying it without their need to submit something back to the core, then I begin to wonder why you feel comfortable with OpenSource development in general as I see a contradiction there.
And last but not least, if grants come, someone needs to install the software for these institutions, train the people and adopt dotLRN to their needs. Not to speak of additional functions they might need (that could make it back into the core). As I doubt many universities would be capable of doing this completely on their own, we have opportunities for the parties involved in the community to make some money.
So, yes, we should pass the hard work/effort of the community to others with subsidy. But maybe I'm only in favour of it because it is our company policy anyway.
As a sidenote on postgres. Unless Oracle is willing to part with licenses as part of the grant, postgres will be the way to go anyway. Furthermore it will be easier to get grants for an Open Source solution front to back.
One more. Offering dotLRN is only part of the bargain. To bridge the digital divide, we also need to make sure, these universities / schools have Internet access and computers to access it. Therefore it would make sense to also ask for old i486 computers that are not beeing used anymore within companies and ship them to the grantees instead of throwing them away.
And if you want to take it even further, you could partner with a volunteer organization to train volunteers for one month in bootcamps (with the training paid out of grants or provided for free, remember ArsDigita ?!?) and then send them to the university for a three to five months internship (e.g. paid by the grants or the university itself) to train and adopt the solution.
I think I am aware of everything your saying, and, I think you've mis-understood what I'm getting at.
I have no objection to people using open source without contributing.. thats part of the point after all.
I was really questioning whether grants to used in this way were the most *effective* way of increasing adoption.
You could argue that if somewhere was too poor to afford even a modest spec PC to run an instance on, then they are hardly likely to have an overwhelming need for such a sophisticated system. I'd suggest if they were in that much financial difficulty then perhaps there are other more pressing things they'd like to receive grants for?
But whatever the details of the issue, my positon was to suggest that if someones got cash to spend, is this the most effective way to increase adoption? And it was a question rather than an answer :o)
And also, I did relate this to the testing effort. We're being asked to look into getting some good testing going for dotLRN. I think this is a good next step, but I just don't go along with the 'pay people to use the software' approach. Surely if anything moves against open source principles its by a product evolving due to financial incentive, not on merit or peer review.
I appreciate all your comments and ideas about the other areas as well, but I doubt very much as to whether what your suggesting would stand up to any serious financial scrutiny. Therefore surely the 'main' gain would be the wider adoption/enhancement of the toolkit, not the potential commercial gain. And hence my point about shouldn't a grant come with conditions? I think you'd find this to be the case in most other circumstances. i.e. if you had a grant to improve a clubs sports faciltities, you would expect them to agree to make some kind of agreement about how those facilities could be used.
I still think it sounded like 'pay people to make them use it'. Which is marketeering, pure and simple, and therefore if I'm being asked to contribute, I just like to understand what it is I'm contributing to :o)
