Monday, February 25, 2013

Everything is Always Getting Worse for Open Source in Education

Katie Ash:

But as companies make such moves, experts contend that the definition of what constitutes "open" is changing. And in some cases, companies are using the term in products that are not actually open source to capitalize on the popularity of the concept.

"There are multiple definitions of open that are confusing buyers and watering down the message," says Philip D. Hill, the ed-tech consultant, analyst, and co-founder of MindWires Consulting. Hill has been following LMS companies for more than eight years and writes about developments in that market on the e-Literate blog.

The only example of this I see is Pearson naming something "OpenClass," but you can't trademark "Open-(anything)" so that's going to happen. Otherwise, Moodle is still GPL, Canvas is the even stricter AGPL.

"The users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software," which was the goal all along.

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